VC Firms and Prediction Markets
Why venture capital allocators are driving the US disruptive boom in prediction markets.
A. Sandhill Road and other venture capital firms are funding prediction markets in the United States like Polymarket and Kalshi. These are using a binary options model to bring sports betting to a (scalable, networked) larger audience. But this US disruptive boom also has a dark side.
B. Former Australian defence minister Linda Reynolds has succeeded in making Parliament House staffer and brave victim-survivor Brittany Higgins bankrupt over X platform comments. Reynolds has contended in media interviews that she had no choice but to undertake this legal action. There is actually a rather famous and influential moral philosophy book that convincingly argues (from relevant “lived experience”) that you can choose between the stimulus and the response.
C. TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies founder Do Kwon has been sentenced to 15 years jail for fraud. There are a couple of different ways to read this. The US can be more prosecutorial on crypto cases - especially the Southern District of New York which brought this case (as well as the Steve A. Cohen and SAC Capital case). The entrepreneurial wave of crypto has maybe peaked in this cycle so this is when such fraud cases would be discovered. A parallel is the Bernie Madoff fraud case during the 2008 Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis. The related area of high-frequency trading firms has also been implicated in Kwon’s firm TerraForm Labs.
D. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Resolving Public Disputes created by the late Professor Judith Layzer.
E. Internet optimism is ending (again) notes Columbia University’s Professor Tim Wu.
F. Rafael Grossi is director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The New Yorker profiles his important work on tracking nuclear proliferation.
G. Vanity Fair covers legendary author Truman Capote’s swan dive. Here is the late masterful actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005) which is in part about the writing of In Cold Blood (1966).
H. The new Netflix documentary 1975 is out on 19th December. The trailer is below.
I. PBS Newshour on how the private credit market (part of the shadow banking system) is starting to crack. This is similar to how the subprime mortgage market began to freeze up in 2007 prior to the Great Recession or Global Financial Crisis in 2008.
J. A 1981 interview with Apple’s Steve Jobs.
K. The 2003 BBC documentary on Peter Biskind’s classic book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998) about the Brat Pack and auteur wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s Hollywood. This was when the old (Hays Production Code) era Classical Hollywood studio system broke up, and independent producers / directors re-emerged (as they had existed also in the 1940s during the transition into the film noir genre). Biskind’s book has a legendary status amongst cinema studies students: all of his books are very highly recommended.
Here is a Movie Geek United interview with Biskind from 2012 about the book.
L. Author Charles Bukowski on drinking alcohol versus taking marijuana. Do read Bukowski’s first novel Post Office (the first in his Henry Chinaski series).