“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter… and getting smarter faster than most companies.
“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humourless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.
“While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy-talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.
“However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intra-networked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
“Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.”
Get your Free
financial review
We first came across The Cluetrain Manifesto, ironically enough, in a research note written by Henry Blodget. If you don’t remember the name, he was the internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who became an aggressive booster of internet company initial public offerings (IPOs) until he was caught red-handed issuing essentially fraudulent recommendations, after which he was barred from the securities business for life. But we digress.
To say that we found Cluetrain to be an inspiration would be an understatement. Within a few months of reading it, we had decided to leave our own job at Merrill Lynch as a private client advisor, and to set up our own business. (It was called Moonrock Radio; it launched in early 2000; it was effectively an early stage podcast business; it did not thrive, but not for want of enthusiasm on our part.)
Although Moonrock didn’t work commercially, it set us off on a career path wildly different from that we would have followed if we’d stayed at Merrill Lynch, and we don’t regret the decision for a moment. It led, indirectly, for example, to the private client asset management business which we now hugely enjoy – and, more directly, to the podcasts which we also co-host and hugely enjoy.
Cluetrain was a child of the late 1990s. It betrays its age with that reference to intranets (remember them ?). But the original authors of Cluetrain – Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger – were on to something.
Being a child of the 1990s, Cluetrain would have been only barely conscious of Google (founded September 1998) and not aware at all of the likes of Facebook (founded February 2004) or Twitter (founded March 2006). But its authors were clearly all well aware of the potential of the networked world.
Not being an early adopter, this correspondent didn’t join Twitter until the end of 2009. (And we’re now onto our third account.) One man, on the other hand, got on board in early 2007, and we’d like for you to meet him. He’s the subject of this week’s commentary, and his name is Naval Ravikant.
Who is he ?
Naval himself probably wouldn’t self-identify with any particular role, as he’s better described as something akin to a “Renaissance Man” and polymath, but a potted biography would include the following. He is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, a platform designed to connect startups with angel investors and employees. He is also an angel investor with interests in 200 or so separate companies, including Twitter / X and Uber. He is also extremely generous in sharing his experience and wisdom with the world in an utterly charming and gracious way.
The best way of getting to know Naval is probably through these interviews. If you’re anything like us, you’ll probably find yourself going back to them again and again. They’re a delight.
Naval has also penned a thread on Twitter which is mind-alteringly good. It’s currently pinned to his Twitter timeline, which you can access using his handle @naval. All credit goes to him; we’re merely republishing it here for ease of use. Its title: “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”:
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
- Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
- Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
- You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity – a piece of a business – to gain your financial freedom.
- You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
- Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
- The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
- Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
- Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
- Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
- Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
- When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
- Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
- The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
- “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” – Archimedes.
- Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
- Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
- Labour means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labour leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
- Capital and labour are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
- An army of robots is freely available – it’s just packed in data centres for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
- If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
- Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
- There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
How valuable is that ?
What we love about Naval’s advice is that he doesn’t hide behind jargon. His prose couldn’t be more lucid. And his recommendations span multiple disciplines: early-stage investment, investment at a more holistic level, work, lifestyle… Everything features.
Thomas Jefferson once remarked that
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Naval Ravikant is a wonderful living expression of the power of sharing ideas in a digitally networked world. While it’s true that much of the internet is a distraction engine (or what Nicholas Carr disdainfully calls The Shallows), if you can manage to extract enough signal from the noise, the rewards are all there for you to enjoy – and in most cases, at absolutely zero cost. It’s like having the library of Alexandria in the palm of your hand.
So switch off the news media. Make time instead for thinkers like Naval Ravikant, and search them out on the likes of Twitter and YouTube. Both your mind and body will thank you for it (Naval is also very good on matters relating to lifestyle). And if you can manage to free up sufficient time, you might also consider some of the books he recommends on his reading list.
The author of Avoid news: towards a healthy news diet, Rolf Dobelli, writes as follows:
“Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant. Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile ? Probably not.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto, meanwhile, ends with some rather ominous advice to businesses that fail to embrace the potential of the networked world:
- Even at its worst, our newfound conversation is more interesting than most trade shows, more entertaining than any TV sitcom, and certainly more true-to-life than the corporate web sites we’ve been seeing.
- Our allegiance is to ourselves — our friends, our new allies and acquaintances, even our sparring partners. Companies that have no part in this world, also have no future.
- Companies are spending billions of dollars on Y2K. Why can’t they hear this market timebomb ticking? The stakes are even higher.
- We’re both inside companies and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they’re really just an annoyance. We know they’re coming down. We’re going to work from both sides to take them down.
- To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.
- We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter… and getting smarter faster than most companies.
“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.
“Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humourless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
“But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.
“While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happy-talk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.
“However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intra-networked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
“Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.”
Get your Free
financial review
We first came across The Cluetrain Manifesto, ironically enough, in a research note written by Henry Blodget. If you don’t remember the name, he was the internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who became an aggressive booster of internet company initial public offerings (IPOs) until he was caught red-handed issuing essentially fraudulent recommendations, after which he was barred from the securities business for life. But we digress.
To say that we found Cluetrain to be an inspiration would be an understatement. Within a few months of reading it, we had decided to leave our own job at Merrill Lynch as a private client advisor, and to set up our own business. (It was called Moonrock Radio; it launched in early 2000; it was effectively an early stage podcast business; it did not thrive, but not for want of enthusiasm on our part.)
Although Moonrock didn’t work commercially, it set us off on a career path wildly different from that we would have followed if we’d stayed at Merrill Lynch, and we don’t regret the decision for a moment. It led, indirectly, for example, to the private client asset management business which we now hugely enjoy – and, more directly, to the podcasts which we also co-host and hugely enjoy.
Cluetrain was a child of the late 1990s. It betrays its age with that reference to intranets (remember them ?). But the original authors of Cluetrain – Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger – were on to something.
Being a child of the 1990s, Cluetrain would have been only barely conscious of Google (founded September 1998) and not aware at all of the likes of Facebook (founded February 2004) or Twitter (founded March 2006). But its authors were clearly all well aware of the potential of the networked world.
Not being an early adopter, this correspondent didn’t join Twitter until the end of 2009. (And we’re now onto our third account.) One man, on the other hand, got on board in early 2007, and we’d like for you to meet him. He’s the subject of this week’s commentary, and his name is Naval Ravikant.
Who is he ?
Naval himself probably wouldn’t self-identify with any particular role, as he’s better described as something akin to a “Renaissance Man” and polymath, but a potted biography would include the following. He is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, a platform designed to connect startups with angel investors and employees. He is also an angel investor with interests in 200 or so separate companies, including Twitter / X and Uber. He is also extremely generous in sharing his experience and wisdom with the world in an utterly charming and gracious way.
The best way of getting to know Naval is probably through these interviews. If you’re anything like us, you’ll probably find yourself going back to them again and again. They’re a delight.
Naval has also penned a thread on Twitter which is mind-alteringly good. It’s currently pinned to his Twitter timeline, which you can access using his handle @naval. All credit goes to him; we’re merely republishing it here for ease of use. Its title: “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”:
How valuable is that ?
What we love about Naval’s advice is that he doesn’t hide behind jargon. His prose couldn’t be more lucid. And his recommendations span multiple disciplines: early-stage investment, investment at a more holistic level, work, lifestyle… Everything features.
Thomas Jefferson once remarked that
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Naval Ravikant is a wonderful living expression of the power of sharing ideas in a digitally networked world. While it’s true that much of the internet is a distraction engine (or what Nicholas Carr disdainfully calls The Shallows), if you can manage to extract enough signal from the noise, the rewards are all there for you to enjoy – and in most cases, at absolutely zero cost. It’s like having the library of Alexandria in the palm of your hand.
So switch off the news media. Make time instead for thinkers like Naval Ravikant, and search them out on the likes of Twitter and YouTube. Both your mind and body will thank you for it (Naval is also very good on matters relating to lifestyle). And if you can manage to free up sufficient time, you might also consider some of the books he recommends on his reading list.
The author of Avoid news: towards a healthy news diet, Rolf Dobelli, writes as follows:
“Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career, your business – compared to what you would have known if you hadn’t swallowed that morsel of news. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to the forces that really matter in your life. At its best, it is entertaining, but it is still irrelevant. Assume that, against all odds, you found one piece of news that substantially increased the quality of your life – compared to how your life would have unfolded if you hadn’t read or seen it. How much trivia did your brain have to digest to get to that one relevant nugget? Even that question is a hindsight analysis. Looking forward, we can’t possibly identify the value of a piece of news before we see it, so we are forced to digest everything on the news buffet line. Is that worthwhile ? Probably not.”
The Cluetrain Manifesto, meanwhile, ends with some rather ominous advice to businesses that fail to embrace the potential of the networked world:
………….
As you may know, we also manage bespoke investment portfolios for private clients internationally. We would be delighted to help you too. Because of the current heightened market volatility we are offering a completely free financial review, with no strings attached, to see if our value-oriented approach might benefit your portfolio – with no obligation at all:
Get your Free
financial review
…………
Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and author of ‘Investing through the Looking Glass: a rational guide to irrational financial markets’. You can access a full archive of these weekly investment commentaries here. You can listen to our regular ‘State of the Markets’ podcasts, with Paul Rodriguez of ThinkTrading.com, here. Email us: info@pricevaluepartners.com.
Price Value Partners manage investment portfolios for private clients. We also manage the VT Price Value Portfolio, an unconstrained global fund investing in Benjamin Graham-style value stocks.
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