This weekend, I was chatting with a friend about public markets and IPOs. Neither of us knew how IPOs are trending this year, so I decided to check the stats. Here’s what I found:

2024 IPOs

• January: 15
• February: 16
• First two months total: 31

For comparison, here are the stats for the same months for the last five years:

2023 IPOs

• January: 8
• February: 17
• First two months total: 25
• Full-year total: 154

2022 IPOs

• January: 34
• February: 32
• First two months total: 66
• Full-year total: 181

2021 IPOs

• January: 118
• February: 132
• First two months total: 250
• Full-year total: 1,035

2020 IPOs

• January: 12
• February: 20
• First two months total: 32
• Full-year total: 480

2019 IPOs

• January: 6
• February: 21
• First two months total: 27
• Full-year total: 232

The number of IPOs completed in the first two months of this year has increased compared to the same months in 2023 (which was an anemic year). But we’re well below the number of IPOs we saw in 2021 (which was a record year).

Interestingly, the stock market reached an all-time high this past week. The NASDAQ Composite Index reached a record high close of 16,274 this past week. Its previous high was 16,057 over two years ago in November 2021.

I’m curious to see how IPO activity plays out for the rest of this year, especially if the NASDAQ Composite Index stays above the records set in 2021.

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

• Commerce gateway – I’m starting to see a pattern in the origin stories of wildly successful entrepreneurs of the last few centuries. Many of them got their start by selling products. They were essentially retailers. After they learned basic entrepreneurial lessons, they found painful problems and created solutions to them. Commerce is a gateway to entrepreneurship for many.
• Storytelling – I’ve kickstarted my progress on my goal of publicly practicing my storytelling in 2024. I still have a few more things I need to do, but I’m hoping to begin telling stories soon.  
• Reading insights – I tested sharing, in my posts, insights from a book I read. This was helpful. While I was reading, I took better notes on potentially insightful passages because I knew I’d be sharing those insights. The process of writing helped clarify my thinking. Overall, this enhanced my reading process.‍
• Reviewing highlights – Digitizing highlights from physical books has been a pain. The best software I’ve found so far isn’t great. I plan to test a few others, but the chances of finding a satisfactory solution to this problem aren’t looking good.

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

This week, an entrepreneur told me about a real estate project he’s finishing. He shared that he ran into several delays and other hurdles that he didn’t anticipate. Because of them, he had to adjust how he funded the project to give himself enough runway to complete it. The project looks great and is projected to do well financially.

During our chat, I asked him about the projected completion timeline versus what played out. He planned for the project to take a little over a year, and it ended up taking twice as long. The only reason he was able to complete the project instead of being forced to abandon it was that he personally had the cash to see it to completion.

In the end, it should all work out for this entrepreneur. His situation reminded me of a lesson I learned the hard way as an early-stage founder. When I’m doing something difficult, unforeseen events will cause things to take twice as long as I thought they would. Building in enough runway to support things taking twice as long should be part of my plan.

Yesterday I shared a key concept I took away from reading Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone’s book I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. Today I read a section where Langone shared the details of how he orchestrated Home Depot’s successful IPO in 1981. It was a tough environment in which to raise money from public-market investors. The economy was in a recession, inflation was through the roof, and interest rates were surging. But Home Depot was just a start-up and needed cash.

One week before the IPO date, bankers said they could fill only $3 million of the target $6 million the company needed to raise. Langone got to work and figured out a way to craft a creative deal and sell it to the existing investors (who ended up not being able to sell shares in the IPO). Everyone agreed to the new terms, and the company raised the $6 million it badly needed.

Langone’s reflection on this difficult situation stuck with me:

If there’s anything I would take a bow for throughout this whole process, it would be this: never giving up, and thinking creatively, instead of reactively, when the chips are down . . . . You get to enjoy lemonade instead of the lemons God gives you . . . .

Langone was in a tough spot. Home Depot cofounders, employees, and existing investors were all counting on him to remove the IPO roadblocks before the deadline. He was in a high-pressure situation, and he kept pushing. He focused on figuring out how to accomplish the goal given the hand they’d been dealt. His solution was unorthodox but ended up working. Absent Langone’s persistence and resourcefulness, Home Depot might not have gone public in 1981 or, worse, survived.

A few weeks ago, a friend suggested that I learn about the founding of Home Depot, since I’m in Atlanta. I did, and one of the cofounders wasn’t what I expected. His name is Ken Langone. He’s a colorful character from humble beginnings, a hybrid between entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and investment banker. I watched a few YouTube videos of him and got more interested in his story.

I discovered that Langone wrote a book called I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. It’s about his life and adventures in business. I bought it as soon as I found it and started reading. I’m not finished yet, but so far I’m enjoying it.

One concept that Langone shares in the book is over-delivering to cement relationships. Langone was the banker who IPO’d Ross Perot’s company, Electric Data Systems (EDS), in 1968. Langone had never taken a company public before and had a lot riding on the EDS IPO being successful. He thought highly of Perot. He wanted this transaction to be a success, and he also wanted to build a long-term relationship with Perot. Because of EDS’s uniqueness and growth potential, he was sure the public markets would be receptive to the IPO. He told Perot he could take EDS public at 100 times earnings (a number far higher than other bankers thought possible), or $15 per share.

The IPO was a success, and Langone was able to deliver Perot 115 times earnings, or $16.50 per share. Perot was ecstatic. He publicly praised Langone whenever the opportunity arose. Perot’s praise and the publicity about the EDS IPO got Langone a flood of new business. It also cemented his relationship with Perot because he far exceeded Perot’s lofty expectations.

Langone watched others over-promise and under-deliver. They’d close a transaction but ruin relationships because they’d lost people’s trust. Langone didn’t want to ruin relationships, so he took a different approach. To build a relationship and trust, he set what he thought were reasonable expectations and worked doggedly to over-deliver.

Fun fact: Because of Perot’s relationship with Langone, Perot was one of the first people who got the chance to invest in Home Depot when it was an early-stage company in 1978. Perot came close to investing $2 million and would have owned 70% of Home Depot if the transaction had been completed. As of the writing of this post, Home Depot has a market cap (i.e., valuation) of roughly $375 billion.

This weekend I began reviewing some of the highlights in books I’ve read. I realized that I have a lot of physical books with highlights. The best ideas I’ve read are scattered across tons of physical books, which adds friction to my goal of regularly reviewing the best ideas from these books.

Having my highlights centralized in one digital repository that I can access from my phone would be valuable. I’ve been playing with a reading app that does this, but the process of getting text from a book into the app isn’t efficient. I must take a picture of each highlight, which the app converts to text. The conversion is suboptimal, so then I have to correct the text before storing the highlight. Once the highlight is digitized it’s great, but getting to that point is painful.

If I want to regularly review the important concepts from what I’ve read, I’ll need to either find a better way to digitize highlights from physical books or read digital books (e.g., on Kindle). I enjoy physical books, so the former is my preference.

I read a quote this weekend from Charlie Munger that got me thinking:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

I believe what Charlie is getting at is that continual learning increases your chances of success in the long run. Learning leads to acquiring wisdom, which improves decision-making and changes behavior. Knowing what to do and when to do it increases your chances of achieving your goals in the long run. Regular learning is something the average person can do to achieve outsize results.

From my learning survey results, I see a desire among driven people to learn and achieve their goals. But I see lots of friction along the path to the wisdom that helps improve their decisions and actions. I’m wondering if some of that friction could be removed and what impact that would have on these people’s lives. Would it materially improve their lives long term?

I’ve been thinking about how to best capture and retain the most important concepts in the books I read. I highlight and make notes as I read, and yesterday I decided to start reviewing those annotations regularly. I think that will be helpful, but it doesn’t feel like enough. Reviewing helps with retention of ideas, but it doesn’t ensure clarity around them or the main concepts in each book.

After almost four years of writing daily posts, I’ve learned that writing helps you clarify your thoughts—mainly because you must first think clearly before you can write clearly. The writing process also aids in uncovering nonobvious insights.

Today I decided I’m going to test a new habit. When I finish reading a book, I’m going to write down the main concepts I learned from it and any new insights I formed. My goal is to distill the most valuable wisdom or ideas and capture new ideas sparked by the book. I think this will be a fun challenge that will enhance the value I get from my reading, and it may also bring value to others and myself in the future.

Wish me luck!

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

• Learning –This week I spent time dissecting an investment that hasn’t performed well. I was frustrated and motivated to figure out where I went wrong in my thinking. This analysis combined with my reading helped me uncover an error in my thinking about certain types of investments. Going forward, I plan to do something slightly different that I think could make a material difference.
• Reading – When I read, I highlight passages and take notes about important concepts. However, I’ve rarely reviewed the notes or highlights. This week I reviewed old highlights and was surprised at how much I’d forgotten. I realized that some important things from my reading don’t stick because of how much and how regularly I’m reading. I want to change this so I can maximize what I get from my reading. I’m going to play with using some of my reading sessions to review notes.

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

I’m reading All I Want to Know Is Where I'm Going to Die So I'll Never Go There: Buffett & Munger—A Study in Simplicity and Uncommon, Common Sense by Peter Bevelin. I’ve never read a book structured like this one. It takes old quotes from various letters and interviews that Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett gave and structures the quotes as if they were part of a conversation with someone seeking their wisdom.

I’m not done with the book yet, but one quote from Charlie Munger caught my attention today:

I have what I call an ‘iron prescription’ that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.

A few days ago, I shared that Henry Ford had a similar view of the importance of understanding other people’s perspectives. Ford and Munger are two credible people who achieved outsize business success. Ford died in 1947; Munger, in 2023. Since they reached the same conclusion although their professional careers occurred at different times, it’s probably timeless wisdom. I want to work toward mastering it.