Happy Sunday.

I’m off for a ride up Palomar again as I punish myself. My friend JC sent me some frozen Prince Street Pizzas and I ate one with Ellen last night. I have a hangover from it this morning.

I am starting to take Saturday’s off on the blog lately and it feels right for now. Late summer laziness.

No matter how much reading I do lately about investing and the markets and no matter how many pitches I take and founders I talk to, a few things stand out…

There is so many trillions of cash out there looking for a home (Tom Tunguz says $220 billion for VC’s raised alone) and with interest rates still high this ‘mo money’ is creating ‘mo problems’.

The most conviction I see is from the YOLO crowd on social media and it is very misplaced and not going away. Michael Dempsey calls it the ‘Get Rich or Die Trying’ crowd in this excellent read.

On the other end of the conviction curve is Marc Andreessen pumping $350 million into a new venture of WeWork founder Adam Neumann. I have been a huge fan of A16z but this investment is not a good look for the VC community (my opinion).

I liked this piece from back in February by VC Martin Tobias titled ‘The Great Asset Repricing‘. It has some good ‘what to look out for’ suggestions.

In 2016, Bill Gurley wrote a post titled ‘Why The Unicorn Financing Just Became Dangerous‘. We could nitpick and say he was FIVE years early but that would be missing the point in 2022. The real danger is that we had five extra years of unicorns, loose policy and a lot of sloppy investing that needs to get cleaned up …now with a special extra cocktail sauce of elevated rates.

As everyone goes big, I continue to think about how to win small. The art of returning our fund with smaller outcomes is what interests me and that means high conviction best on people and teams and products that can get profitable early and create optionality.

Have a great Sunday.