Entrepreneur's Handbook

As a layperson with no economic credentials, I’d recommend books with a bit of entertainment value, even if they may gloss over some details. It’s still important to understand the basic theory and mechanics of the financial markets, but it’s equally important to understand the human factors and politics involved, and some of these more narrative books are helpful in that regard.

I found The Big Short both entertaining and enlightening on the 2008 crash, a while back I also read “The Number” by Alex Berenson, which focuses more on corporate equities and the rise of earnings per share as a driving metric.. I did also read about half of an older book called “Secrets of the Temple”, which gives a history of how Paul Volcker handled the inflation crisis of the 80s. That was more dense but really helped solidify my understanding of the Fed. I’ve also recently started “Random Walk through Wall Street”, which again is mostly equities-focused but so far seems to give a balanced take on the financial and human factors.

As far as explaining the most recent crisis, I’ve found this blog [0] to be the most informative, approachable and somewhat entertaining. Very clear explanation of what exactly the BTFP program is doing, with a healthy amount of speculation about how it could be abused and potential effects of that. Disclaimer that it’s written by a crypto researcher, but there’s very little content about crypto.

[0] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/kaiseki-b15230bdd09e

Congrats on still sticking to the idea of monetizing via payments vs throwing ads everywhere. This and your reply here is a rare positive signal coming from Medium nowadays.

A few personal observations:

1. For a paywalled service, quality is everything. When seeing medium.com in the URL, my expectation is that on average I will see low quality writing, that is forming its own character now, somewhat similar to LinkedIN [1] (exceptions exist but are invisible). Have you considered paywall to post, even as low as $1/mo as a content quality filter?

2. There is no reason for a 16k character article to require 6.5MB of data to render. (looking at a random article from the home page [2]). I hear that Medium has an optimized writing experience, why not have an optimized reading experience too?

3. Do you wish Medium became what Substack did, and if no, what is your vision for it? Why should one use Medium as an author or as a reader?

[1] https://twitter.com/StateOfLinkedIn

[2] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/be-present-aff45d6421b4

Update - I came across something on why they would have made such a loan

Voyager was offering the public high interest rates eg. 9% on USDT and 6% on bitcoin and then had to find somewhere to put that money that promised to pay more than that interest so they could make a profit. (rates https://www.investvoyager.com/blog/voyagers-june-interest-apr-rates/)

>3AC said they would pay a high rate of interest, and Voyager took their word for it– because in the minds of Voyager’s principals, there was no other outfit with 3AC’s pedigree that could absorb the amount of capital that needed to be shipped out the door. https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/number-three-511f334d8fae

So basically they lent the money because it was other people's money and they could make a profit as an intermediary.

Ideally you would have connections with people in the media developed over a long period of time or know some people who do.

Barring that you need something really newsworthy. You should read or watch the news and keep track of the names of the bylines. Try to understand what those people think is newsworthy and give them what they need to produce their product.

You can cold pitch anyone with a byline once, so it had better be good.

Be "notorious". You could be on TV tomorrow if your murdered your cofounder.

Thou shalt not kill, but here is an original marketing hack

https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-staged-protest-that-kickstarted-the-growth-of-salesforce-into-a-billion-dollar-company-a53d6995f762

Yes sure! I don't have any responsibilities at this age.So there can't be a better time than now to try things out.We (I) have the energy ,time and "freedom" required to do something crazy.I might lose some time and energy but there can't be a better time than now.So we (I) should keep building things and learn a lot.Many millionaires wish they started earlier[1].I already regret wasting my college years.So I don't wanna "miss out" this time.Thank you everyone for your advice

[1]https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/heres-what-these-20-millionaires-wish-they-knew-when-they-were-20-a3c33e3b3a57