#141 - Interview with Moses Kagan, Founder of Adaptive Realty

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1 QUOTE

I. On preparation before taking action:

"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win" - Sun Tzu

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2 THOUGHTS

This week I interviewed Moses Kagan, founder of Adaptive Realty, a real estate private equity firm based out of Los Angeles, CA. We dove into his journey building Adaptive Realty's real estate investment and management platform, how he structures deals, and the pain points of growing a real estate operating company. Here are the top two memorable points made during our conversation:

I. Retaining employee talent is about more than paying well. There isn't enough money in the world to overcome a toxic, cutthroat, negative work environment. Compensation and culture work hand in hand.

II. Your decisions today impact your family's trajectory for decades to come. No matter your family background, your personal and professional decisions today can wildly impact your family's future generations. In the same vein, we are all a product of the generations that came before us. This is both humbling for the well-off and encouraging for those just starting to build generational wealth.

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3 LINKS

I. Are you competing at the right things? (Jocko Willink's Podcast)

+ I listened to this twice this week. It is, in my opinion, a wonderful dissertation on how to compete and what to compete for - in business, in life, and as a nation.

II. A framework for thinking about what projects to work on (Julian Shapiro)

+ I sent this to multiple people this week as an extremely useful framework for making big decisions and deciding what direction to go in professionally.

III. Amazon's leadership principles (Amazon.com)

+ Timeless principles for any organization.

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Best of the rest:

Investing

When SPACs Attack! A New Force Is Invading Wall Street. (Wall Street Journal)

What to know about music's copyright goldrush (Pitchfork)

Sequioa fund letters 1974-1982 (Coinvestor Club)

Secrets of Sovereign - how the Chandler brothers turned $10M into a cool $5B (Institutional Investor)

The Lindy Effect in investing (Chris Mayer)

Real Estate

Why tech moguls are obsessed with building utopian cities (Marker)

How mushroom mycelium could be used to replace other building materials (The Verge)

Technology

All Amazon shareholder letters from 1997-present (Link)

The outsider: how CEO-for-hire Frank Slootman turned Snowflake into the biggest IPO ever (Forbes)

The great unbundling (Benedict Evans)

Misc.

No one knows how much the government can borrow (Noahpinion)

We need a real investigation into the origins of covid-19 (Matt Ridley)

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Have a great week!

- Benton