Five Links for March

and a few bonus tweets

The Sure Thing by Malcolm Gladwell
Entrepreneurs reduce risk.  Personally, I abhor taking unnecessary risks.  Great entrepreneurs take bets where the long term odds are in their favor.

Investing as Entertainment by Shreyas Hariharan
"Robinhood isn’t competing with Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab. It is competing with Netflix and TikTok."
and my response and my tweetstorm

SafeGraph Raises a $45M Series B
and good piece on the raise in Techcrunch by Anthony Ha 

The Pirate Problem by Alex Danco
Great analysis of Wall Street Bets and how little guys can trump the big guys.
Another good one on this topic is Reddit: Organized Lightning

Self-Serve Second by Auren Hoffman
How to Transition from Enterprise to Self-serve. For SaaS companies, how do you create self-serve as a second motion?
And read Gokul Rajaram's piece on: Self-serve first: the overlooked but essential paradigm underlying great software companies

Watch: Nomadland by Chloé Zhao

Listen: Rationally Speaking: Intellectual honesty, cryptocurrency, & more (Vitalik Buterin) by Julia Galef

Books:

The Body by Bill Bryson (4/5)

The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler (4/5)
HT: Zachary Karabell and Bruce Feiler

See all my napkin graphs

I’m hiring a Chief of Staff at SafeGraph. Our last Chief of Staff was just promoted SafeGraph’s VP Finance. One of the problems with hiring a great Chief of Staff is that you often quickly promote them to running big parts of the company.

Please forward to the superstars you know: Chief of Staff at SafeGraph

Auren 📚 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 @auren

wife: "daddy's company just raised $45 million. what do you think of that?" 9-year-old: "does that mean we get a bigger allowance?"

Auren 📚 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 @auren

The simple heuristic to tell how interested a venture capitalist is in your company

Auren 📚 𝐇𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐦𝐚𝐧 @auren

In many venture financings, it now takes longer to go from accepted term sheet to close than is does from early pitch to accepted term sheet