Dickie's Digest - Rolling Funds, Morgan Housel, Journaling, and Curiosity
We’ll keep the intro short this week - there’s nothing worse to me than excessive throat-clearing at the start of a newsletter. The Digest is packed this week with a bunch of things that are worth your time to check out. As always, if you find anything good during the week, send it my way!
In this week’s Digest:
Have an epic week!
Dickie
💰 Rolling Funds: The Democratization of Venture Capital
The hottest thing in VC-Twitter for the past few weeks has been Rolling Funds, a new type of early-stage venture capital fund started by AngelList. After learning more, I see why.
Rolling funds differ from traditional VC funds in two main ways. They are publically marketable and can raise money at any time. Traditional VC funds must fundraise privately and cannot raise more capital after launch.
The biggest beneficiary of rolling funds is any content creator with an audience. If you have a strong following and want to start investing, you can easily leverage that audience to seed your fund. Multiple creators like Anthony Pompliano, Shaan Puri, and Sahil Lavingia raised multi-million dollar funds OVERNIGHT, just by tweeting out they were launching one.
Rolling funds will further blur the lines between finance and media companies. They democratize access to raising a venture fund. What’s next? Democratizing access to investing in a venture fund.
If you want to learn more about them, check out the tweet thread I put together with everything I learned.
📊 Deep Dive Into the Mind of Morgan Housel
Morgan Housel is one of my favorite financial thinkers and writers. His newest book The Psychology of Money was an instant buy for me, and I’ve been enjoying it so far.
Whenever someone launches a book, they go on a podcast tour to market themselves and their new book. After hearing him so much, I went down the rabbit hole of his writing and other works, trying to better understand how he sees the world.
There were three pieces that really stuck out to me, each of which is worth checking out.
A primer for his new book. 20 chapters about different ways people think about, interact with, and invest their money.
23 Books That Changed His Life
I love lists like this from smart people. It just further adds to my list of books I want to read that I probably never will. There are some good ones here.
The Three Side of Risk [HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
If you read one thing from the Digest this week, read this essay. It’s a long read, but it was one of the more powerful essays I’ve ever read.
🖋 191 Journal Prompts for Better Results
If you’ve been a Digest reader for a while, you know I am a huge fan of journaling. For over 600 mornings in a row now I’ve typed a few hundred words into Notion before I start my day. My most popular essay by far is My 10 Go-To Reflection Questions (and Where I Found Them). So when I came across this massive list of journal prompts, I had to dive in.
The prompts are grouped into categories like gratitude, reflection, stoicism, mindfulness, making lists, writing letters, and asking the big questions. A few of my favorites from Andy’s list:
What am I putting off that needs to be done?
Could it be that everything is completely fine as it is?
Write a letter to yourself to read one year from now.
What am I most looking forward to over the next month?
🎧This Week in Podcasts
A light week in podcasts this week, but the one episode I did really enjoy was a 10/10 episode.
YCombinator CEO Michael Seibel on Invest Like the Best HIGHLY RECOMMEND]
I’m fascinated by YCombinator and the incredible resources they provide. Listening to the CEO talk about what they look for in an application, what most founders get wrong, and what he thinks the future of startups look like is well worth your time.
😎 Cool Things Corner
This section explores any new gadgets, apps, study playlists, or anything I found cool this week.
Long-time Digest readers know I am always on the lookout for a good study playlist. This week I discovered “chillstep” music and have been really enjoying it.
This two-hour mix on Soundcloud is my favorite one so far.
If you have any go-to study playlists, respond directly to this email with the link - I can’t get enough of them.
🧠 Idea Corner
This section explores one new idea I thought about in the past week.
Curiosity flywheels: This is my system for exploring new ideas.
I have conversations with people about things that interest me, curate resources to learn more, consume those resources, clarify the ideas in my head, and then create something with those ideas (like a tweet thread.)
What I create leads to more conversations, which leads to more resources, which leads to more creation .. and on and on. Every spin of the flywheel is easier than the one before it.
🥃 Sunday Chaser
San Franciso turning orange was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. I found this drone footage flying over the city fascinating.
Thanks for reading!
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Be sure to follow me on Twitter or respond directly to this email to get in touch. And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.
