I just saw a Tweet for how Basic Capital can help you 5x the size of your retirement portfolio by borrowing money.
There’s definitely a way to lose all your money.
But more importantly, Basic butchers the entire philosophy of investing for retirement.
The airline business is brutal. Your seat availability today depends on aircraft orders placed a decade ago. Your inventory — empty seats — expire the moment the gate closes. Everyone from the mechanics to pilots are unionized. And competitors offer virtually the same product. In 2024, every major US airline lost money flying passengers [1]. Good thing that flying planes isn’t how airlines actually make money.
As politicians on both side thunder about ending, auditing or increasing the President’s authority over the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to forget we’ve fought this war before. Nearly two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson’s populist crusade against Nicholas Biddle’s Congressionally chartered “Second Bank of the United States” toppled our nation’s monetary backbone and set the stage for the Panic of 1837.
Back in high school, I wrote an essay about Jackson’s crusade and how a victory against imagined financial tyrants can become a long defeat for everyone else:
I generally believe that good startup (and product) names are short, fairly easy to remember / spell, somewhat distinctive, and you can buy the .com / .ai domain name. I’m also a sucker for things that rank first alphabetically. If you meet (most of) these criteria you get a 4/5.
We wrote this guide to compliment Spencer’s popular “Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines.” It draws upon our personal experiences and insights gleaned from working with talented VAs (virtual assistants) over many years (shoutout to Angeli, Karyn, Rio, and Shang!) as well as observations from other founders who have successfully built remote teams in the Philippines.