Hi friends, 

It has been a week. We learned that the US economy contracted 1.5% in Q1. Berkshire Hathaway held their AGM for shareholders in Omaha this weekend while FTX held court in the Bahamas with political leaders of yore. Meanwhile, Yuga Labs had a disastrous launch of their OtherSide Metaverse game with crazy transaction fees. I hear someone named Elon did things, too.  

I'm ready for summer to come. 

Today's Contents:

• Good Reads: Emerging Trends
• Good Reads: Sensible Investing
• Weekly Song: Wash

Good Reads: Emerging Trends

The Ownership Economy 2022: A primer on the state of web3 here. Yes, this is obviously marketing material for their fund. Today, the spirit or promise of the 'ownership economy' is real but the reality is there isn't much shared ownership in many of these early projects. They still have highly concentrated ownership among insiders with limited transparency. It remains super-early days. 

India is enduring a record heatwave. 50°Celsius is 122 °Fahrenheit for those scoring at home. And it's expected to continue. This is (yet another) huge humanitarian crisis in the making.




Student debt forgiveness. The All-In Podcast this week (E78) had a great discussion of the key issues on the proposed debt forgiveness. Go listen. The key point for me is that we shouldn't write off any amount of this debt until we have an honest conversation about the quality of the degrees and what is going to be done to reform the system. And for numbers, 34% is the number of adults aged 18 to 29 who have student-loan debt, according to the Education Data Initiative.

Good Reads: Sensible Investing

The Great VC Pullback of 2022 here from Matt Turck at FirstMark.

My sense is that the current reality of the market is a lot worse, because deal data is a trailing indicator – financings are often announced months after they closed.

We’ve rapidly, perhaps brutally, transitioned from a hyper-frothy VC environment to a world where many deals are not getting done.

Thoughts on follow-on investing for VCs. Here from Tom Tunguz. 

Chris Hohn (CIF) is a Hedge Fund Manager Like No Other. Here in Institutional Investor. 

Weekly Song: Wash

Music Video here.

Justin Vernon has said this song is about March rains in Wisconsin that wipe the snow away and then the growth can blossom in spring. 
 

"Wash" by Bon Iver

Bet
Is hardly shown
Scraped
Across the foam
Like they stole it
And oh, how they hold it
Claire, we nearly forfeit

I, I'm growing like the quickening hues
I, I'm telling darkness from lines on you
Over havens fora full and swollen morass, young habitat
All been living alone, where the ice snap and the hold clast are known

A short one this week. Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.

As always,
Katelyn