Thursday 3rd April 2025

Meghan Markle’s As Ever Is Selling an Identity Crisis - Intelligencer (No paywall)

My quest to buy fancy jam revealed that Meghan isn’t just confused about what her whole deal is. She also has no idea who I am.

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Timing Is Everything: Real SP 500 Returns Across 5, 10, and 20-Year Windows

Understanding the Data: The dataset spans from 1926 to 2024, covering a comprehensive period of 99 years—nearly a century—of financial history. The data presented are total returns, meaning they reflect not just price appreciation but also reinvested dividends. This approach closely mirrors the investment experience of holding an index fund similar to the S&P 500 over this extensive timeframe. Importantly, these returns are adjusted for inflation, reflecting real purchasing power.

Over this 99-year period, the S&P 500 generated a cumulative real return of 103,060%, meaning an investment grew to more than a thousand times its original value when adjusted for inflation. This remarkable growth corresponds to an annualized real return of approximately 7.3%, clearly illustrating the immense power of compounding. Additionally, the average annual real return during this period was 9.1%, while the median annual return stood higher at 11.7%, reflecting the presence of stronger returns in typical years.

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What DeepSeek Can Teach Us About Resourcefulness

Resources are a key hurdle faced by many organizations—not only small, bootstrapped firms, but also large ones, where competition for funds and talent can be just as tough. Resourcefulness, in contrast, is not about the resources a company has, it’s about the ability to creatively leverage the world’s constellation of knowledge, expertise, resources, and capabilities, even without owning them. Resourcefulness allows you to achieve much more than you could accomplish using only your own resources and capabilities—and to do so at lower cost, with less capital, and often with greater expertise and speed than you could on your own. By prioritizing creativity, DeepSeek was developed at a fraction of the cost and time of what investors have been told is necessary to build a powerful AI model.

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A Guide to Building a Unified Culture After a Merger or Acquisition

Mergers and acquisitions, though powerful tools for growth, often fall short of expectations. One reason is a lack of focus on the integration experience of acquired employees. While companies tend to invest heavily in pre-deal due diligence, they frequently overlook the day-to-day realities faced by incoming employees—who often feel undervalued, unsupported, and overwhelmed—ultimately threatening deal success, long-term productivity, and retention. These challenges are preventable through planning that includes culture assessments, employee journey mapping, empowering mid-level leaders, and remaining flexible during integration, all of which help foster buy-in and preserve deal value.

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If AI Were Just a Big Lie, It Would Look a lot Like ... This

Let me be clear up front, because I need to set the foundation for my argument: AI is not a big lie. It's definitely not a pseudo-technology that's designed to fool people with unrealistic promises for the sole purpose of making a handful of people filthy rich in the shortest possible time. 

According to this TechCrunch article, like a lot of overnight-success AI startups, 11x went from zero to $10 million in ARR in just two years, prompting a bang-bang Series A and Series B investment in 2024 to the tune of $74 million.


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Elon Musk Just Got Some Very Bad News About Tesla, and It's the Start of a New Era

It's pretty easy to draw a straight line from the $250 million Musk reportedly spent to get President Trump elected last year and his work with DOGE, to the growing peaceful protests that have sprung up at Tesla dealerships both in the U.S. and abroad.

Against this, Trump reportedly told cabinet members Wednesday that Musk would be leaving his government work "in the coming months," news that investors seemed to like, as Tesla's stock rebounded after falling sharply on the news about the lower number of Teslas sold.


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With iOS 18.4, Apple Quietly Introduced 1 of Its Best Features Yet

This week, Apple rolled out iOS 18.4, the latest update to the software on your iPhone. There are new emojis, improvements to RCS messaging, and several new Apple Intelligence features, but there's one that isn't getting nearly as much attention as I would expect, especially considering how great it is for users.

The requirements are pretty simple. You need a Mac using macOS Sequoia 15.4 or later that starts up to the Mac Setup Assistant and a nearby iPhone or iPad using iOS or iPadOS 18.4 or later that has already been set up. You'll also need to be sure WiFi and Bluetooth are turned on for both devices.


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Elon Musk Is Literally Building a Legion of Robots. He Says They'll Change Everything

Elon Musk said Tesla will build at least 5,000 Optimus robots this year, and maybe as many as 10,000. The company will build another 50,000 Optimus robots in 2026, and will work its way up from there. It may eventually build 10 million robots a year or more, he added. And he believes there will be enough demand to sell every one of them.

"My prediction is … that Optimus will be the biggest product of all time by far," he said at a recent hastily planned 90-minute all-hands meeting at Tesla. "Nothing will even be close. I think it'll be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made." He spent the meeting, which was also livestreamed to the public, talking about Tesla's coming projects and what he said was a bright future for self-driving cars and Optimus robots. He was careful to say nothing about his involvement in politics, and none of his employees did either.


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How to Fund Your Company's Growth

You can reinvest profits into the business. It's the least risky path financially because you're not beholden to anyone else. But it's also the slowest. Bootstrapping preserves ownership, yes, but it can leave you behind the competition in fast-moving markets.

Banks love collateral. If you're buying equipment or expanding facilities, most banks will lend against those assets. But they typically won't fund "blue-sky" growth—hiring great people, launching new products, or expanding your customer base. Why? There's nothing physical to repossess.


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Why RTO Mandates Are Boosting Demand for Coworking Spaces

Return-to-office mandates are proving to be a boon to coworking spaces. Rather than signing expensive long-term leases for permanent offices, companies with distributed workforces are opting for short-term agreements for flexible workspaces.

When Covid forced millions of people to work from home, many employees took advantage of the flexibility and left big cities for smaller, more affordable places. Employers seized the opportunity too, and made new hires across the country from previously untapped talent pools.


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