Warren Buffett once said, “Interest rates power everything in the economic universe, and they have some effect on the decisions we make.” I decided I wanted to learn more about interest, so I bought a few books.

This week I finished reading The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor. Chancellor’s main points are that interest is necessary to allocate capital to its best uses and valuing assets would be impossible without interest. He provides historical content on interest, going back to Babylonian times. I enjoyed how Chancellor detailed the interest-rate environments of various time periods and the impact they had on society and the economy at the time.

I’m glad I read the book. I highlighted many sections I want to revisit someday.

This week I caught up with a founder and chatted about his fundraise. He recently kicked it off (again), and it’s going well this time. A few bank wires have cleared and he has significant interest from various funds for the remainder of the round.

This is starkly different from his efforts to fundraise last fall, so I wondered why he’s having more success this time around. Is something materially different about his company (or pitch)? When I asked, he said the company is still progressing at the same rate as a few months ago. He sees a difference in venture capital investors. More investors are receptive to his pitch, which is essentially the same as a few months ago.

In March, we’ll see start-up fundraising kick into high gear: more pitch competitions, demo days, etc. Lots of founders will “officially” kick off their raise and begin pitching investors. Fundraising wasn’t great last year. How will it go this year? I’m curious about whether this founder’s fundraising experience will be the exception, the norm, or somewhere between the two.

I read a quote today from the German missionary Albert Schweitzer that caught my attention:

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while the pessimist sees only the red stoplight . The truly wise person is colorblind.

This got me thinking about my experience. I’ve learned to balance my thinking in any situation by considering the counter to my natural instincts. For example, if I’m super excited and see lots of upside, I try to think about the downside. Conversely, if I’m hesitant and see lots of risk, I try to think What could go right? and see the upside potential.

One of the books I reread periodically and recommend to idea-stage founders is The Mom Test. It’s a short read and can add tremendous value to founders who are thinking about what solution they should build or what problem they want to solve. Every founder I’ve recommended the book to, and who read it, loved it.

The book focuses on a single topic: customer discovery. It outlines a simple, effective methodology for talking with customers. The book details how to ask the right questions (that aren’t leading questions) so conversations yield valuable insights about customer pain and its severity. The book does a good job of laying out an approach that helps founders better understand what (if anything) they should build, which can prevent founders from wasting time, energy, and money. Another reason I like this book for idea-stage founders is that it helps them avoid the common solution-in-search-of-a-problem trap.

If you’re an early-stage founder who hasn’t found product–market fit yet, consider giving the book a read.

I’ve been learning about Jack Ma recently. He’s the founder of Alibaba, the China-based e‑commerce behemoth. As of this writing, the company has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of roughly $188 billion. Alibaba has a variety of successful business lines, including a marketplace, cloud computing, and financial services.

Jack is an impressive founder, but one fact surprised me. Alibaba is a technology company, but Jack Ma isn’t technical at all. He doesn’t write code and doesn’t have a deep understanding of tech. Yet he was able to found and scale a wildly successful technology company that changed commerce in his country.

If ever a nontechnical founder building a technology company needed inspiration, Jack Ma was the one. For nontechnical founders, his journey is worth studying.

A friend, who’s also an investor, gave me some feedback on my blog. This doesn’t happen often, so I was excited to hear what he had to say. I view any kind of feedback as an opportunity to get better, which is important to me.

Sharing topics that I’m thinking about is helpful to him. But he gets more value from the posts where I go deeper—specifically, when I share personal examples of how I’m acting on what I’ve learned or lessons I’ve learned from past actions related to the topic.

This was timely feedback, as I’ve recently been thinking about knowledge vs. wisdom. I get more value from wisdom and have decided to focus on reading to acquire wisdom this year.

Similarly, according to the feedback from my friend, he gets more value from the posts where I share wisdom and unique insights. I appreciated hearing that. It motivated me. Going forward, I want to write more posts where I share more of what I’ve learned from my successes and failures and the actions I’m currently taking based on what I’ve learned.

This is my two-hundred-third weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Financial history – I’ve been reading books on financial history lately. It’s been a great exercise in zooming out to see the big picture, understanding human behavior, and understanding some of the complexity of the financial system. I’m excited to keep learning in this area.
• Weekly learnings – I’m thinking about ways to share some of the things I learn each week. A friend suggested an idea that I like, and I’m going to solicit other people’s thoughts about it.
• Practical learning – This week was a reminder that the best way for me to learn is by doing—and that I learn the most when things don’t go as planned.

Week two hundred three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

I’m continuing with my learning survey. It’s turned into more of a customer discovery exercise than a survey. This week I had a call with an entrepreneur who’s also an investor. One thing he shared stuck with me:

“My learning is curiosity led but application driven.”

In other words, he’s looking to learn something to a level of competence sufficient to apply it. I like his wording—it’s a succinct and accurate description of how I and the entrepreneurs I’ve surveyed approach learning.

This week an entrepreneur told me about a new business he’s trying. He’d met a gifted creative whose work caught his eye. The creative wants the freedom to create what inspires him and thinks that a business that sells what he makes will give him that freedom. But he hasn’t had much luck getting the business off the ground. The entrepreneur got to know the creative and realized that he’s gifted in his craft, but not in business. He doesn’t understand or know how to apply business concepts.

This entrepreneur and creative have decided to test going into business together. If the test phase works out, they’ll continue. Each is responsible for his strengths: the entrepreneur for administration, marketing, and finances; the creative for creating the pieces and networking with other creatives.

When I heard about these two starting a business together, I was excited. Last month, I shared that I think a practitioner could be a good cofounder when paired with a business-minded hustler. I think a partnership like that could be a great, complementary founding team. The entrepreneurial experiment these two are running is exactly that. If successful, it could turn into something big.

I’m excited to follow the journey of this experiment and hear about what they learn along the way.

While researching a business, I learned that it generates significant revenue from ads. Digging deeper, I found out that it’s charging 10x more than I’d envisioned for ads. The coveted (and most expensive) ad slots are sold out for the next six months. I don’t have any inside information, but it wouldn’t surprise me if this business is generating eight figures in annual revenue from ads.

I don’t know a lot about ad-based business models, and this project has me curious. I want to learn more and will dive deeper into this space.