Competitive Advantage vs Moats
Coming soon…
Stevan Popovic
Writing, side-projects, newsletter and more.
Latest posts
Monetizing Social Status
Humans have evolved to seek social status. In a time of Instagram and followers its as front and centre as ever. But you can’t eat social…
Ideas From Julie Zhuo
Summary As a society, we fascinate over ideas. We all want to be ideas people. But what really matters is the follow-through. It’s the doing…
Stock Ideas
Last month I launched a new side-project called Stock Ideas. Stock Ideas is a weekly newsletter curating the best original research and…
Ideas From Reid Hoffman
Summary Look for people who are explicit learners. This means people who care an unusual amount about improving their performance and their…
Sharing Notes
Over the last few days, I have published notes with ideas from some of my favourite thinkers. This includes people like Paul Graham, Morgan…
Ideas From Fred Wilson
Summary A trait of the best startups: they start in niche markets but have the option to grow into mainstream markets. The public markets…
Ideas From Rob Walling
Summary Road blocks are insurmountable problems that stop you moving forward. Speedbumps are just changes of plans that slow you down. It’s…
Ideas From Cathie Wood
Summary A lot of growth in recent years (2000-2010) has been financially manufacturers. Also, these crashes have led to risk aversion in…
Ideas From Sam Altman
Summary He places a massive emphasis on what you work on (the area/problem) and who you work with. Make sure you get these primary questions…
Ideas From Morgan Housel
Summary He puts an emphasis on personal finance and being okay with enough. You can always earn more and risk more, at some point you have…
Ideas From Paul Graham
Summary Write as you speak. Write with simple words. Write things that surprise people. School is full of bad tests; tests you can hack…
Ideas From David Perell
Summary He uses Twitter to share ideas and get quick feedback (in a similar way to Erik Torenberg). His personal business plan is all…
Ideas From Steve Jobs
Summary Humans are tool-builders. It’s what sets us apart from the other animals. A computer is the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up…
Ideas From Beth Kindig
Summary Cloud companies should be seen as “safe” investments. They aren’t subject trade wars and they help companies cut costs in times of…
Ideas From Howard Marks
Summary He is always thinking in probabilities, not in black and white. By thinking in probabilities he doesn’t go all in on one option but…
Ideas From Daniel Gross
Summary Uses extensive tracking to measure personal performance (sleep, food, time, etc). This is part of his belief that being…
Ideas From Sarah Tavel
On Marketplaces When you create a way to jump the liquidity in a marketplace, you can overtake the incumbent. AirBnb did this against…
Ideas From Naval Ravikant
Summary The internet is letting people go back to working for themselves (smaller teams, on their own schedule, defined roles, etc). Niches…
Ideas From Cedric (Eli James) Chin
Summary For a strong career, you should seek to build career moats. These are hard to replicate skills that keep you in demand. Typically…
Google Finance - How to Track Portfolio Performance
Tracking your investment portofilio is key to answering the question ‘am I beating the market?’ Google provides the Google Finance function…
Remote Work - What Are The Second-Order Effects?
Due to coronavirus, a remote work experiment has been forced on all. For some companies, this will be a test they may have never desired…
Career Change Mindset
People frequently ask me “what was the hardest part about changing career?” An underrated difficulty is the challenge of managing your…
One Up On Wall Street
This book explains how the individual investor can make returns that beat the pros. Peter starts by explaining why individual investors have…
Are We All Too Scared?
Fear is one of our most primal emotions. We experience fear when we perceive danger. From an evolutionary perspective, fear is the signal…
Designing Your Life
This book applies design thinking to your career. Using design techniques such as brainstorming and prototypes, the authors describe…
28
You can view my previous yearly summaries here: 24, 25, 26, 27. Summary This has been a strange year, providing me with more questions than…
The Mom Test
An excellent book on the topic of asking better questions when validating a business. It outlines a straightforward way of asking better…
How To Always Be In Demand
The predominant force driving your salary is the law of demand and supply. Borrowed from economics, the law of demand and supply governs…
Wealth Ladder Lens
Nathan Barry, a successful entrepreneur and designer, recently shared The Ladders of Wealth Creation, describing a framework to generate…
What Can I Do When I Grow Up?
This is a book primarily aimed at children, but I found it useful nonetheless. It provides some structure to think about the question of…
Pain + Reflection = Progress
For the great philosophers of Ancient Greece, reflection was a way of life. The exercise of pausing to reflect - to think - was an important…
Explicit Learning
Learning is a key feature of humanity. It allows us to improve over time and learn from past mistakes. Learning (along with physical growth…
Arcs of Seniority - How to Become a Senior Developer
What makes a developer senior? After completing my code Bootcamp and starting my first job as a web developer, I immediately became…
A Guide to Personal Finance & Investing
Introduction What is this? Why learn about personal finance? Why read this document specifically? Why did I write this? Why listen to me…
Walks vs Sprints
To build a successful web product, you first need to know what you are building. Whilst that statement is obvious, knowing what to build is…
27
You can view my other yearly summaries here: 24, 25, 26, 28. Summary This year represents one of change. I started a new career as a…
Thoughts On Hard Work
The value of hard work is one I’ve held for a long time. So when someone as smart as Naval Ravikant challenges the notion of hard work, I…
General Assembly WDI - Thoughts For Prospective Students
Since graduating from General Assembly, I’ve spoken to several friends and acquaintances about my experience. They generally message me to…
So Good They Can't Ignore You
Cal Newport delivers a book with an alternative and compelling view on careers, don’t follow your passion. With a number of examples and…
Post-Amazon Retail
How will retailers survive in a post-Amazon world? This is the question Walmart, John Lewis, etc. have been asking. Yet the best answer (so…
Always Be Coding
Having recently taken the plunge and learned to code, I’m trying to work on a new habit: code every day. In three months at General Assembly…
Factfulness
This book provides you with a number of new mental models in which to view the contemporary world. Touching on areas of history, science and…
GA WDI: Graduate
My 12-week course with General Assembly has come to an end. It’s been an amazing and intense learning experience. A big thank you to Mike…
GA WDI: Week Seven & Eight
The second half of GA WDI has involved building on the fundamentals from the first half and stretching our skills with bigger, more…
GA WDI: Week Five & Six
The GA train continued at a frantic pace. As we’ve dived into topics like routing, APIs and AJAX the learning curve has continued to be both…
GA WDI: Week Three & Four
Week three was another fast-paced week of learning, with content including test, JQuery, animation, audio and much more. In week four we had…
GA WDI: Week Two
Last week I described GA’s web immersive course as fast-moving and relentless. Well, it hasn’t slowed down. Javascript This week the course…
GA WDI: Week One
I recently started a new chapter in my career - training to become a software developer. I enrolled in General Assembly London Web…
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
This is a simple and easy-to-read introduction to personal finance. It introduces you to some key concepts but is mostly a simplistic…