Three rare and powerful skills:

An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability.

Two weeks ago, Mitt Romney wrote an opinion piece in The Atlantic titled, “America Is in Denial”. The piece highlights numerous potentially “cataclysmic events” facing the nation, namely droughts out west, inflation, rising debt levels, profligate government spending, melting ice caps, illegal immigration, and the events of January 6th. Interestingly though, Romney argues that the most significant threat is actually not the events themselves, but rather Americans’ refusal to address them.

Tesla has single-handedly transformed the landscape of the automobile industry worldwide in less than two decades. Before it, almost no car companies were seriously invested in developing all-electric vehicles (EVs).

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator. Business success was another story. Disney’s first studio went bankrupt. Later cartoons were monstrously expensive to produce, and financed at onerous terms. By the mid-1930s Disney had produced more than 400 cartoons – most of them short, most of them liked, and most of them losing money. Disney and his studio were nearly broke.

If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important. The more fields it shows up in, the more likely it is to be a fundamental and recurring driver of how the world works.

Collab SOS: A New Fund and a Call to Action

As a complement to Shared Future, a dedicated fund providing rapid, catalytic capital to entrepreneurs working on climate solutions, we are thrilled to share a new $200 million fund called Collab SOS — which invests in Series A and Series B companies fueling a more sustainable economy across materials, ingredients, energy, and supply chains. Our criteria for investing is simple:

Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world the fastest. It was technically a race, but that was an afterthought, as no one had ever completed the feat.

Will Smith writes in his biography that:

Maverick is back and given the Top Gun sequel has raked in more than $800 million to date, it is already the biggest blockbuster of Tom Cruise’s career. A lot has changed since the original nearly four decades ago, but the secret to its success lies in what hasn’t changed — its “playbook.”