Tippets #201
My year in books, Silicon Valley vs. China, financial mediocrity, a call to read, and more! Enjoy.
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time, and thank you for letting me be a small part of your week! As a reminder, I’m Rishi Taparia, Co-founder and General Partner at Garuda Ventures, a first-check fund that partners with founders as they pull the future into the present. Tippets is a curated set of tidbits and snippets (get it…tippets…) from my reading around the web.
From Me This Week:
Tippets from Around the Web:
2025 letter
Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, one of my top books of 2025) published his annual letter this week. Worth sitting down with a cup of coffee and reading in full, he talks all things Silicon Valley, AI, and warns the U.S. underestimates China’s industrial strengths and rapid AI progress.
Though San Francisco has produced so much wealth, it is a relative underperformer in the national culture. Indie movie theaters keep closing down while all sorts of retail and art institutions suffer from the crumminess of downtown. The symphony and the opera keep cutting back on performances — after Esa-Pekka Salonen quit the directorship of the symphony, it hasn’t been able to name a successor. Wealthy folks in New York and LA have, for generations, pumped money into civic institutions. Tech elites mostly scorn traditional cultural venues and prefer to fund the next wave of technology instead.
(54-minute read - Dan Wang)
The Prison Of Financial Mediocrity
A thought-provoking read digging into why we are seeing the rise of betting / prediction markets, as young people turn to high-variance bets (crypto, prediction markets, sports betting) as a way to gain agency in todays world.
White-collar workers, or otherwise the financially aspirational, are watching the timeline shrink. Three years ago, “AI will replace knowledge workers” was a thought experiment. Now it’s a planning assumptioem>n. Everyone’s asking when, not if, and the estimates keep getting shorter.
Then there’s social media, which ensures you’re never satisfied with where you are. The algorithm is optimized to show you the next tranche of what could be. Always the vacation you haven’t taken. The apartment you can’t afford. The lifestyle one rung above yours. It doesn’t matter where you are on the ladder; there’s always someone above you, and the algorithm will find them.
Previous generations had limited visibility into how others lived. You compared yourself to your neighbors, your coworkers, maybe some celebrities in magazines. The reference class was narrow. Now the reference class is infinite. A 25-year-old making $70k is constantly fed content from people their age making $2mn, living in Bali, “working” four hours a day. The baseline for “enough” keeps moving.
You never catch up. No matter what you achieve, social media will show you what you’re missing. The spread between your life and the life you “should” have is maintained algorithmically, forever uncollapsible.
So you have AI shrinking your timeline AND social media ensuring you never feel like you’ve arrived. The pressure to escape, NOW, FAST, before it’s too late, compounds daily.
(10-minute read - Sysls on X)
Side Quest Recommendation: "The Story of Civilization" Series [Durant]
The latest reminder of the benefits of reading, and reading widely with some very practical advice on how to find more time to read more.
Munger talks about the "latticework of mental models." I thought I understood this concept at a younger age, and I definitely DID NOT. Because the way you develop this latticework is to read widely across non-investing, non-market, non-business material.
There is no shortcut to the latticework. It can only be developed through reading wide and deep, and it pops into place organically.
Don’t be a passive observer to your own life. The way I’d put it is that if you don’t actively take charge of your own time, you will keep doing the exact same shit you are doing, every single day, until the day you die.
(14-minute read - Gregory Blotnick on X)
Capital in the 22nd Century
A thought-provoking piece on AI and the future of income and wealth inequality. If AI makes capital a true substitute for labor, authors Philip Trammel and Dwarkesh Patel argue wealth will concentrate in the hands of those richest when that shift happens. Without a strong global progressive tax on capital or capital income, inequality could grow without bound and be inherited. Capital-driven growth may boost overall output but will make taxing capital costly and politically hard.
(35-minute read - Substack)
Quote I'm thinking about: “All your uses of time should be benchmarked to reading books. There is nothing more valuable, nothing, nothing, nothing.” - Gregory Blotnick
If you enjoyed this issue, please share it with one friend who might also get some value from it!
Please share what you’re reading! If you have insight on anything mentioned above or have any interesting links/papers/books that you think would be worth sharing in future issues of Tippets, please reach out! Click here, reply to this email, or DM me on Twitter at @taps.