Another member emailed me vouching for the Bionomics book you shared here, @ajzitz, so I wanted to register my interest — I just bought the book before writing this comment. I’ll paste the bit from the book that he pitched me with, in case other members might be interested in reading:
To give you an idea, there is an entire chapter titled “Economy as Ecosystem,” where he writes “[b]y contrast, ‘niche players’ survive by avoiding head-to-head price competition…. Attempting to escape scarcity, species as well as industries fragment into ever more-specialized offshoots. By adapting to the peculiarities of their niches, ecologic and economic life forms become more efficient at making offspring and products. Lacking any grand design other than the urge to escape threats to their continued existence, genes and technology spontaneously weave living webs of ever more-intricate filigree. The future details of these stunningly complex systems are unknowable, but their basic architecture and historical direction are quite clear and similar.”
I’m looking forward to reading this now!
There’s another disturbing thing from this ‘high interest rates ecosystem’ style of thinking that I implied but didn’t touch on in the essay: all investors who started their funds or their careers post-2008 are immediately suspect. Not to say that they’re bad — just that we don’t know, and can’t know for awhile. This is quite discomforting to me, because there are plenty of investors I read and like and respect who seem to have a track record only in the ZIRP years. To make this concrete, even vaunted VC firms like a16z should be considered unproven by this lens, which is pretty scary. And whilst some businesses are going to be excellent regardless of the interest rate regime, they probably won’t be as excellent, which is something I now always have at the back of my head.
Related, unstructured thoughts:
- is FIRE a ZIRP thing?
- how much is the recent phenomenon of VCs quitting VC and going into podcasting a sign of the end of ZIRP?
- is Automattic’s conflict with WPEngine a symptom of the end of ZIRP? (Wordpress is a badly governed open source project attached to a for-profit entity, Automattic, which raised capital during ZIRP).
- Private equity shenanigans during ZIRP.
The list goes on. ZIRP is this thing that haunts me, and I think it should haunt anyone who’s reading about investing performance, or taking advice about ‘founder mode’, or reading about businesses grown in the past 15 years.