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Reading

I don’t think you should focus on the failure of others, or even the success of others. What you do need to do—and what is surprisingly hard—is to define success for your own part of the world, and work towards that. Non-monetary success, because again, money lags.

I’ve always loved Paul Ford’s writing, and recently learned that he’s been writing short, punchy posts for the blog of his startup, Aboard. His cofounder, Rich Ziade, is also writing great stuff, with good humor - introducing himself as the other founder of Aboard.

This rally is so different because no one is beating around the bush anymore. It’s not about technology. It’s not about use cases or improving the world. It’s just, “More people buy, number go up.” The veil has been lifted and we all know it. It’s a momentum trade plain and simple.

Nick Maguilli and Joe Weisenthal wrote about how this crypto rally is emptier and more dada-esque than those before it. Nobody is even pretending to produce useful technology or an viable alternative financial system. I guess at least it’s honest, for a very narrow definition of that word.

Since we were looking at what would be left from a sale after taxes, higher taxes gave us more incentive to grow the business faster–employing more people and contributing more to the economy (and the government), so we could get to the magic after-tax number.

From Steve Roth’s account of his selling a company and how taxes affected his attitudes. I’ve been chatting with a friend or two about the idea of wealth taxes (I’m a big fan, see Capital and Triumph of Injustice).

Watching

I’ve really been enjoying Y Combinator’s ‘Dalton and Michael’ podcast-which-is-also-a-video-series. They cover a lot of the topics in startup that are matters of attitude and intentions, and they give pretty good advice, in my opinion. It’s delivered at a nice level of specificity – not so broad that they’re delivering platitudes, but they also aren’t relying on knowledge of specific companies and short-term trends.

Besides that I’m just watching different media reframed as midwest emo intros.

Listening

Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, is so good.

So is the new ‘Forest Scenes’ from MIZU.

Elsewhere

I wrote a whole bunch on the micro blog this month, about Incentives, Running, the Remix web framework, Placemark.io, web pages and video games, and the S&P 500. Plus one post on the macro blog about Figma Plugins.