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EGD News #130 — Q1 2022 in review

EGD News #130 — Q1 2022 in review

Sent on April 15th, 2022.

If you aren’t a subscriber to EGD News, you can subscribe here.

After writing my recent annual review for 2021, I decided to review each quarter to reflect on my work and what I’d want to achieve in the next quarter.

In Q1 of 2022, what went well with EGD?

I am pretty happy with the work I’ve been doing. I started writing 500 words a day and have kept up this habit. On the days that I’ve been traveling, it has been harder to find the time to focus on writing, but I still try to put in those 500 words.

I’m consistently working on ten to fifteen different articles for EGD News in Roam Research. As thoughts and insights come up, I return to certain pieces to work on them. I’ve also managed to merge and split up pieces, as I’ve noticed things making sense as one piece or two separate pieces.

I’ve been observing that I’ve started developing a need for quality over quantity in my work. Instead of writing long pieces, I’ve started thinking about limiting the word count in any piece to 1,000 words. For an average reader, 1,000 words will take four minutes to read. I believe that for a very personal newsletter like EGD, four minutes a week is much better than ten or fifteen minutes on 3,000 words. I might release long-form pieces in the future, but currently, I feel like shorter pieces can deliver more quality.

The same goes for the EGD podcast. Downloads haven’t grown in a year, but as I said, I’m not worried about quantity. Putting out quality content consistently will make me happier than doubling the number of podcast listeners.

In Q1 of 2022, what went well in investing?

During Q1, I made six new investments, out of which Social First and Superbloom have been announced. Out of the six companies, three are free-to-play mobile studios, and three are doing blockchain gaming. My syndicate made these investments, and I’d set up an SPV with Odin. The smallest investment was 50K USD, and the biggest was 200K USD. The average investment size was 110K, with a median of 67.5K and 100K being the middle two values.

I’m happy with the investments, but I feel that this area has the most to improve upon. You can read more about these improvements areas later in this piece.

What new skills and habits did I develop?

I’m happy about getting more engaged with crypto. I wanted to learn more, so I enrolled in an online course called “DeFi Orientation.” The course was created by Nat Eliason (tokenomics guy at web3 game Crypto Raiders), who writes:DeFi Orientation is the most popular “intro to DeFi” course, with over 1,300 students attending in 2021. DeFi is a completely new financial layer of the Internet, giving us the ability to use our money in new and exciting ways. That could mean letting other people borrow your assets and pay you interest on them.

The great thing about the course was the confidence it gave me in my abilities to navigate all the decentralized finance systems and activities, like using wallets, swapping currencies, yield farming, etc.

Besides crypto and online courses, I read 17 books in Q1, and I wanted to highlight one book that stands out from the rest.

Leadership: In Turbulent Times. I’ve read many well-known leader biographies in the last twelve months, and this book was the best so far. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about how four US presidents led the country in turbulent times. Read my notes and highlights from the book by going here.

As a bonus: I’ll give an honorary mention to Jim Collins. I re-read his books Built to Last and Good to Great in Q1. Both books keep getting better with each re-read.

What didn’t go well?

I’m glad about what I’ve achieved in angel investing, but improvements are to be made.

I have bumped into a few companies in Q1 who decided not to give my syndicate an allocation because of the number of people who’d see their pitch decks and other material. With 170 people, it does become intimidating to share your business ideas in the open.

This is an area where I’d want to develop a solution during 2022 to still back and support these fantastic companies and not compromise their need for privacy and limit exposure.

Starting the investment process to finalizing it still takes time. Most deals took two weeks, with one taking five weeks to close. The one reason why it is so slow is that syndicate members are traveling and not reacting to requests to fill in the paperwork and wire the cash, which we’d then pool together to the SPV that will finally invest the 50K, 100K, or 200K to the company. Hopefully, I can be more active in ensuring that people are ready on all fronts when it’s time to invest.

What do I want to achieve in Q2?

I want to do more online courses.

I learned so much from Building a Second Brain (structuring my documents), Write of Passage (writing), Effortless Output (using Roam Research), and DeFi Orientation (crypto finance). It has been a great way to scale up my skills, and it has worked so well after each course. I immediately got to apply the learnings, and I’m still using them daily.

Now I want to double down on doing more online courses. My goal is to complete at least one course in Q2.

Conclusion

That’s it. I hope you appreciate me sharing these reflections. I wish you all a great Q2!

(Photo by Shotkit from Pexels)


Get my book, “Long Term Game: How to build a video games company” from Amazon. Available on Kindle, audiobook and paperback. Check it out


Mika Tammenkoski — Building Metacore

In this week’s episode, I’m talking with Mika Tammenkoski, who is the co-founder and CEO of Metacore Games, the company that is well known for their hit game Merge Mansion.

In this discussion with Mika, we talk about his long journey in gaming, what he has picked up on leadership and startups from all the projects he’s been involved with, and what Mika thinks about building teams, pivoting, and increasing the likelihood of finding a hit game.

Listen to the full episode by going here.

Some useful templates from EGD

Articles worth reading

Heresy — “Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for heresy was death. You could have led a life of exemplary goodness, but if you publicly doubted, say, the divinity of Christ, you were going to burn. Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving children’s lives, but if you express certain opinions, you’re automatically fired.”

Where Does Sky Mavis Go From Here? — “After this attack, I’ve noticed that there remains a profound sense of trust and protection to a nascent industry. By and large, the community surrounding Axie Infinity has come together, with players feeling positive and hopeful for a positive outcome and investors doubling down on their partners and investments to ensure continued service. While I can’t speak for other developers, this occurrence has helped me to reinforce aspects from Web2 that are absolutely pertinent in Web3.”

The Case For Sabbaticals — “One of the hurdles that stops people from taking a break is the idea that life transitions are all-or-nothing leaps. Work is either something you do indefinitely until retirement or something you quit and then go live on a beach.”

Quote that I’ve been thinking about

“Every job looks easy when you are not the one doing it.”

— Jeff Immelt


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I hope you have a great weekend!

Joakim