Rishi Taparia - Issue #101
This week we look at Stripe’s hot streak, WeWork’s recent challenges, falling in love with reading, flooding in Southeast Asia, Michelle Obama’s memoir and more. Enjoy!
Payments giant Stripe is raising another $250M at a $35B pre-money valuation
Stripe is on a tear. As I guessed they’d have announcements rolling out in sequence. Two weeks they announced Stripe Capital, going after Square, Kabbage, Bluevine and a slew of other SMB lenders. Last week they made another major announcement, offering a corporate card.
The card will aim to solve what the company says is a challenge for smaller companies that have trouble securing cards to buy supplies and to issue to employees. The card also means Stripe is getting into the same space as Brex Inc., the corporate card startup which recently garnered a $2.6 billion valuation.
With Stripe’s access to data this is a move that makes complete sense (side note: apparently the company’s banking partner on both Capital and Corporate Card is the same, but this partner has yet to be announced. I’m very curious to see who it ends up being.) This week the company rounded out the third pillar of their continued domination announcements with a $250 million raise at a $35 billion valuation.
All you can do is clap
WeWTF, Part Deux
WeWork and the on again, off again IPO has been the talk of the Valley - the number of think pieces on everything from whether the CEO is a cult leader to the business model of wave pools will likely fill a room in the library of congress. Of all of them, this piece by Scott Galloway is the one to read. Scott is very much no BS when it comes to basically everything, and isn’t afraid to call it like he sees it. The opening line
So, the mother of all party crashers took a dump in the We IPO punch bowl. The crasher? Math. The autopsy will show the shelving of this IPO was death by S-1.
Go ahead and give it a read, you won’t be disappointed.
Why Do Some People Love Reading?
I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with reading throughout my life. As a child I was a voracious reader, reading whatever I could get my little hands on from The Hardy Boys to Archie comics, Roald Dahl to my sister’s Baby-sitters Club. I’d even read the backs of hair gel and makeup boxes while on the toilet! High school had recreational reading take a backseat to after school clubs and varsity sports, and college and the first few years working were a blur of new environments, places and people. I’ve made it a point to read for fun more over the last few years, making attempts to be a more active reader. Since welcoming my son in to the world a year ago, I’ve been thinking about how to instill in him a love of reading. According to this piece, “three variables have a lot of influence over whether someone becomes a lifelong reader.”
First, a child needs to be a “fluent decoder,”…able to smoothly “go from print on the page to words in the mind.” This is something that schools teach, but parents can help with it by reading to and with their kids—especially when that reading involves wordplay, which particularly helps kids with the challenge of identifying the “individual speech sounds” that make up a word.
Second…fluent decoders benefit from having wide-ranging background knowledge about the world. “The main predictor of whether a child or an adult understands a text is how much they already know about the topic,”…
Once those two things are in place, the final component is “motivation—you have to have a positive attitude toward reading and a positive self-image as a reader,” Willingham said.
Time will tell, but I’m using any excuse I can to convince my wife to help me figure out how we can get a room like this:
Talk about a den!
Reading and rabbit holes
Speaking of reading, choosing what to read is always a challenge for me. Patrick Collison suggests starting from the middle of a book and ask “Would I like to have ended up here?“ Mortimer Adler says to know what you’re reading for. In this article Tyler Cowen suggests a "“rabbit holes” strategy. Come up with a bunch of questions you want answered and then do whatever you need to do to find the answer.
Follow the questions, not the books per se. Don’t focus on which books to read, focus on which questions to ask. Then the books, and other sources, will follow almost automatically.
Read in clusters! Don’t obsess over titles. Obsess over questions. That is how to learn best about many historical areas, especially when there is not a dominant book or two which beat out all the others
Climate change is forcing Asian cities to rethink their flood defences - In deep trouble
Rising sea levels are going to cause low lying cities much like my hometown of Jakarta, Indonesia to do one of two things: figure out a defense mechanism or move. Jakarta has chosen the move path, at least as it pertains to the capital city designation. Indonesia is spending $33bn to rebuild a new capital. What becomes of the current capital? More flooding.
As the planet heats up, sea levels are rising. Heavy rainstorms are also becoming more frequent and tropical cyclones more intense. And Asia’s coastal cities are growing, even as the risk of flooding increases. The number of people living in flood plains in Asia is expected to more than double between 2000 and 2060.
Taps’ Notes: Becoming by Michelle Obama
I read this book on the recommendation of a close friend. Memoirs have a tendency to be hit or miss. Going in to this one I was skeptical. Michelle Obama, for all the amazing things she has accomplished in her career and as First Lady, has largely remained private about her history and family, especially as compared to her husband. After this read it’s clear: Becoming is her coming out party.
I was struck by two things reading this book. First, Michelle Obama is a fantastic writer (or has a fantastic ghostwriter if you believe her husband). Second, contrary to other autobiographies that tend to paint a rosier and more glamorous picture of life and never seem authentic or genuine, the First Lady is incredibly open and vulnerable. She takes us through her internal struggle between what society believes she should do versus what doing what she is passionate about. She walks through the importance of family and the foundation it created for her life. She is open in her love for Barack and how she didn’t think he could win and didn’t want him to run but simultaneously didn’t want to hold him back. She talks about being a mother and describes the sense of time with a baby perfectly:
When there’s a baby in the house, time stretches and contracts, abiding by none of the regular rules. A single day can feel endless, and then suddenly six months have blown right past.
Becoming is a worthwhile read if for no other reason, Michelle Obama is clearly a very intelligent and capable person, open and vulnerable in a highly relatable manner.
Quote I’ve been thinking about: “We do not have conscious access to the origins of our emotions and the moods they generate. Once we feel them, all we can do is try to interpret the emotion, translate it into language.” - Robert Greene