In publishing, interleaved books are those sold with blank pages inserted between printed pages so as to facilitate note-taking. They were a common practice in the 16th and 17th century. Here is how an interleaved book with notes by the reader (source) looked like –

 Thus my term ‘Interleavings’ for my notes and thoughts on the digital texts I enjoyed reading.

Here are my interleavings from the recent past.

‘Alpha above the LLM baseline’

Patrick McKenzie or Patio11 as he is known on twitter runs the Complex Systems podcast. This time he is interviewed (Link). There is a fun passage on how he met and impressed his wife Ruriko by singing Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ in front of 200 Japanese folks:) 

This passage stood out in particular. Patio11: “One word is we have the concept of ‘alpha’ in finance, and alpha – one Greek letter smuggles in a huge amount of understanding about how the world works. I would love to be able to describe someone’s alpha above the LLM baseline in discussing a topic. Because there are a lot of human writers in the world who have no alpha above the LLM baseline.”

Good mental model (if I can call it that) for how to think about evaluating a person in the AI age. What is their alpha above the LLM baseline? What do they bring to their work a reasonably powerful AIgent can’t deliver?

Head of Research / Data roles to support investment teams

The last of Kirsten Green’s ‘Letters to a Young Investor’ series in The Generalist. This one covers fund management and org building (Link). The previous letter was reviewed in an older piece of mine. That was on her investing frameworks.

I found it interesting that they have a head of research as well as a head of data.

Kirsten Green: “This approach has led us to thoughtfully add specialized roles in research, data, portfolio support, and operations. Our Head of Research, Jason, exemplifies the strategic value of dedicated expertise. Given the depth of our proactive efforts to uncover promising tailwinds and business evolutions, we determined it was worthwhile to have a dedicated function that interplays with the investing team’s passions and deal flow. The research team ensures we consistently show up with a prepared mind, systematically covering the landscape to build conviction in our ultimate point of view or investment decisions.

This research function acts as both a complementary force and a counterbalance to the natural enthusiasms of investors. When an investor develops a thesis, research helps pressure-test assumptions, identify blind spots, and contextualize the opportunity within broader market shifts. This deliberate tension between passionate advocacy and rigorous scrutiny creates a more complete understanding that strengthens our decision-making. It also means we’re rarely starting from scratch when evaluating opportunities – we’ve often been tracking emerging spaces well before specific deals materialize.

Similarly, our Head of Data, Luke – everyone at Forerunner needs basic data literacy, but Luke brings exponentially greater capabilities that create leverage across everything we do. He can analyze at a depth and context that transforms our decision-making, both in evaluating new investments and supporting portfolio companies through critical inflection points.”

I was reminded of Kelly Granat’s podcast (scroll below) where she describes how Lone Pine has a 3-member data team that supports the investment team, and validates their assumptions, and highlighting interesting patterns from the data they are seeing.

It is not a bad idea, and surprising that more investment teams in venture don’t have this, especially given the data that is beginning to become available via third party data sets, expert calls etc. Beginning to see expert calls being used in Series A investment evaluations in venture in India now.

“If you do everything, you’ll win.”

Dwarkesh Patel’s AMA episode (similar format to the Patio11 podcast episode above where the host is now the interviewee) is an enjoyable listen, covering AI (naturally), his fave history books (Robert Caro’s LBJ biographies), as well as how he selects podcast guests (would be enjoy the 1-2 weeks of research before he interviews them?)

Dwarkesh: “The main thing I took away from those (Robert Caro’s LBJ biographies) books is LBJ had this quote that he would tell his debate [students]. In his early 20s, he taught debate to these poor Mexican students in Texas. And he used to tell them, “If you do everything, you’ll win.” I think it’s an underrated quote. So that’s the main thing I took away. And you see it through his entire career, where there’s a reasonable amount of effort which goes by 20/80. You do the 20 to get the 80% of the effect. And then if you go beyond that to get, “Oh, no. I’m not just gonna do 20%, I’m gonna just do the whole thing.” And there’s a level even beyond that, which is an unreasonable use of time. This is going to have no ultimate impact, and still try doing that.” 

“If you do everything, you’ll win.” That line gives me goosebumps every time I read it. It is advice for writing or creating, and for life itself. 

Link to excerpts from Dwarkesh’s AMA I found interesting.

Have a common goal for the org, and structure your org to meet that goal

Like most of David Senra’s podcast episodes, this one too is chock full of insight and wisdom. I hadn’t heard of Robert Kierlin or Fastenal before this episode. Senra looks at Fastenal through Kerlin’s biography ‘The Power of Fastenal People’. Fascinating episode. The key concept is around keeping a common goal, and organising your company around it – removing everything that distracts from the common goal, and setting incentives and culture to enable everyone to work towards that goal. As with all Senra episodes, he uses the themes in the biography he is covering as a springboard to jump to learnings across several other biographies as well, such as Mike Bloomberg’s biography, from where he comes with the terrific “Do not make the mistake of confusing your product for the device that delivers it.”

Senra: “The one he repeats most throughout the entire book, that your company should be organized and oriented around a commitment to a common goal, and this is their common goal, growth through customer service. 

And so what is the uncommon pursuit of the common goal? Organizations succeed to the extent that all of their members pursue a common goal. This is one of those simple ideas that are so difficult to practice. The greatest danger to the success of the organization is that it starts developing unnecessary subgroups, and these subgroups start pursuing their own goals rather than the common goal of the organization. That is bureaucracies what he’s describing

This is from Les Schwab’s autobiography. “We have had over the years some people in the office that sometimes think that they are more important than the stores.” “The office serves only one purpose, and that is to serve the stores.

Sam Walton said it very similar, he says, “If you’re not supporting the customers or supporting the people that support the customers, then we don’t have a need for you in Walmart,” kept it very, very simple.”

Link to excerpts from Senra’s podcast episode I found interesting.

Simple and Hard > Complex and Easy

I had never heard of Mark Daniel, founder of investment firm Digital, before this Infinite Loops podcast with Jim O’Shaugnessy. Some great quotes here. My biggest takeaway was around how people want complex and easy (the best pushup variant, the best translation of a foreign book) instead of simple and hard (just keep doing the simple variant regularly, just get started on the book with any translation) etc.

Mark Daniel: “Like marriage, health, building a business, building a great portfolio. All of those things are quite simple and quite hard. Whenever I find myself trying to over complicate something, it’s usually because I know what the answer is. I don’t want to accept what the answer is, because it’s going to require me to sweat. It is always the guy who’s out of shape who’s asking about push-up variations in the gym. It’s always the guy who can’t do one push up, he’s like, “But do I put my hands here? And then do I do a jumping push-up? Or do I do underhand?” It’s like, “No. Just keep going until you can’t anymore” and I think that that tends to be correct in every stream of your life that’s worth developing. You just have to do the simple, hard thing 90% of the days each year and then do it for 10 years and then look up and see where you’re at, and that tends to work out pretty well. That’s really, honestly, the only thing that I’ve seen work out well. That’s not luck driven. “

Link to excerpts from Mark Daniel’s podcast I found interesting.

“When we find great business models and great founders in the same situation at the same time, we go all in.”

Long read on Greenoaks’s Neil Mehta, who has been a fairly astute picker of high growth (some may call generational) startups such as Coupang, Wiz, Figma etc. Venture nerds will enjoy the colour and back story. That said, I found it a tad hagiographic though. Still a useful read.

Some quotes I particularly enjoyed.

  • Neil Mehta: “We’re only focused on two things in life: great business models and great founders. When you find them in the same situation at the same time, we go all in.”
  • “Each year, Greenoaks identifies about 10–15 people who might be like this, and to whom the firm could be a uniquely close partner. Before any meetings, they set about preparing. “I don’t mean go on the website and use the product a little bit,” Mehta said. “We’ll talk to their customers, examine exactly what competitors are doing, understand the product in a granular way, study the underlying technology and how it’s evolving. There’s a series of things we’re testing for, depending on the company. We can understand from the outside-in better than almost anybody else on Earth. There’s no need to explain the 101 or go through remedial background. For a founder, that makes a first meeting with us feel like a fourth or fifth.”

Setup dynamics

Kelly Granat, co-CIO of Tiger cub Lone Pine, comes on the Colossus | Invest Like The Best podcast with Patrick O’Shaughnessy to give us a behind the scenes glimpse into how an elite public market investor works. Loved how she detailed 

  • the difference between how public market investing has changed from when her career began (use of credit card data and expert networks in analysis, the rising importance of third party data in impact on stock prices, the importance of macro etc.).
  • how Lone Pine works – surprising amount of candour in detailing the processes. Found the 3-member data team particularly interesting – especially how they join investment meetings and even call out interesting trends and anomalies from the data they are crunching.

Kelly: “When I zoom out and think about starting as a summer intern in the summer of 2001 during business school and then returning full-time to the public markets in 2002, the industry was really different. One, there were a lot more fundamentally oriented, directional, duration-oriented investors who were doing deep research with three, four, five-year time horizons. There were many fewer leveraged pods, and certainly passive wasn’t a thing yet.

In addition, when I think about organizational structure and how we did our jobs, most fundamental firms were pretty siloed. You could cover industrials, consumer, or financials, and you were doing that with a peer set of people outside your firm with whom you developed a network over time by sharing meetings and attending conferences. The level of conversation among peers was not as informed because people were operating in sector silos in terms of knowledge, coverage, expertise, and network. In addition, the tools we used to do our jobs were pretty different. You would meet with companies, read filings, attend conferences, and try to conduct proprietary research, but things like credit card data and expert networks—all of the tools we now use to supplement our fundamental research—didn’t exist.

At the portfolio level, when I look back—and although I wasn’t managing a portfolio at that point—I observed that the tools to consider portfolio construction and risk analytics really did not exist. As a fundamental investor, you were going bottom-up, building a single-stock portfolio and considering how stocks acted in concert through correlations and similar factors. The new behavior feels more like what we call setup dynamics—a function largely of the dissemination of a lot of third-party data. This creates setup dynamics around events, quarters, conferences, investor days, and how those events are previewed based on what third-party data suggests or on the cues provided by sales traders at banks regarding whisper numbers.”

Link to excerpts from Kelly Granat’s podcast I found interesting.