The Google Capital Company – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
"Berkshire Hathaway is See’s Candies, and Google is BNSF."
Digital Museum of Wenbin - Latest items and digests
The developer of ListenNotes.com, microfeed.org, PodcastAPI.com, Listen411.com and CurateKit.com. I like curating things. The world is a museum without walls.
Latest posts
native americans sold manhattan to dutch for $24 in 1620s. At 8% growth rate, that $24 would become $562 trillion today, roughly 18x USA GDP, able to buy today’s whole new york real estate for hundreds of times
One of my favorite compound-interest thought experiments: The famous story says Manhattan was “sold” to the Dutch for about $24. Imagine that $24 had instead been invested in 1626 and earned an average 8% annual return, compounded for 400 years. By 2026, it would have grown to roughly $562 TRILLION. For perspective: • That’s about 18× an entire year of U.S. GDP • Roughly 340× the value of ALL NYC…
Milton Friedman on 4 ways to spend money: 1) Your money on yourself (you’re careful about both cost and quality) 2) Your money on others (you care about cost, less about quality) 3) Someone else’s money on yourself (you care about quality, not cost) 4) Someone else’s money on others (you care about neither)
Milton Friedma
Sales advice
Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips. 1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball. 2. Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or…
Q: What happened 1973 and 1974 when your investment firm lost over half?
Charlie Munger: Oh, that’s very simple. That’s very easy. That’s a good lesson. That’s a good question. What happened is the value of my partnership where I was running, went down by 50% in one year. Now the market went down by 40% or something. It was a once in 30 year recession. I mean monopoly newspapers are selling at 3 or 4 times earnings. At the bottom tick, I was down from the peak, 50%.…
The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.
“Buy good companies. Don’t overpay. Do nothing.
Terry Smith
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
The trick in investing is to find businesses that are going to earn high returns on capital for an extended period of time. That's what happened with Berkshire. The long period of time gets to be very important b/c those doubles later on are very big numbers.
Warren Buffett
Product shape as moat
No matter how smart you are, you can't create the best toaster that is also the best kettle. We don’t use many Swiss Army knife products at all. The competitiveness between everything in AI is a symptom of unoriginality. Most companies are still focused on the terminal interface of AI: chat.
If you had invested $10,000 in Apple on June 6, 1983, by April 17, 2003, you’d be sitting on $8,400.
July 2026: Costco has 82.9m paid members worldwide (US & Canada ~45m); total card (including free family cards) holders 148.5m.
Executive members 41.2m (or 49.7%). Executive members also generate about 75% of Costco’s worldwide sales
Banks earn 13-14% on capital, but American Express (Berkshire's second largest equity investment) earns 30% on capital without additional risk.
Warren Buffett
Focus by boz
Early facebook culture
Rewriting Bun in Rust | Bun Blog
11 days, US $165,000 worth tokens
He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.
"Many thousands of Costco’s U.S. hourly workers have over $1 million in their 401(k) accounts"
Either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin
The Anti-Amazon - Benjamin Y. Fong
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI: From Foundations to Systems
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agentic AI is a comprehensive practitioner's reference for building autonomous AI systems. The book covers the full stack from first principles to production deployment, organized around a central thesis: building great agentic systems requires understanding every layer of the pipeline, not just one. The book opens with the LLM substrate -- transformer architecture, GPU…
As the Tide Turns Against Putin, Beware the Drowning Man
Like a struggling swimmer, he may take desperate measures to stay afloat.
Hints for computer system design (1983)
About “naming”
I did not conquer half the world by listening to men who had conquered nothing
Alexander the Great
The Mauritshuis: The most beautiful museum in The Hague
The Mauritshuis is home to the best of Dutch painting from the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Admire Masterpieces such as the Girl with a Pearl Earring, 11 Rembrandts and The Goldfinch at the Mauritshuis in The Hague!
How We Made Cloud Browsers 3x Cheaper and Faster
We cut browser sessions from $0.06 to $0.02 per hour while making browsers start and scale faster.
When Warren Buffett started his early partnership, he had ~$170k savings (roughly $1.5m to $2m in today’s money) , the initial investment capital was ~$105k (roughly $1m in today’s money) raised from family
He was 25 year old
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort | Tom Bedor's Blog
This is more about coworkers in a company. But i feel the same as media consumption: ai-slop podcasts/videos shouldn't deserve human attention.
Building self-improving tax agents with Codex | OpenAI
"One senior accountant who spent 180 hours on tax prep last year spent only 15 hours on it this year. She put that time in part toward calling every one of her clients and walking them through their returns, a level of high touch service that wasn’t possible a year ago."
Long Humans
"We pair our engineers and operators with practitioners inside our firms to find the problems and solve it with them"
Mozart was the greatest musical talent maybe that ever lived... so what was his life like? Well, he was bitterly unhappy and he died young... What the hell did Mozart do to screw it up?"
Charlie Munger
Save like a pessimist. Invest like an optimist.
I've always believed that nothing is worth an infinite price. So even an admirable place like Costco could get to a price where you would say that's too high." "I can't bring myself — with my habits — to pay these big prices, but I never even think about selling a share of Costco just because it's selling at a high price." "I think it's going to be a big, powerful company as far ahead as you can see." "I wish everything else in America was working as well as Costco does. Think what a blessing that would be for us all."
Charlie Munger
Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park.
Charlie Munger
Making $1 million a year looks great until this guy who sits next to you, who can't possibly be as smart as you, is making $1 million, too. Then the whole world turns into a very unfair place
Charlie Munger
A HashiCorp investor did a classy thing to make the founder whole
If you don’t know what to pursue right now, pursue yourself. Pursue becoming the healthiest, the happiest, most healed, most present, most confident version of yourself. Then the right path will reveal itself.
Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
George Addair
We consume 63% more oil in 2026 than in 1980, but our reserves are 157% more
Raw materials are useful because the real resources are human ingenuity, time, technological advance, etc. We always find solution to problems.
Global M2 ≈ $120 trillion. Average per person ≈ $15,000
Total US M2 in 1971 was ~$0.65t, and was $22.8t in June 2026, an increase of 35x, or 6.7% annually, or doubles every 10.7 years
Meanwhile, gold price increases ~130x. Physical cash is only about 10% of M2. Roughly 90% of M2 is bank deposits and money-market balances.
There is only one success in life and that is to be able to spend your life your own way
Jim Rumer - A bench in sausalito; “You reminded us to be participants in life not just spectators “
From 2000 to 2006, US housing prices surged by 54% after inflation, exceeding the total gains of the previous 50 years combined.
Japan stock market peaked in 1989 and bottomed in early 2019 - 20 years after the peak!
It reclaimed its 1989 peak in Feb 2024 - 35 years later. Now in June 2026, it gained 72% over 1989 peak. But Japan stock market annualized return is still ~8.7% from 1970 to 2024. Live long, buy and hold :)
160+ golf courses were built in Japan between 1989 and 1991. There were another 1,200 under construction or in the approval process that never got completed once the bubble burst
By 1990, the total Japanese property market was valued at ~4x the real estate value of the entire USA
Tokyo itself was on equal footing with the USA in terms of real estate values. The property market in Japan in 1989 was five times the size of Japan's economy
The bottom 2% in terms of income in the United States, the bottom 5%, and for sure the top 1% all live better than John D. Rockefeller was living when I was six years old. John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world and, today, you can get better medicine, better education, better entertainment, better transportation. You can do everything better than he could.
Warren Buffett
After internet bubble crashed, Nasdaq lost 78% and it took ~12.5 years to recover from low to previous peak
Mar 2000 peak: ~5,048 Oct 2002 low: ~1,114 Apr 2015 new high: ~5,056
US market annual returns between 1995 and 1999: 37%, 23%, 33%, 28%, and 21%
1980 to 1994 total returns : 650%
At peak on Dec 29, 1989, Japan stock market is the largest in the world, accounting for 40% to 45% of total market cap in the world
8 out of 10 most valuable companies in the world were from Japan. Recent estimates (2025–2026) put the U.S. at roughly 60–65% of total global stock market capitalization.