I met a friend this week. We were catching up after a long time. He works in tech, but is outside the tech bubble thanks to living in Canada. He does not hangout with techies much.

At some point I went into an hour-long rant on the macro environment. You can think of it as a summary of the last one year of All In podcast episodes.

His reply was: All this is fine, just tell me what you did with all this information.

My honest answer, which I was a bit ashamed to admit, was not much. My job is mostly the same. I still invest in indexes and FDs. For us techbros, all the Twitter threads we consume and the All In podcast episodes we listen to just provide discussion fodder for catch ups at Third Wave.

If I am being honest does anyone know how the collapse of SVB bank will impact the tech ecosystem in the long term? Nope. Everyone is guessing on Twitter. Playing the expert like with all macro events.

What about the Russia - Ukraine war? Who knows.

What will be the steady state interest rate? Who knows.

I have all the information available about the ridehaling business of Gojek. On paper I am the product head of it. And even I can’t predict with confidence what my completed orders will be for next week.

I don’t even know why my company’s stock goes up or down everyday, forget the entire stock market.

So Who knows

Another anecdote: When the stock market crashed in 2020, I was talking with a friend about whether to invest or wait.

I was looking at charts, a bad habit from listening to too many Animal spirits podcast episodes, reading all the analyst reports I could, thinking about historic multiples, while my friend was like “eh, the market always go up after it goes down.” and doubled down. And I missed the biggest buying opportunity in a long time.

So nowadays I just SIP. Mostly.

(Disclaimer: Not investment advice and all that)

So I find it interesting that within a day of a bank run people are writing Twitter threads on impact of the impact on SVB collapsing on not just the US startup ecosystem, but even India’s. And if this event will collapse the entire banking system.

No one knows.

Check out the last 2 years of prediction threads of Bill Ackman and David Sacks.

VCs who deployed their entire fund in less than a year during peak ZIRP on shitcoins and BNPL startups are now writing threads on managing risk. I find it funny.

Too many people are writing prediction threads currently and creating FUD on twitter and yes, you can read these threads, but I doubt it will do you any good.

Note: I wrote this post as a Twitter thread on the day of SVB bank run. I have been lazy lately. So publishing it at a later date.