Highlights
Chatting with Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Administrator and Michael Kratsios, former CTO of the US (literally coolest job title ever) and current Managing Director at Scale AI about various trends affecting America’s ability to lead global innovation 🚀.
Traveling across the Deep South to meet people working in fields where good HR policy is often overlooked. We have to take care of our labor force, or else we won’t have anyone building our competitive edge, or frankly building anything, in core industries 🏭.
Studying financial history and frameworks to uncover fraud under iconic shortseller Jim Chanos, @WallStCynic. This has strongly affected how I view the world, even beyond financial modeling — there are so many ways to twist stories and numbers. I’m more careful now than ever before to ask “how does this really work?” 💸.
Welcome to the new folks on here - thanks for taking the time to catch up with me. Feel free to check out my other posts!
Hello friends!
Oh, how times flies - another semester has ended and I’m now a junior in college. As with nature in springtime, my sophomore year was a time of huge personal growth 🌱 . The word verdant reflects exactly that — it means “the bright green color of lush grass.”
Now it’s summer and I’m writing this newsletter from a small village, where the WiFi may be down, but spirits are high. It’s my first time in a place so remote and so far from anyone I know, but it feels like home already. Ironically, as I took a rickety bus here from the nearest big city, I saw posters advertising one of biggest tech conference in the region. Many familiar names were listed as keynote speakers. A year ago, I would have already been energetically emailing the organizers asking if I could get a last minute ticket and Tweeting about organizing coffee chats. This year, though, I had no fear of missing out. I stayed on the bus.
So why am I here, in this oasis of yellow and lilac hues?
I left college seeking a space to both think . . . and not think for a while. A moment to “gnothi seauton”, if you will. To that end, I’ve been teaching the most precious little children, cooking, singing, and doing lots of gardening. It’s been phenomenal and I encourage everyone to take some time to disappear for a while and refocus on what’s really important to you. Remember though, that changing your environment is only a temporary solution and when you head back to your everyday duties, you maintain what you learned and truly incorporate it into your life. More on this to come.
But without further ado, here are some cool things I uncovered and wonderful people I met last semester!
Hakuna matata,
Ula
Food for Thought 🧠
Financial Fraud Then and Now
Documentary from ColdFusion (overall, an epic channel) and The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind on the Enron Scandal
Podcast on Enron from Acquired
Canadian National Film Board’s excellent cartoon summary of the 18th century French speculative craze and Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance by Janet Gleeson
A similar crisis in Britain encapsulated by The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge Studies in Economic History) by Anne L. Murphy and a video analysis of the first stock market crash by Today I Found Out
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson (book and TV series)
The 21st Century Workforce
“I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked” by Emmanuel Maggiori, PhD
“How to Solve Manufacturing's Talent Problem” by Sam Flamini
The Evolution of Commercial Pilots by James Hennessey for Contrary’s How We Work essay series
Miscellaneous Recommendations
Arctic Outpost radio station accessible via Radio Garden — “Spinning the 78's from the top of the world!”
@orangebook_ — one of my favourite Twitter pages with timeless wisdom.
Though I am very fond of Dutch Golden Age portraits and the Italian vedutisti, @polmastersofart has stolen my heart, too. I’ve tracked down some of the paintings IRL!
Im-PORT-ant Infrastructure 🚢
I love port cities. I grew up in one and explore multiple new port cities each year. I find them so fascinating because of their historical significance across regional and global networks. In the maps below, notice how we can overlay 18th century trade routes between port cities with modern container shipping paths. In fact, some services allow you to track even a specific ship!
I believe that the ports of the future will be places where top talent and industry can gather. They don’t have to be by the water or even in person. Examples: non-waterfront, soon-to-be international hubs like Austin, Texas, as well as digital and online communities built on platforms like Discord. Other futuristic ports will be built in outer space, while existing ports will become smart container ports.
I decided to look into smart container ports after reading about Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI plans for the Port of Ponce in Puerto Rico. As Bloomberg reports,
Shipping ports are capital intensive projects designed to operate at full capacity. The idea of slowing down operations enough to do research and development is usually out of the question. But Scale plans to invest $2 million during the next 12 months to turn part of the Ponce facility into a Smart Port Lab.
This story piqued my interest since most contemporary urban theory primarily focuses on the morphology and evolution of cities from polluted industrial landscapes to sustainable 15-minute cities. This focus has had an intellectual and investing stronghold on the industry, meaning there are so many overlooked fields that architects, developers, and urban designers could also be investigating. Therefore, I’m thrilled that Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Administrator and Michael Kratsios, former CTO of the US, and current Managing Director at Scale AI have been rooting me on in my research, weaving automation and cybersecurity together with the study of urban design history.
From an automation point of view, I believe Scale’s most interesting project components include enhancing:
Operational processes
AI-enabled document processing > OCR
Remote operations
Equipping terminal operators with complete visibility of their shipping logistics and supply chain networks from the comfort of a command center.
Computer vision for object recognition
Digital tracking of assets in and around the port cuts down on inventory discrepancies and reduces insurance costs.
Autonomous inspection systems scan for damage, preventing people from entering risky zones.
From a cybersecurity point of view, I think it’s critical to expand discussions on how:
No single U.S. agency is responsible for maritime network security → there are no enforceable standards and unrestricted vendor choice (Wall Street Journal), even as cyberattacks on the maritime industry’s operational technology systems have increased by 900 percent over the last 3 years (Naval Dome).
Port of LA developed its Cyber Resilience Center in partnership with IBM.
There might be a solid security advantage to Scale doing research in the Caribbean, given potential American offshoring to a nearby region like Puerto Rico AKA “nearshoring,” rather than looking to other continents.
We interrupt this broadcast to remind you to fix your posture and stay hydrated!
Human Capital Strategy 🦺
For spring break this year, I decided to forgo visiting a tropical paradise in favor of a bus trip across the South. Having grown up in NYC, I wanted to see what the rest of America looked like. Up to that point, the archetype American worker I knew blended in with the crowds hurrying through the bustling streets of Manhattan to their work in skyscrapers. At the same time, I realized there was a multitude of American communities along the urban-rural continuum which I hadn’t seen before. Across those geographies, there were some populations whose experiences with HR at work were completely mismatched with their actual needs. I ended up looking into:
the paradoxical labor shortage in critical industries and huge population of unemployed, prime working-age men
HR practices in corporate vs. manufacturing sectors
rise of trade school, even in light of a declining American work ethic
I wrote about what I learned in “A Land That Lost Its Dynamism: Revisiting HR Standards in Overlooked American Industries.” Some key takeaways:
“Job openings so exceed the ranks of [the cohort of un-working men] that every member of this idle army could be placed in a job, and there would still be more than 3.9 million jobs awaiting candidates.”
Throwing money at American industry in hope that investments can revitalize them is naive thinking. It is more pertinent to plan how to find, train, and keep motivated and skilled workers staffing them. (Let’s see what happens with the 50 billion dollar semiconductor CHIPS and Science Act vs. who can put the money to good use).
People are assets, not expenses. Treat them as such.
“Star” employees are partially talent and partially the product of their environment. Therefore, their abilities are not always transferable to other companies and can defect or fail to reach expectations.
Good human capital strategy is a dynamic firm and country’s greatest advantage.
I sincerely hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Feel free reach out with suggestions for future topics, any questions, or if you ever want to chat!