#2110: Build a business, but don't be Buffett

Beginner typesetting is tedious, especially for a tweaker. I gave up. So I'll be publishing the first version of The PDF of Naval Ravikant as a Roam book. It's quicker to make my notes reader-ready, and it's potentially a lot more useful.

In addition, this week I posted my CFA notes on Statistical Concepts & Market Returns along with its Anki Deck.

Here are a couple of things I found interesting this week.

Build a business, not an audience

I've read several blog posts from a 20-something "influencer" who has a newsletter with 25,000 subscribers. He really only knows one thing well (SEO). The rest of the time, he espouses trendy-but-wrong ideas on other things: fitness (HIIT is money for nothing), money (FIRE is a good strategy in 2021), and on and on.

But because of his online track record, I thought I might learn something. And I did: I gag when I hear "influencer," especially when my children say it.

In contrast, Jakob Greenfeld does a great job of describing the main problem with influence-focused audience-building which is "the creative world's bullshit industrial complex."

Their goal is to become entrepreneurs. But instead of building products, they create content. Or even worse, they do research and take courses on how to create content.

My goal is to build a business. I want to turn my expertise into $10,000 per month. (How? I'm not sure. It'll take some time to figure that out.) First, it seems wise to build an audience in advance. But I want it to be based on value, not shiny objects. I don't want an audience for its own sake.

Let's say you have 2000 followers that you got by posting feel-good platitudes, whereas I only have two followers called Elon Musk and Paul Graham. Would you swap accounts?

Would you switch places with Warren Buffett?

"You would be one of the richest people in the world. But you would also be 90 years old." Any takers?

In Time Billionaire, Anthony Pompliano quotes investor Graham Duncan:

People don't really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

We are all born as time billionaires. But we get poorer every minute, and our perception of the decline speeds up. We're time-rich when we're born but weak and broke. In mid-life, most are time-starved, even weaker, but making money. When we're old, we have free but dwindling time, often a sudden urge to "get in shape," and (hopefully) a stable net worth.

I haven't realized it until recently, but I've always pursued Ravikant's "trifecta": getting all three at once.