Decision Making
Annie Duke played professional poker for 18 years, winning more than $4 million in tournament earnings, before retiring to write and consult. Her book Thinking in Bets (2018) condenses what she learned about decision-making under uncertainty in a domain where you're forced, every hand, to distinguish between the
Mental Models
Charlie Munger, who died in November 2023 at 99, spent sixty years as Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway. His annual speeches at the Daily Journal meetings and at Berkshire produced a distinct body of work on what he called "mental models" — the cross-disciplinary thinking tools
Mental Models
A PE firm I know well once passed on an acquisition because the numbers were too good. The target company was a European distributor of industrial components with 18% EBITDA margins in a sector where the average was 9%, a five-year growth rate of 22%, and a clean balance sheet.
Mental Models
In 2008, SpaceX had lost three rockets in a row. Elon Musk was down to the last reserves of his eBay payout, Tesla was burning cash, and the consensus view in aerospace was that launch costs were fixed — $65 million minimum, maybe $100 million, and that was just the physics