Scott Stevenson

A really good strategy in investing is: don’t try to pick the next great stock/piece of real estate/crypto coin. Instead find the next big asset class.

If you got into the real estate, stocks or crypto early, you did great. This is because these new asset classes get huge amounts of money poured into them over time as they become reliable, liquid and regulated. The question is: what is next?

Prediction markets seem like a good bet. A challenge though is that they don’t naturally appreciate as more money comes in. But it seems like there should be a way to benefit over the huge amount of money that will eventually enter prediction markets. Maybe buying early into a prediction market fund?

A great hidden signal in hiring:

If you were bad at your job, but wanted recognition, what would you do?

That’s what you need to filter out.

A dev who doesn’t like building emphasizes: “I multiplied the effort of the team by 2x by implementing a new tool in our CI/CD”, rather than talking about what they built.

A designer who isn’t proud of their designs will deemphasize their actual portfolio work and focus on their “15 step process”

Severely over-indexing on kindness/charisma is another yellow flag. Kindness is great! But being ultra kind is also one of the best strategies for job preservation if you’re not good at your job. Competent people are often kind, but it’s not their whole personality.

Business folks who don’t want to put in the work overemphasize strategic contributions, lean on polished presentation and talk about how it would be high leverage for someone else to do the work.

These are “compensatory signals”. If we feel inadequate in some way, we seek to compensate in other ways.

But if we know we have great results, we simply let the results speak for themselves.