AGM

Commitment > Optionality

Terrence Tao’s arguments for the value of serendipity and the counterintuitive benefits of inefficiency align perfectly with Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. Too much emphasis today on optimization, getting the answer right, and getting exactly what we asked for.

My latest in @nytopinion on Dubai ... nytimes.com/2026/03/16/opi…

La lliçó és que Laporta té mil defectes i foscors però té una valentia i una genialitat que el soci intueix i que Font, que ha volgut fer-se passar per qui no és en campanya, no ha pogut transmetre mai.

There is a specific kind of intelligence that is almost never celebrated but is consistently effective: the intelligence that recognizes when the game being played is not the game worth playing.

There are at least 6 problems in no particular order: -mislabeling or intentionally disguising the amount SaaS exposure in some porfolios -no concept of portfolio construction for some of the direct lending managers -mismarking and/or marking inconsistencies across funds -other uses of leverage away from the basic bank/bond/clo financing of direct lending - 2nd outs, jv’s, direct clo equity investments to juice returns and mask the real underlying leverage of the portfolio -250bln of the direct lending market is in “semi-liquid” products where underlying isn’t liquid at all -prisoners dilemma for LP’s of that last bucket - if you don’t redeem do you just get left with the turds? Everyone has to make their own opinion on the SaaS and AI disruptions threatened loans. I think there will be a very interesting secondary opportunity as entities look to sell to meet redemptions or reduce exposure to areas they are too overweight. Right now though to your point Boaz the public BDC’s at .85 -.95 GAV - I look at GAV not EQUITY NAV bc the latter ignores the ultimate downside risk - are cheap to where these secondary private portfolios are offered/trading - I think there will be a convergence in the near future given the amount likely to come for sale.

when u get greedy w fundraising.... returns at certain scale are a b*tch...

@RaphaelKahan incredible city with many faces. strolling Anfu Rd with a coffee and no concrete plan is a treat.

Shanghai is extremely underrated

@GuliMoreno @carlosotermin densidad de talento & capital*

@GuliMoreno @carlosotermin celebrando sus exitos sin duda xo no tengo claro el spillover a esp a ningun plazo 1) elevan aspiraciones del resto xo para irse tb (i.e. el exito lo han conseguido yendose fuera) 2) pocos o ninguno con base fija en Esp 3) el talento y densidad d capital lo han conseguido fuera

Esto es de un inversor Tier 1 de San Francisco. El cambio de los últimos 18-24 meses es real. España acelera🔥

@GuliMoreno @carlosotermin sí q hay un raising awareness a los plumillas politicos locales q hay talento d sobras para q cambien lo q hay q cambiar (seguridad juridica, rapidez para legalizar operaciones d financiamiento, flex laboral, mejorar mercado d capitales etc para acelerar d verdad)... pero...

@carlosotermin En mi humilde opinión, a la larga sí lo es. De lo que más ha acelerado nuestro ecosistema son precisamente españoles que lo han petado fuera y: - Elevan las aspiraciones del resto - Montan equipos con ambición global aquí - Atraen talento y capital La alternativa es peor...

Biz trip across Perú in a couple wks meeting regulators, investors, targets & diplomats and then off to China for 3w w/ wife & daughter (Beijing, Ningxia region & then Sichuan in Chengdu and Chongqing). Bring it on!

My conversation with John Arnold (@johnarnold). Few people I've spoken with have as wide a view of the global system as John. He was one of the most successful energy traders of all time, and after stepping away from markets he built a foundation devoted to solving America's most critical systemic problems in a principled way. John's recent trip to China was the catalyst for this conversation, and I feel lucky we all get to learn from him. We discuss: - His trip to China and what it taught him about robotics, AI, and EVs - What it takes to be the best (and what it costs) - Building the best seat in the market - The state of energy markets today - NIMBYism as the impediment to progress - What he thinks about the wave of nuclear startups - Fixing America's broken systems: healthcare, criminal justice, education, and journalism Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 intro 0:45 China’s Rapid Transformation 3:53 Lessons from the Chinese EV Market 6:12 Robotics 11:22 The Discipline of an Elite Trader 15:42 Leveraging Scale and Proprietary Data 17:36 Lessons from the Baseball Cards 21:15 Trading Natural Gas and Market Dynamics 25:34 Innovation in the Modern Energy Sector 27:02 High-Level Goals of the U.S. Energy System 32:59 Overcoming NIMBYism 36:10 The Challenges of U.S. Transmission Lines 37:55 The Future of Nuclear, Fusion, and SMRs 44:00 The Economics of Solar and Battery Storage 48:28 Data Center Demand 50:28 Housing Reform 53:32 Rethinking the Role of Philanthropic Foundations 57:05 Improving the Criminal Justice System 1:01:58 Privacy and Security 1:05:03 Education and Life Outcomes 1:06:41 The Promise and Pitfalls of EdTech and AI 1:09:12 Identifying Market Failures in Healthcare 1:12:10 The Role of Regulation Across Different Systems 1:14:06 Journalism as the Fourth Estate 1:16:41 The Kindness of Hard Truths

The trinity of Digital Public Infrastructure, Open Network for Agriculture & AI: driving the next phase of agritech in India yourstory.com/2026/03/digita…

Very important

Great reporting from Forbes, compiling a list of 20 big buyout shops that missed targets.... welcome to zombieland! forbes.com/sites/hanktuck…

One of the greats being vulnerable and authentic makes him even more of a legend

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

We now have at least five independent academic research groups using different datasets and different methods coming to the same conclusion: Expanding market-rate housing supply helps low-income renters.

lloyd blankfein WSJ interview is so good. you go in expecting a laid back reflection on life from a guy that's summering in miami 8 years into retirement and it immediately becomes clear that he's still an absolute psycho who misses the bloodbath.

Child’s Play harpers.org/archive/2026/0…