Digital Museum of Wenbin - Latest items and digests

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If I can be optimistic at 99, almost dead, surely the rest of you can handle a little inflation.

Build Canada's Wealth Fund

Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers

PRAGMA: Revolut Foundation Model

I Bought Friendster for $30k

Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than lost in the corrections themselves.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

Historically I deal in five or six asset buckets. It tends to keep me out of trouble in terms of playing in an area where I shouldn't be playing at a particular time. One of the most important things to do is not to play when you don't see a fat pitch.

I won't play in a game where the other people are wise and I'm stupid. I look for a place where I'm wise and they're stupid. And, believe me, it works better.

I don't care if a company is large cap, middle, small or micro cap. It makes no difference. See's Candy at $25M was micro when we bought. The only questions that matter: 1. Do I understand the business 2. Do I like the people running it 3. Is the price attractive

If all you ever did was buy high-quality stocks on the 200-week moving average, you would beat the S&P 500 by a large margin over time.

I am building a cloud

Microeconomics is what we do and macroeconomics is what we put up with

Daring Fireball: Another Day Has Come

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you're going to be miserable your whole life.

Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

When I ran Magellan, I might’ve been right 6 times out of 10. But if I’m right and make a double or triple, occasionally, it offsets the times you lose 30 or 40%. In fact you could [only] be right a third of the time as long as you have a lot of good results.

I am not a victim, I’m a survivor. I don’t like any feeling of being victimised, so I just put my head down and adjust without ever feeling betrayed.

I’m a better investor because I’m a business person, and I’m a better business person because I’m an investor.

If you’ve got a 150 IQ and you’re in my business, go sell 20 or 30 points to somebody else because you really don’t need it. You need emotional stability. You need to be able to detach yourself from fear or greed when that prevails in the market.

You’ll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.

Most of the errors in our business are errors of emotion.

The Walt Disney Family Museum

Stocks are a safe bet. But only if you stay invested long enough to ride out the corrections.

Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting the flowers and watering the weeds.

The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify.

I like to deal with people where I feel a one-page contract will do the job. If I have to have 50 pages in there to protect me against the guy I'm dealing with, I'll always wonder whether I needed 51.

It takes 3 qualities to do well…[reasonable] intelligence, energy, & integrity… You may not be able to throw a football 60 yards, run the 100 in 9.8, [or] sink 3-pointers, but you can choose where you stand on the integrity scale. That is a choice you make.

You don't need perfect. If you're 96% sure, that's all you're entitled to in many cases. I see these people doing this due diligence and the weaker they are as thinkers, the more due diligence they do. It's just a way of allaying inner insecurity.

Fairmont San Francisco

Alcatraz Island

Filoli | Historic House & Garden

Charles M. Schulz Museum

Musée Mécanique

House of Prime Rib

Brilliance is the ability to simplify a mass amount of information into a simple yes/no decision.

I’ve been investing over…probably 25,000 days. If you took the headlines from the [news] of those 25,000 days…I’ll bet a majority…certainly wouldn’t be good news or optimistic… America works, but the headlines are frequently going to be kind of alarmist.

All intelligent people should think primarily in terms of opportunity cost. When deciding whether to do something compare it with the best opportunity you have.

Netflix culture slides

The profitability of American business determines the profitability of what the owners of American business [earn] — and you can forget all about the little ticker symbols and everything else.

If you’ve got 150 IQ and you’re in my business, go sell 20 or 30 points to somebody else because you really don’t need it. You need emotional stability.

The highest form of wealth

Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park.

Good life quotes

People calculate too much and think too little.

Bad news is an investor's best friend. It lets you buy at a marked-down price.

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)

The best armour of old age is a well spent life preceding it.

Wenbin writings

What happens when VC-backed startups become lifestyle?

Historical Chinese Siege Battles

Curation sites or newsletters

If you want a formula, you should go back to graduate school. They will give you lots of formulas that won't work. When Costco was selling at about 12 to 13x earnings, I thought that was a ridiculously low value…but I can't reduce that to a formula for you.

It’s so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don’t, you’ll need a lot of luck. And you don’t want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you’re very likely to win without having any unusual luck

No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use a checklist.

I regard Berkshire Hathaway sort of like a painter regards a painting. The difference being that the canvas is unlimited. There’s no finish line…[Investing’s] a game that you can continue to play.

It’s more important…what’s on your inner scorecard than your outer scorecard. Some people get in a position where they’re thinking all of the time of what the world’s going to think of this or that instead of what they themselves think. If you’re comfortable with your inner scorecard, I think you’re going to have a pretty happy life. I think the people that strive too much for the outer scorecard sometimes finds that it’s a little hollow when they get all through.

An intense interest in a subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel in it.

Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

Selling your winners and holding your losers is like cutting flowers and watering weeds.

Chinese historic sieges that I wish to have Netflix/HBO shows

Baremetrics sold for $4m and investors wrote off $800k

Buffer’s $3.3M Buyout of Series A Investors

Wistia’s $17.3M Debt Financing and Investor Buyback

KPCB’s 2012 Investment of $7M in Gumroad and the 2017 $1 Buyout

If you aren't happy having $100,000, you're not going to be happy if you have $100 million.

DRUDGE REPORT

Five Links for March 2025 - Summation by Auren Hoffman

"5-Bullet Friday" email newsletter by Tim Ferriss

kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products

theSkimm - Your go-to for the info and tools you need to live your smartest life. | theSkimm

Techmeme

Live Media Feed | REDEF

The Best Writing On The Internet

Daring Fireball

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.

The Met Collection - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.

The second half of your life should be better than your first half. You should be wiser when you get older.

Good software knows when to stop

The truth is, you’ve got to expect good times and bad times in business…[Don’t] try to time the purchase…try to make the right purchase at the right price and make sure you’ve got a good business.

The Buffett Archive

Patience and aggressive opportunism is what you need. It's an odd combination, but it's what works best.

The whole Walt Disney Company was selling for $80 million in 1966, debt-free. $4 million bought us 5% of the company. They spent $17 million on the Pirates [of the Caribbean] ride. Here was a company selling at less than 5x rides - and they had a lot of rides!

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

National Gallery of Art (USA)

Explore the collection | Paintings | National Gallery, London

Our system unleashes people's potential. And we've got 312 million people that want to do better tomorrow than today. Over time, that works. This country goes forward, and it'll continue to go forward. The luckiest person in history on a probability basis is the baby being born in the United States today.

We have a wonderful system that eventually is self-cleansing and always moves forward. Five years from now, 10 years from now, the world everywhere will be doing better.

We always live in an uncertain world. What is certain is that the United States will go forward over time.

In fact, the true investor welcomes volatility ... because a wildly fluctuating market means that irrationally low prices will periodically be better attached to solid businesses. It is impossible to see how the availability of such prices can be thought of as increasing the hazards for an investor who is totally free to either ignore the market or exploit its folly.

The best way to get what you want in life is to deserve what you want. If you apply that to business, that means you really take care of the customers.

Inspiration links

You have to have the attitude that you’re buying into a business. You’re not buying something that [just] wiggles around on a chart. And if you buy intelligently into a business, you’re going to make money.

I have a friend whose grandmother used to say that she couldn't understand why people got into envy-jealousy because it was the only one of the sins that you could never possibly have any fun at.

A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.

By owning great companies, you can just forget about all the noise and the irrational market fluctuations—and slowly get rich.

When we make a decision, there ought to be such a margin of safety [and] it ought to be so attractive that you don't have to carry it out to three decimal places.

It's not whether you're right or wrong, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong.

Charlie and I have always thought that our cost of capital is represented by what we can do with our second-best idea.

The really great business is one that doesn’t require good management. That’s a terrific business. The poor business is one that can only succeed or survive with great management.

The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

It’s not what you buy, it’s what you pay for it. And what you pay for it is determined by the psychology of the market.

The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything—you can wait for your pitch.

The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd.

You make most of your money in a bear market; you just don't realize it at the time.

The goal of an investment is not to buy something at a low price, but to buy a business with a high return on capital at a reasonable price. Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.

Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology. The economics tell you what a business is worth; the psychology tells you why it’s currently mispriced.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The low-risk, high-uncertainty opportunity gives us our most sought-after odds: Heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much.

The investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.

The biggest mistake people make in the stock market is to look at the price as the reality. The price is just a consensus of what people who don’t know what they’re doing think at that moment.

The best way to evaluate a company is to look at its return on incremental invested capital. If a business can reinvest its own cash at high rates of return, it is a compounding machine. If it can’t, it’s just a cash cow in a terminal decline.

If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. If you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you’ve got a bad business.

The game is won by players who focus on the playing field not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.

The best business is a royalty on the growth of others, requiring little capital of its own.

The hardest thing for an investor is to do nothing when there is nothing to do. Most of the 'activity' in the market is just people trying to look busy.

The most important thing to do is to find a business that even a fool can run, because sooner or later, one will.

The most important thing to do is to find a business with a wide, sustainable moat, and then don't look at it for ten years.

The best way to achieve an above-average return is to reduce the number of decisions you make. If you find a truly great business, doing nothing is the hardest and most productive work you will ever do.

We are looking for companies that have a terminal value that is not only high but predictable. If you cannot see the end of the movie, do not buy the ticket.

Growth is not a separate category of investing; it's a component of value.

We don’t get paid for activity, just for being right.

Before looking at new investments, we consider adding to old ones. If a business is attractive enough to buy once, it may well pay to repeat the process.

Volatility is the price of admission—the prize inside is superior long-term returns.

All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade.

If you think a business is going to be around in 10-20 years, and if they’re going to be able to price advantageously—that’s going to be a good business.

If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.

The point of getting rich is so you don't have to work with people you don't like or get along with people you don't want to

If you own a Costco, WalMart, or Nvidia, that offsets your mistakes. You’re terrific in this business if you’re right six and a half times out of ten. That’s a great score.

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.

The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.

Stocks sell at silly prices from time to time…it doesn’t take a high I.Q. to figure out that they’re cheap, but it does take a temperament that’s willing to step up and actually act.

Crooks, crazies, egomaniacs, people full of resentment, people full of self-pity, people who feel like victims … avoid them like the plague.

The secret to life is easy because it’s so simple: You don’t have a lot of envy or resentment. You don’t overspend your income. You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people, and you do what you’re supposed to do.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Value investor quotes

Tech & Non-Tech Stacks to Run Listen Notes (2025)

Notebook LM: A threat to the Podcasting World

How to build a ChatGPT plugin: A case study using PodcastAPI.com and serverless Cloudflare Pages for AI-powered podcast discovery

A practical way to upgrade Postgres major versions with near-zero downtime

How to evaluate a 3rd party RESTful API?

Instead of Monthly Billing, a Daily Alternative for SaaS

How I accidentally built a Podcast API business

Future of knowledge work

How to evaluate a 3rd party RESTful API?

How I accidentally built a Podcast API business

Good enough engineering to start an Internet company

The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company

My Y Combinator interview experience (W18)

We Don’t Run Cron Jobs at Nextdoor

Nextdoor Taskworker: Simple, Efficient & Scalable

Automated tracing and visualization of software security structure and properties

Mars: Accelerating mapreduce with graphics processors

Database compression on graphics processors