Top Podcasts of the Week

November 22, 2021

Below is our “Top Podcast” list with our curator, Colby Donovan!

Today we have Kyle Bass with his macro view, Sam Lessin on applying the venture capital model to individuals, NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran on the importance of narratives and story telling, and the story of Moderna.

Investing

  • We Study Billionaires — The Investor’s Podcast Network: TIP396: China and the Macro Impact w/ Kyle Bass. Hayman Capital Management’s Kyle Bass shares all his macro thoughts at the moment. He covers inflation expectations, why he doesn’t trust the CPI and why he’s buying farmland as a hedge. Then he touches on all things China — the potential for conflict between China & Taiwan, issues with Chinese companies’ accounting policies, and the state of the Chinese real estate market. He winds down with thoughts on the energy market and why the U.S. underinvestment in oil and gas and focus on clean energy has left us vulnerable to a rise in oil prices. [November 13, 2021–62 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

  • This Week in Startups: Why Sam Lessin is using the VC model to invest in individuals + Jason funds a startup on air. From 4:10–41:40, Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures discusses how he is applying the venture model to invest in individuals along the spectrum in the creator economy. He explains his thesis for doing so, how the investments are typically structured, and provides an example of a $1.7M investment he made in a YouTube creator. [November 17, 2021–67 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker

  • unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc: Aswath Damodaran — Narratives and Numbers: Understanding The Value of Stories in Business. NYU professor Aswath Damodaran shares why story telling and narratives are powerful and important, particularly when it comes to a CEO or investor discussing a stock. He explains the importance of combining models with a compelling and coherent story, provides examples of it done well and poorly, and explains why narratives, not data, explain so much of what we see in the investing world today. [November 17, 2021–51 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Website Link

“I learned more about business from my Uber driver and my hot dog stand vendor than I do from CEOs of companies.”

  • How I Built This with Guy Raz: Moderna and Flagship Pioneering: Noubar Afeyan. This is a great entrepreneurial success story. Noubar Afeyan co-founded Moderna in 2010 with the hope to use RNA technology to help cure life-threatening diseases, which it did in 2020 with the development of a vaccine for COVID. The episode walks through his story, beginning with how a chance meeting with Hewlett-Packard cofounder David Packard gave him the entrepreneurial bug, and later starting Flagship Pioneering, his multi-billion dollar venture studio. They walk through Moderna’s process of developing, testing, and manufacturing the vaccine for COVID and the lessons learned as he looks back on the experience. [October 11, 2021–68 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

The Meb Faber Show

  • #368 — Rodrigo Gordillo & Corey Hoffstein — You Now Get To Have Your Beta Cake While Eating Your Alpha Too. Corey Hoffstein is CIO and co-founder of Newfound Research, and Rodrigo Gordillo is the President and Portfolio Manager at ReSolve Asset Management. Corey and Rodrigo joined forces to try and tackle the issue of how to generate returns in an environment with stretched equity and fixed income valuations. We hear how using a little bit of leverage to the traditional 60/40 portfolio can provide more than one dollar of exposure for every dollar invested. Then they walk us through what strategies investors can stack on top of their 60/40 portfolio, including global systematic macro, trend following, and tail hedging, and what that those strategies cab do to an investor’s risk/return profile. [November 15, 2021–75 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

  • #369 — Africa Startup Series — Maya Horgan Famodu, Ingressive Capital — Africa Holds The Fastest Growing Consumer Class, Fastest Growing Population & Fastest Growing Middle Class in The World. Maya Horgan Famodu is the founder of Ingressive Capital, a VC fund focused on early stage African tech, and believed to be the youngest person to launch a tech fund in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this episode, she lays out the factors behind the recent explosion in funding that the continent has recently experienced — strong demographics, high growth, and rapid tech adoption. Then we get into some companies in which she has invested, specifically a lot of “X for Africa,” the African equivalent of companies like Stripe, Robinhood, Flexport, and Plaid. And we even touch on 54gene, which we highlighted in episode 345. [November 17, 2021 — 36 minutes] iTunes Podcast | Spotify | Google | Breaker | Website Link

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Kareem Zaki (General Partner, Thrive Capital): 

Robin Wigglesworth (Author & Writer, Financial Times): 

Good investing,Meb Fabertheideafarm.com