Weekend Briefing No. 501
A Saturday morning briefing on innovation and society.
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
100 — Here is a ranking of the top 100 colleges for startup founders.
35 — MIT Technology Review releases an annual list of the top 35 innovators under 35 years of age.
7 — Taylor Swift wins Video of the Year for "Anti-Hero" at MTV Video Music Awards. She cleaned up with seven total awards.
Adorable Little Detonators
Babies, those little assholes, really do show up in our lives like a popular girl transferring into school in the middle of the semester. Their sudden presence, though welcomed, throws the social order into disarray. A 2017 researchers concluded that across the board, the strength and quality of friendships “typically decreases after people become parents” and that most of the quality degradation occurs around when the child is 3, during the years that kids’ needs are most demanding of their parents’ time and energy. The dilemma facing friends with kids and friends without them isn’t so much if they’ll ever have the time to meet up at a bar for happy hour; it’s whether all those years of being busy and disconnected have messed up their friendships so much that nobody will want to go. The Cut (46 minutes)
What do you think is the best way to preserve friendships in the early years of parenting?
Lives of Harvard MBAs
This is an interesting survey conducted at the 25th reunion of the Harvard Business School class of 1986. The survey dives into love, sex and money. Here are some of my favorite stats: 1) Just 3% of the alums (aged 53-55) say they want more sex. The highest priorities? Time (31%), health (18%) and peace of mind (13%). 2) More members of the class have hired personal trainers (43%) than therapists (41%) or cosmetic surgeons (7%). 3) A third of the class (33%) admitted to having slept with someone whose last name they didn’t know (37% for men, 17% for women). 4) Some 14% of the class is divorced, with another 1% separated. About 5% divorced and remarried. 5) Median Net Income: $350K; Median Net Worth: $6 million. Poets & Quants (10 minutes)
Investors benefit from Banksy works soaring 63%?
Over the last 20 years, record prices achieved for Banksy’s art have grown at an astounding 63% compound annual rate. Impressive, to say the least. But even more impressive? It's not just the ultra-wealthy benefiting from this phenomenal growth. Masterworks enables its 820K+ users to access investments in multi-million dollar artworks by artists like Banksy, Basquiat and Picasso for just a fraction of the cost of an entire piece. When Masterworks sells a painting — like the 16 it’s already sold — investors receive their portion of the net proceeds. Every single one of Masterworks’ sales has returned a profit to investors, with three recent sales, realizing net annualized returns of 17.6%, 21.5% and 35%. All of their offerings are limited, and shares can sell out in just minutes, but Weekend Briefing readers can skip the waitlist with this exclusive link. Masterworks (Sponsored)
The Crisis of Men and Boys
If you’ve been paying attention to the social trends, you probably have some inkling that boys and men are struggling in the U.S. and across the globe. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier. Over the same period, women’s lifetime earnings have increased 33%. More men are leading haphazard and lonely lives. Roughly 15% of men say they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990. Men account for close to three out of every four “deaths of despair” — suicide and drug overdoses. There is something in modern culture that is producing an aspiration gap. Many men just seem less ambitious. It is not that men have fewer opportunities. It is that they are not taking them. Many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Many men have an obsolete ideal: Being a man means being the main breadwinner for your family. Then they can’t meet that ideal. Demoralization follows. New York Times (7 minutes)
Gender Skew in Higher Ed
Last year’s freshman class at Tulane was nearly two-thirds female. Tulane’s numbers are startling, but the school is not a radical outlier: There are close to three women for every two men in college in this country. Last year, women edged out men in the freshman classes of every Ivy League school save Dartmouth, and the gender ratio is significantly skewed at many state schools. (The rising sophomore class at the University of Vermont is 67% female; the University of Alabama is 56% female.) Most small liberal arts colleges are close to 60% female, and the discrepancy is even more pronounced at community colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. Why? And how do college admission officers think about this? New York Times (22 minutes)
Intelligent v Smart
Some people are intelligent but don’t have a lick of smarts. Their ability to succeed in the world might surprise you on the downside. Others lack intelligence but gush smarts. Their potential will surprise you on the upside. On rare occasions, you meet people who are both intelligent and smart. They run laps around everyone. Let’s define “intelligence” versus “smart” like this: Intelligent people understand technical details; smart people understand emotional details. Or, maybe intelligence is good memory, logic, math skills, test-taking ability, rule-following. Smart is a high degree of empathy, bullshit detection, organization, communication skills, persuasion, social awareness, understanding the consequences of your actions. Both are important. But there’s a critical difference in how each is valued. Collab Fund (6 minutes)
Apple Meets Mother Earth
This is actually one of the most clever pieces of corporate communication I’ve seen about environmental impact. Check out this video from Apple. Apple (5 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Check out Founder Fridays - A Friday morning briefing helping founders scale smarter.
Weekend Wisdom
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. - Marcel Proust
To never forget why you had the kids - because you fell in love and adore your partner. We have taken a two week trip without the kids since they were 1 yr old. I used to say to them “she is the reason you are here and I can’t forget that”. Show kids that being parents rocks, is exciting, you can still be stylish, go out, travel, entertain and have fun. Those that surrender are sending a message that being a parent is hard, tiring, and all about them. It isn’t kids that can’t travel and adapt; it’s the parents! Cheers,
One thing I think we have to get better at is looking at what statistics actually say both in light of our own assumptions and that of the researcher, especially when the tendency is to ask the easy question. The survey today was a classic. When it quoted 15% divorced or separated it makes the assumption that we live in the same generation as our parents, almost all of whom married once. Rather than a generation less likely to marry in the first place rendering divorce stats in isolation very misleading.