Intro

Hi friends — this letter expands upon my previous thoughts on money as a measuring stick (using an amazing essay on girlhood as its jumping-off point) & talks about how and why I’ve gotten better at learning (mostly about data centers).

Reading (1)

One of my favorite parts of having a salary is the ability to subscribe to things. Recently, I’ve gone on a spending spree to attain what I call a “premium content diet.”

My thought process is the following: I only splurge on certain things, mostly inputs to my physical health like good food, a good mattress, etc. Now that I have a consistent monthly budget with some surplus, the best use of less than 1% of my take home pay is leveling up the information I consume, my mental inputs.

I have a particular weak spot for nonfiction essays. One of my favorite essay writers, Ava (aka @noampomsky on Twitter) just published an excellent piece on girlhood. (The essay is free to read, not paywalled.) The central topic is that the idea of girlhood is pedestalized, marketed, and used as an impossible and ever-changing benchmark for women of all ages. The essay discusses how to navigate this reality. I was particularly struck by this excerpt towards the end:

Ava’s post articulates a dynamic I’ve been thinking a lot about recently: how dialogues between people—both literal and (especially) figurative—affect behavior, and with whom certain dialogues resonate. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote some half-baked thoughts on a tweet that claimed, “[I]n the absence of strong convictions of what you want from life, you’ll always default to wanting more money.”

I think the above essay gives a great framework for understanding that inclination: Money is a common reference. It is a measuring stick that everyone, from every culture, understands.

Wanting money is a safe way to measure success because it can be anything to anyone. For people who don’t have enough, it represents a necessity like food or shelter. For people who barely have enough, it represents security. For people who have too much, it represents the ability to indulge whichever whim feels the most pressing. Money, in other words, is one of the rare items which evokes envy in people of all backgrounds. So why does chasing money feel so unsatisfying to so many?

As a measuring stick, money is like giving a gift card as a birthday present, in that it has clear, extrinsically-defined value and offers open-ended optionality; however, like receiving a gift card as a present, using money as an accomplishment also rings a bit hollow. It betrays that the gift-giver might not know you as well as you thought. Or, worse, they know you well but did not take the time to find an appropriate gift.

Beyond necessities and safety, money represents nothing more than a dream deferred, a cop-out gift to ourselves. There is immense, fundamental worth in defining what you value and deliberately seeking that which you value most. So treat yourself like someone you love and consider what gifts you treasure most. Don’t keep buying yourself gift cards.

Internal Dialogue

Separately, I think Ava’s dialogue framework also applies to internal, normative values. This only adds to the importance of articulating your own thoughts and priorities. Without understanding yourself, it’s difficult to wrestle with hypothetical and ever-changing “voices of authority” on culture and morality.

Breakthrough (1)

Work Routine/Becoming an “Expert”

Five months into my job, I feel like I have the foundation of my work routine down. I wake up at about the same time every day, I have a grasp of my core responsibilities, and I am no longer building furniture or running to the store for staple goods after work.

Now, I’m playing around at the edges of my routine to find what’s most productive: Is eating a light or heavy lunch better for my energy levels during the day? How many days per week should I get a full workout in? Should I be walking more? Etc.

One of the more important “fine-tuning” areas I’ve been working on is when to consume information and how to consume more of it.

I wrote in my last letter about Scott Bessent, former head of George Soros’s $30 BN family office, saying macroeconomic intuition can only really be built in your 20s. I’m using that as motivation to read as many reports as I can get my hands on. However, I also have to learn much more dense topics so I can hold my own when talking about our hard tech investments with founders or co-investors. In a day, my reading topics jump from Nvidia’s rail-optimized topology to CapEx trends in the lumber industry to esoteric think-pieces from other VCs.

The exciting part of this is, from the investment side, there are few true experts in the intersection I play in. Some people are deeply technical (for example, PhDs) but are still building an intuition for market incentives and movement. Most others are investors who have limited engineering background and are trying to speedrun Electrical Engineering educations. (Many hedge funds did not have a large semis and hardware book prior to 2021 or so.) I’m in the latter category (also far from an expert), but I have what I consider three distinct, though limited, advantages:

1. My introduction to public markets came interning for one of the best semis investors on Wall Street, so I learned how to model, conduct diligence calls about, and on-ramp TMT teams to the tech and business models of hardware companies. I never participated in investment clubs or stock pitch competitions in high school or college. As a result, how I think about public markets is deeply informed by how hardware companies operate, and I don’t have “bad habits” or intuitions to unlearn from, say, SaaS investing.

2. Our VC firm invests in and has strong relationships with deeply technical people. Our founders include the former head of Broadcom’s Tomahawk division, the inventor of CentOS and Rocky Linux, and Mellanox’s former largest competitor. I can ask as many questions as I’d like, but they can’t be dumb. This is both an incredible incentive to learn and a high standard to hold myself to as I learn.

3. I have time and incentive to “go deep.” Since our firm makes the most money when we are contrarian very early with strong conviction, our business model hinges upon deeply understanding the pain points and unlocks of present and future technology. If I do my job right, I’ll have a much clearer view of the world of tomorrow than most full-time tech analysts, even if it doesn’t play out exactly how I think it will.

Optimizing my work schedule, particularly my consumption and absorption of information, will help me compound these advantages over time.

This leads to my two most unintuitive conclusions: Reading fiction before I fall asleep & listening to podcasts or lectures when I work out have been the two biggest unlocks for me. I’m not sure how or why these techniques work, but they do. I think the workouts clear my head and let me focus more on audio & reading fiction in bed helps me “wind down” my brain from its working pace without trying to go from 100 to 0.

Neither of these practices were intuitive. In fact, both happened by accident when I was too tired to think about following a routine. This is all to say, the random walk to discover your ideal day may take you farther off the beaten path than you think.

My Best,

Sam