Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning

It’s been dubbed one of the most dramatic chases captured on film. A BBC crew for Plant Earth II records an iguana running from a nest killer snakes on an unspoiled beach in one of the Galápagos Islands. Incredibly tense:

The Equation of Time

If you took a photo of the sun everyday at the same for a year and overlayed the photos you'd find that the sun makes a figure eight-like pattern in the sky (i.e. if you observed the sun at noon everyday it will appear in a slightly different position each time that over the course of a year traces a figure-8 path). The phenomenon is known as an "analemma," and is the result of the earth and the sun's relative motions. Another way to explain it is that it is the difference between the actual position of the sun in the sky and the mean solar time measured by our clocks.

Solar time is time measured by earth's rotation relative to the sun, as explained by this Brittanica entry. Apparent solar time is measured by directly observing the position of the sun--as by a sundial. Mean solar time, kept by most clocks, is the time that would be measured by observation if the sun "traveled at a uniform apparent speed throughout the year rather than, as it actually does, at a slightly varying apparent speed that depends on the seasons." The difference between mean and apparent solar time is known as the "equation of time," derived from the medieval Latin aequātiō diērum, or "difference of days." (Back then the word equation referred to reconciliation.)

Anyways, the difference between apparent and mean solar time is related to two phenomena: First, the earth’s axis is tilted 23.5° relative to the plane of orbit (which causes the sun to appear higher or lower in our sky throughout the year) and second the earth moves through its orbit at slightly different speeds in different seasons. The result is captured in the spectacularly cool video below:

Of course, earth is not the only planet to have an analemma. Other celestial bodies have their own analemmas:

1. Mercury: a single point (because a day on Mercury takes exactly two years!)
2. Venus: an ellipse
3. Mars: teardrop
4. Jupiter: ellipse
5. Saturn: teardrop with a teeny-tiny loop at the end
6. Uranus: figure 8
7. Neptune: figure 8
8. Pluto: a very large figure 8 

When Streaming Killed the TV Star

Change is the only constant...in the 1950s television replaced radio as the dominant form of entertainment. Then came cable television and HBO in the 1970s. Then it was the internet...and YouTube in 2005. Since then, broadcast television and cable have been losing ground to streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, etc.; first slowly and then quite rapidly. The future that was long anticipated finally arrived last month. The New York Times reports that in May, "more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined." It was the first time that happened over a full month.

Looking at the chart above, Americans were still consuming entertainment primarily through television even as late as five years ago. But streaming has made rapid strides in recent years. And ironically, it may be due to Boomers. As the NYT notes, "It’s no surprise that younger viewers were the first to jump to streaming. But another group has since made the leap as well: viewers over the age of 65." They are the fastest growing age group for streaming services, according to Nielsen. Older viewers watch a lot of television and are drawn to free platforms like Tubi, Roku, and Pluto. 

If the streaming vs television race is all but over, the winners within streaming are just as clear. Not all streamers are equal...YouTube is the undisputed king of streaming capturing 12.5% of all viewing time in May, followed by Netflix (7.5%) and Disney (5.0%).

What's next for the winners? Well, Ted Sarandos, Co-CEO of Netflix, says "What we really are focused on is the 80 percent of TV watching that is not on Netflix or YouTube today.”

The ascension of streaming as the primary form television consumption reminds us of the change seen in the music industry a few decades ago. On August 1, 1981 MTV (Music Television) went live and swiftly revolutionized the way people experienced music by playing (back then) music videos 24/7. The impact of a new technology on existing media was captured eloquently in the Buggles' icon video "Video Killed the Radio Star" (which was played heavily in the early days of MTV). And its message applies just as much to the next incumbent technology.   

Bessemer's Anti-Portfolio

Venture investing is hard: 3 out 4 start ups fail with investors losing much not if not all of their money when those 75% of firms liquidate assets. While VCs are always on the lookout for the next big thing, no one can really say whether today's startup will be tomorrow's industry behemoth that makes investors very rich. To improve their odds, VCs will invest in many businesses in a number of markets with the understanding that statistically only a few of their bets will (hopefully) generate big returns.

It's not surprising then that VCs don't like to advertise their losses. They'd much plaster their websites and marketing materials with their successes. And they certainly don't want to remind you of their great misses...companies they passed on that eventually became household names (whose success in hindsight is so blinding obvious, it might give prospective investors pause to hand you any of their money).

Bessemer Venture Partners ("BVP") is refreshingly different. BVP is one of America's oldest venture capital and private equity firms, founded in 1911. Whether because of humility, or the firm's track record, or simply because they think it's clever marketing...BVP maintains a list of (ex-post) game-changing companies they evaluated but decided not to invest in for one reason or another. As BVP quips: "Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies —our “anti-portfolio”—whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working."

And the list is (drum roll, please)...

Source: bvp.com

These 16 companies, which include four Magnificent 7 members, had a collective market capitalization of more than $8.5 trillion, as of June 6, 2025, or roughly 1/6 of the value of the entire U.S. stock market.

Thanks for keeping it real BVP.        

Perspectives: Land Inequality

The global population is estimated to be over 8 billion (and perhaps even as high as 10 billion). Regardless, there's a lot of people in the world and it already feels very, very crowded. Just look at Tokyo, Jakarta, Delhi, Shanghai, etc. Imagine how it'll be in 2050 when the global population is anticipated to be 25% higher! Where will people live? Will we run out of space?

The below chart puts some of our demographic challenges into perspective. Excluding Antartica, the sum of the land area across the U.N.'s 193 or so countries is 57.5 million square miles. Roughly half of the world's population live in 20 Asian countries with a combined land area of only 7 million square miles (highlighted in yellow). So, 50% of humanity lives across just 12% of the world's land.  

But that's not all. There is also significant land inequality within nations. Consider China and India, two of the world's most populous countries. About 94% of China's 1.4 billion people live inside 50% of the country's land area. In India, 50% of its 1.4 billion people live on 27% of the country's land in the north. Add in Bangladesh and its 175 million people sitting next to India and below China and you have about a fifth of humanity living across less than 4% of the planet's land--roughly 730 people /square mile! 

Of course, we are not suggesting (by extrapolation) that earth can support 40 billion people! The question of how many people our planet can permanently support is a complex one and hotly debated. Various studies on the subject, based on the idea of "carrying capacity," have produced enormous ranges from 2 billion (were way past that!) to one trillion! Though the majority of studies put the earth's carrying capacity at around 8 billion. But maybe if we could just move people around a little better (immigration!), we might safely be able to support a few billion more! Consider Australia and Canada, they occupy 11% of the world's land area but have just 0.8% of its population!  

Land, labor, and capital...inequality exists across each of these key economic inputs.

PSG are the Champions of Europe

PSG makes history by winning the Champions League final by a record 5-0 margin against Inter Milan. Congratulations Paris, congratulations Qatar!

And the Winner Is…

There were some great goals in the 2024/2025 Premier League season. Here were 10 contenders for the best:

And the winner is…Omar Marmoush’s 30-yard sizzler!

I Heart New York

New York City, "the City," is an amazing place with its iconic skyline, diverse population, and bustling streets filled with ‘organized chaos’. Some people never want set foot anywhere else ("...culture, food, the Park. Why leave?") Not surprisingly, New Yorkers can be a little self-absorbed, as famously depicted by Saul Steinberg's classic 1976 New Yorker cover. 

But 500 years ago? Who could've imagined a small Dutch outpost would become one of the world's most important cities? Well, the guys at SNL believe it was obvious from the start in this delightful clip:

Tale as Old as Time...True as it Can Be

Indeed!

Those are the opening lines to the theme song for Disney's classic animated Beauty and Beast (1991) movie, and later, the 2017 live action version. The movies are based on the 1749 French fairy tale by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Fascinatingly, De Villeneuve drew her inspiration from historical events. The real "beast" was a man named Petrus Gonsalvus who born in Tenerife, Spain in 1537. Gonsalvus had a rare genetic condition called hypertrichosis or "werewolf syndrome." It is characterized by excessive hair growth throughout the body, including the face. At a young age Gonsalvus was sent to Henry II of France in a cage as a curiosity. The King however appreciated boy's quiet and calm nature and sought to transform him into a gentleman. 

Gonsalvus became a part of the royal court and would go on to speak, read, and write, in three languages. While his achievements impressed many he was still viewed by most as somewhat less than human. After Henry's death Gonsalvus became the property of the King's widow and de facto ruler, Catherine de' Medici. Catherine sought her own experiment on Gonsalvus, involving "Belle." She wanted to see would happen if her "beast" married a beautiful woman; what kinds of children would they conceive? She found a wife for Gonsalvus, a young maiden also named Catherine, who was the daughter of a royal court servant.

Petrus Gonsalvus met Catherine for the first time on their wedding day. The pair would be married for 40 years and have seven children, four of whom suffered from Gonsalvus' condition, which has dominant traits. Sadly, the four hypertrichosis-stricken children were sent as gifts to other European courts. As a result, the story of the "beauty and the beast" was thus spread across the continent, eventually becoming part of de Villeneuve's tale. 

The Racket: Finance Bros Edition

A couple of funny memes re-making the rounds on LinkedIn this morning...

Private Equity:

Hedge Funds:

Broadcast Yourself…

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first video on YouTube, the world’s biggest social media platform. Originally intended to be a dating tool with videos (obviously?), YouTube quickly revolutionized how we watch, create, and share videos, turning ordinary users into content creators. The NYT has a great article chronicling its biggest moments from Lazy Sunday to Gangnam Style to I am Not a Cat., etc.

Google saw the potential of YouTube early on and snapped it up in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the company's biggest acquisition at the time. Today, YouTube has 2.53 billion active monthly users (behind only Facebook), and more than 60% of all U.S. internet user access the site daily. In 2024, the site generated $54+ billion in revenue and is on track to overtake Disney as the world's biggest media company by revenue in 2025. In fact, analysts estimate that YouTube could be worth as much as $550 billion as a stand-alone company (that would make it the 17th biggest company in world as of April 2025).

And it all started with this unassuming 19 second video from co-founder Jawad Karim: "I am at the Zoo."

DPI is the New IRR? Caveat Emptor...

For the past year, private equity managers have sought to prioritize returning cash to investors after higher interest rates stifled deal activity and exits. The drop in distributions has left many financial institutions that invest in private equity with less money to allocate to future funds. As a consequence, DPI, or distributions to paid-in capital, has replaced IRR, or the internal rate of return as the most important measure of private equity performance—at least for the time being. 

IRR has long been favored by the private equity industry to demonstrate its superiority over public markets. And justify the hefty management and performance fees (?). IRR is a cash-weighted measure of return that takes into account the time value of money, which ROI, or return on investment, does not; which is helpful when committed capital is called over different points of time. However, there are also some unrealistic assumptions underpinning the mechanics of IRR calculations that can make returns appear more attractive than they really are. That effect is compounded by how private equity funds mark their assets. 

The value of an asset is whatever someone is willing to pay for it. But in the absence of an active market for said asset, its value is whatever the fund manager says it is. Now, to be fair, fund managers do consult third-party valuation experts and their valuation processes are usually audited by well-credentialed firms at least annually. Still, as owners and experts on said asset, the fund managers' views carry a lot of weight. And it's not really in their economic interest to aggressively mark things down. So, even when public markets gyrate wildly, private equity valuations tend to remain relatively stable, as fund managers hold out hope for better times. In fact, this is actually an attractive feature of private markets for many investors, to chagrin of others. 

But what if you have to sell? Recently, amidst funding cuts by the Trump administration, the liquidity needs of major university endowments have increased. For example, Yale is reportedly exploring the sale of up to a third of its private equity portfolio. And Harvard tapped the bond market raise $750 million to meet short-term needs. Heck, if multi-billion dollar endowments (like Harvard and Yale with $50.7B and $40.7B of assets, respectively) start selling their massive private equity portfolios to generate liquidity, fund managers are not going to be able avoid price discovery for very long. And investors, long shielded by IRRs, may find actual realized returns, or DPI, are a lot skinnier than they imagined.

King James: Path to 40

Lebron James is the oldest player in the NBA at 40. He's also the first and, so far, the only player in NBA history to cross 40,000 regular season points. He is in his 22nd season in the NBA and going strong. Beyond the championships (4) and league MVPs titles (4), one of the most remarkable aspects of his game is his consistency. James scored his first 10,000 points in the exact same number of games as it took him to go from 30,000 to 40,000 (h/t Ben Golliver):

- 10K in 368 games 

- 10K to 20K in 358 games

- 20K to 30K in 381 games

- 30K to 40K in 368 games

Age is but a number...

Waiting to Exhale

Losing weight is a big issue. The CDC estimates that ~42% of adult Americans, roughly 100 million individuals, are obese (defined as having a BMI Index >30). Obesity is responsible for many diseases and accounts for nearly $173 billion in medical expenditures (in 2019 dollars). 

There is no shortage of weight loss services and products. In fact, the weight management market was valued at $143 billion in 2022. Ozempic anyone? But ever wonder how we actually lose weight? Where does the fat go? Stumped? Well, you're not alone...there seems to widespread mystery and confusion about the metabolic process of weight loss even among health professionals, including doctors and dieticians.  

Writing in the SciTechDaily, Ruben Meerman and Andrew Brown of the University of New South Wales say the correct answer is that "fat is converted to carbon dioxide and water. You exhale the carbon dioxide and the water mixes into your circulation until it’s lost (as vapor,) urine or sweat." The key relationship, which we all intuitively recognize, is that:

                                               ENERGY IN = ENERGY OUT

According to government figures, Australians consume 3.5kg of food and beverages every day. Of that, 415g is solid macronutrients and the remaining 3kg is water. Messrs. Meerman and Brown note that what's not usually reported is that a typical person also consumes over 600g of oxygen every day, which is crucial to maintaining the metabolic balance, as shown in the diagram below. Including oxygen, 4.1kg of stuff goes in, so at least 4.1kg of stuff must come out, otherwise we gain weight.     

In steady state, the 415g and 640g of oxygen is metabolized into 740g of carbon dioxide, 35g urea, and 280g (one cup) of "new" water. (Every O₂ molecule we inhale gets split into two separate oxygen atoms which are welded together with hydrogen atoms obtained from food making two brand new water molecules) (h/t rubenmeerman.com). The 3kg of water we drink plays a crucial role in all of this by acting as a solvent, a reactant, and a transporter of nutrients, but remains unaltered in the metabolic process.

What this means is that of the 4.1kg of food, water, and oxygen a person typically consumes each day about half of it exhaled out as carbon dioxide and water vapor. The remainder is excreted out as urine, sweat, and feces. The first part is crucial for weight loss. If we are not producing enough carbon dioxide, we're likely adding pounds.

So, if fat turns into carbon dioxide, can simply breathing more cause weight loss? Umm, no. Meerman and Brown note that "huffing and puffing more than you need will cause hyperventilation and will only make you dizzy, or possibly faint." Unfortunately, the only way you can increase the amount of carbon dioxide your body is produces is by...moving your muscles. Yes, exercising, doing chores, walking to the store half a mile away rather than driving or, worse, Instacart-ing. At least you'll appreciate with every breath that you take, you're exhaling away fat.  

The Harvard Humble Brag

Last week Harvard rejected demands from the Trump Administration that threatens $9 billion in federal funding and its non-tax status. University president Alan Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community: "No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” Harvard's defiant stance is very different from that of major law firms and other universities, notably Columbia, who quickly agreed to the government's demands.

That's made Harvard, or Hahvadh, popular again; with individual donations skyrocketing over the past week. Harvard is elite, it's also wildly rich...so naturally, both the Right and the Left have issues with it. Which has forced many Harvardians over the years to hide where they went to school from their less smarter, less richer, less capable non-Harvard peers. Because, apparently, things become awkward when you drop the "H-bomb." 

But now that Harvard finds itself at the forefront of the nation's political/culture wars, people all across the political spectrum have cover to speak about their personal connection to the esteemed university. Not to remind you how smart and capable they are. No, of course not. But to "helpfully" set the context for whatever for/against argument they want to make. But things can still be a little awkward. Take it away Ronnie... 

The (Not So) Magnificent 7

The Magnificent 7 companies: Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla have been a dominant force in U.S. equity markets over the past few years, helping propel the performance of the S&P 500. Last year, these seven companies accounted for 48% of the benchmark's 23% price return. 

But their start to 2025 has been less inspiring, with same companies as a group returning -6% YTD (Jan, Feb). The S&P 500 as a whole is still up a modest 1.2% YTD. However, back in 2022, when the Mag 7 fell 40%, it pulled the S&P 500 down 19%. Without the Mag 7, the S&P 500 would have returned -8%. Maybe the pendulum swings back the same way in 2025. Given that these companies are collectively now a bigger weight of the S&P 500 at 30.6% than in 2022 (24.1%), the impact of a Mag 7 decline would be even more. 

MLB: Best Game Ever

Looking back at Ohtani's remarkable (ridiculous?) game from Oct 2024: 6 for 6; 3 HRs, 2SB, and 10 RBIs...

Chappelle Show, Chappelle Show...

Dave Chappelle was back...hosting the first SNL episode of 2025 (his fourth time overall). And he did not disappoint, riffing on the L.A. fires, Freak-Offs, immigrants, etc. in a trademark 17-minute monologue filled with hilarious but sharp commentary (most opening SNL stand-ups clock in around 7-8 minutes). Chappelle ended with words of empathy and compassion for displaced people..."whether in the Palisades or Palestine." Enjoy...