Newsletter : Issue #25

Scenius, Era of incredible change, The Future of Software Business Models and The Memo by Howard Marks

Aug 16, 2025

Happy Sunday! Welcome to the 25th edition of my weekly newsletter. Here are some of the articles and resources that caught my attention this week.

Reading

1. Scenius

“My main learning was to play more. Foster more community. Foster more curiosity. Work until I get stuck, then go spend time with the kids. Spend more time outside. The Bezos notion to invent, and wander. We cannot directly control serendipity, but we can choose to increase the surface area of our exposure to serendipity and make time for it. We cannot directly control our subconscious, but we can plant ideas in it, give it space, and take its outputs seriously. We have limited control over our physical and mental states, but we can choose to pursue the benefits of variance. And some learning is best (only?) unlocked through community.”

2. 1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind

“Their view of things was shaped by reading about races in fast machines and in children’s magazines, by over-hearing adult whispers about nervous breakdowns and fast women … their imagination was alert to the fact that an age had ended and a new one — by turns a promise and a menace — was busting onto the scene, visible as yet only in flashes and fragmented visions.”

3. Free Software & The Future of Software Business Models

“Hardware is hard, but difficulty creates differentiation. If software gets commoditized, more value will flow to hardware. And this article is about finding differentiation in software. If a company can use hardware to get performance gains, it’s a wonderful way to build moats. For next-gen hardware companies (semiconductor companies, for example), the decreasing cost to build software creates a new way to build moats and distribute your hardware.”

4. What Do You Mean?

“There are virtually no large organizations on the planet that get better as they get bigger. You could point to many reasons for this, but one is that they are worse at communicating; there is not a shared library of definitions. It might also be fair to say that millions of relationships collapse every year because of miscommunication. It may be true that we are decades or centuries behind our potential technological progress because we are not very good at coordinating.”

5. The Calculus of Value

“What’s the bottom line of the calculus? Fundamentals appear to me to be less good overall than they were seven months ago, but at the same time, asset prices are high relative to earnings, higher than they were at the end of 2024, and at high valuations relative to history. Most bull markets are built through the addition of a “constellation of positives” on top of a well-functioning economy. Today I see elements that include the following:

the positive psychology and “wealth effect” resulting from recent gains in markets, high-end real estate, and crypto,
the belief that, for most investors, there really is no alternative to the U.S. markets, and
the excitement surrounding today’s new, new thing: AI.

These are the kinds of things that have the ability to fire investor imaginations and contribute to bull markets, and they certainly seem to be doing so now.”

Few more :

Make Your Own Luck

Open models by OpenAI