Best of the Week

Shamir Secret Sharing (Article | 15 mins)

In 2003 a software bug at PayPal nearly brought down the entire company. This fascinating story told by Max Levchin lays bare the reality of running a company early on, no matter how successful it looks from the outside.

Pair with: Our Business Breakdown of PayPal.

Devote Yourself to the Cause of Your Life (Article | 8 mins)

An important article on finding your life’s work and how you can “revel in the day-to-day minutia, the tedious tasks that make up your job.”

Pair with: Our conversation with Sam Hinkie about finding your people.

M&A, competition, pricing, and investing (Podcast | 61 mins)

dbt Labs helps founders and operators make better decisions on pricing and acquisitions. Learn how it does this and how to incorporate its lessons into your strategy.

Pair with: Our conversation with Madhavan Ramanujam on how to price products.

We want to see where you listen to our podcasts!

#ListenHere

We love your pictures. Keep them coming. Share where you listen to our podcasts on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram using #ListenHere, and we’ll feature our favorites throughout August.

 Invest Like the Best - Samo Burja

Guest: Samo Burja – founder of Bismarck Analysis

There’s never been an immortal society. Through the lens of his great founder theory, Samo is on a mission to understand why. Learn more about the intersection of history, geopolitics, and power in this conversation.

Pair with: The Great Founder Theory (Article | 90 mins)

In his seminal manuscript, Samo outlines his thesis that there have only been 500 great founders in the history of humanity.

Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. Tired of running your own expert calls to get up to speed on a company? Tegus is the gold standard for research, delivering unmatched access to timely, qualitative insights through the largest and most differentiated expert call transcript database. With over 60,000 transcripts spanning 22,000 public and private companies, investors can accelerate their fundamental research process by discovering highly-differentiated and reliable insights that can’t be found anywhere else in the market. As a listener, drive your next investment thesis forward with Tegus for free at tegus.co/patrick.

Business Breakdowns - argenx

Guest: Julia Angeles – Investment Manager at Baillie Gifford

With a little help from llamas, argenx develops antibody-based medicines for patients suffering from severe auto-immune diseases. It’s a $30 billion biotech company set to produce over $1 billion in sales this year. You should learn about this business.

Pair with: The Success Story Behind argenx (Video | 10 mins)

Hear CEO Tim Van Hauwermeiren talk about his approach to entrepreneurship, the company’s evolution, and the formative lessons from his time at business school.

Business Breakdowns is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors, and provider of Canalyst. Tired of calculating fully-diluted shares outstanding? Access every publicly-reported datapoint and industry-specific KPI through their database of over 4,000 driveable global models handbuilt by a team of sector-focused analysts, 35+ industry comp sheets, and Excel add-ins that let you use their industry-leading data in your own spreadsheets. Tegus’ models automatically update each quarter, including hard-to-calculate KPIs like stock-based compensation and organic growth rates, empowering investors to bypass the friction of sourcing, building and updating models. As a listener, you can trial Canalyst by Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick.

What Our Listeners Are Saying:

Founders - Paul Graham

Episode 314: Paul Graham – How to do Great Work

How to do Great work combines clear thinking, profound truths and pragmatic wisdom. David dives into the latest must-read essay by Paul Graham.

Founders is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Get the best sleep of your life and unlock more energy with the Pod 3. Go to eightsleep.com/founders to learn more.

Making Media - Liberty RPF

Guest: Liberty RPF - Expert curator & Head of Infinite Media at OSV.

In a world of infinite content, you need a content dietician. A sherpa. A curator. Liberty took on the role for us and many others. We tracked him down to discuss the future of media, curation, growing audiences, books, and the unique way OSV works with creators.

Pair with: Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) (Podcast | 114 mins)

The tech industry’s favorite analyst. This is the inside story of Ben Thompson’s popular tech blog, Stratechery, and how the business has evolved to include podcasts and more.

Making Media is brought to you by Scribe. Scribe is the magic behind Colossus transcripts. And we are not alone. Scribe is the transcription service that powers all of S&P Global - like CapIQ - and the client list includes our friends at Tegus. Go to joincolossus.com/scribe to unlock 150 minutes of free transcription and test their capabilities.

Web3 Breakdowns - Alex Thorn

Guest: Alex Thorn - Head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy Digital 

This week, we take on some of the most critical topics in Crypto. Why now for the Blackrock ETF? What are the chances of approval? What did the XRP ruling mean, and what are the implications? Tune in for answers to these questions and more.

Pair With: Bitcoin Data Shows Bullish Foundation (Article | 11 mins)

Alex Thorn and his research team examine Bitcoin’s performance vs. other asset classes and describe several upcoming catalysts that suggest the best is yet to come.

Web3 Breakdowns is sponsored by OKX. Want to stop paying trading fees? You can now trade for free for two months with OKX. Over 20 million traders and institutions choose OKX when they want to trade. And you can join them by signing up at OKX Trader Series to start your two months of fee-free trading today.

Pioneer Program

Thanks to John Rodriguez, Mohammad Ruhul Kader, Erick Mokaya, and Jefferson Rumanyika for their help and research this week.

Want to get involved in Colossus? We are always on the lookout for pioneers to help grow our content library. If you are interested - let us know here.