Two excellent newsletters I read this week

Matt Levine at Bloomberg:

If you can lose all your money and go into debt based on your colleagues’ bad decisions, then … look, that can work, that’s conventionally called a “partnership,” but it tends to rely on deep trust among partners backed up by a collaborative environment, transparent information sharing and a careful selection process for partners. “We didn’t hire each other” is, unbelievably, one of the phrases in the Vision Fund’s word cloud: not a great sign! If your colleagues are actively hiding deals from you, then why would you trust them with your net worth?

Oh one last cultural point from that Vision Fund article is this absolutely Wambsgans first paragraph:

Flying over Europe in a private jet last year, Rajeev Misra took his shoes off and propped his bare feet on the knee of a top executive of FIFA, soccer’s governing body. The executive froze while Mr. Misra, head of SoftBank Group Corp.’s $100 billion Vision Fund, chatted about ways to make more money off the streaming rights for the organization’s tournaments.

The Journal put that at the beginning of their article but I am mentioning it at the end here because there is really nothing to say after that.

Will Leitch's newsletter:

It was the first time my father had ever recommended a job to me, had ever even implied he didn’t think things were going well out in New York, and it was deeply alarming: They’re scared it’s not going to work out for me. And why wouldn’t they be? I was 29 years old, working thankless jobs for no money in the most expensive city in the country, and the only thing I was excited about was working for hours every day for free on a website I did with my friends that had no readers. If my parents were this concerned, surely, everyone was. Will had all this promise. We loved that he always dreamed big. But he’s almost 30 years old now. It’s probably time for him to start getting serious about his life. It was becoming increasingly clear they weren’t wrong. How much longer could I continue to kid myself? (I politely declined Dad’s invitation and have never brought it up again until right now.)

...

And then the site took off. You know what happened with the site after that. In many ways, I’m fortunate I had failed so much before Deadspin happened: I knew quickly that this was as close as I was going to get to a big break, and therefore I was mature and determined enough to make sure I didn’t screw it up. (If I had been 22 or so, I wouldn’t have understood how rare such opportunities are.) I dedicated my entire life to Deadspin.