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In Today’s Edition

• Peter Thiel’s comments on Europe

• The value of Customer Success

• YC’s Group Partners share advice on actually getting things done

• Goldman Sachs warns of hit to third-quarter earnings on deal to offload GreenSky

• OpenAI plans major updates to lure developers with lower costs

• WordPress.com blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms

• First-ever gene therapy trial to cure form of deafness begins

This platform’s 77% return is an outlier, but there's more

The news is true: Masterworks’ 15th sale just weeks ago returned an impressive 77% to investors. While such a high return is an outlier for the blue-chip art investing platform, every one of their sales to date has returned a profit to investors. 

In full, Masterworks has over 300 paintings and their 16 exits have delivered: 32%, 39.3%, 36.2%, 27.3%, 9.2%, 33.1%, 21.5%, 17.8%, 13.9%, 35%, 10.4%, 325.5%, 4.1%, 17.6%, and 77.3%, net annualized returns*. 

Even more impressive, every sale but one outperformed the stock market in the period from when it was offered to when it was sold. 

With performance like that, offerings on the platform can sell out in minutes. However, readers can skip the waitlist to join with this exclusive link. 

Performance of exited investments is not representative of artwork that has not yet sold and past performance is not indicative of future results. See important disclosures at masterworks.com/cd

🚀Startups Nuts

Peter Thiel’s comments on Europe

Of the seventeen $100bn corporations founded since 1990, eleven were in the U.S. and six in China. Is Europe priming itself for future success? It has the highest density of AI talent, the highest share of cited research publications, and a large student demographic studying computer science and engineering.

The value of Customer Success

Startups seem to be introducing Customer Success teams earlier in their journey. What used to be a post-Series A thing is now being introduced alongside your early paying customers. There’s often confusion across the organization as to what they really do. Are they a cost or profit center? Here’s how you can help ensure every department knows the value of Customer Success.

YC’s Group Partners share advice on actually getting things done

Chasing productivity can sometimes lead us down the wrong path. We end up doing work and optimizing things for the sake of it, rather than focusing on those few impactful things that really matter. Having the mindfulness to be able to identify the real work is the main battle.

🏭Business Nuts

SpaceX Debuts New Website for Cellular Starlink Service

SpaceX's upcoming Starlink for mobile phones will give customers access to LTE text, voice, and data across the globe. It will be able to service unmodified smartphones. SpaceX was originally hoping to launch with T-Mobile, but the companies have been silent about the deal since its announcement. The new Starlink for mobile website indicates that SpaceX plans to launch the voice and text service in 2025.

Goldman Sachs warns of hit to third-quarter earnings on deal to offload GreenSky

Goldman Sachs said Wednesday that it agreed to sell its fintech lending platform GreenSky to a group of investors led by private equity firm Sixth Street. The deal, which includes a book of loans created by Goldman, will result in a 19 cents per share reduction to third-quarter earnings, Goldman said in the statement. The New York-based bank is scheduled to disclose results Tuesday.

📱Tech Nuts

OpenAI plans major updates to lure developers with lower costs

OpenAI plans to introduce major updates to its API next month, including memory storage and vision capabilities. The new features are expected to be rolled out at the company's first-ever developer conference on November 6. They are designed to attract more developers to pay for access to OpenAI's models. OpenAI is aiming to hit $1 billion in revenue by 2024.

WordPress.com blogs can now be followed on Mastodon and other federated platforms

Anyone using the hosted version of WordPress can now connect their blogs to federated platforms like Mastodon. The integration allows blog owners to share their posts on other platforms and receive replies from those platforms. The blogs themselves can be used as fediverse profiles. The feature can be turned on by toggling the 'Enter the fediverse' option from within the Discussion section in WordPress' blog settings.

🔥Newsletter Spotlight

🎁Miscellaneous

First-ever gene therapy trial to cure form of deafness begins

Up to 18 children from the UK, Spain, and the US are being recruited for the world's first trial of a gene therapy to cure auditory neuropathy, a condition caused by the disruption of nerve impulses traveling from the inner ear to the brain. The condition can be caused by a variation in a single gene that produces a protein that allows inner hair cells in the ear to communicate with the hearing nerve. The study aims to deliver a working copy of the gene using a modified non-pathogenic virus. Participants will be monitored for five years to gauge whether the treatment works.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

• She's the star witness against Sam Bankman-Fried. Her testimony was explosive

• Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP

• The Google trial shows that Apple’s search deal is the most important contract in tech

• Abu Dhabi’s $1 trillion fund pushes deeper into private equity

• Tech Godfather says AI could rewrite code to escape control

• AMD to acquire AI startup in effort to catch Nvidia

• Stop obsessing about work all the time

• When to know it’s time to quit

• 3 ways you can buy happiness

• Inside Linear: Building With Taste, Craft, and Focus

• How to analyze stocks

😎Fun Fact

The world's first recorded financial scam involved selling shares in a non-existent, "fantastically air pump" company in 18th century England

🔥 Hot Book of the Day

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both.

The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billion—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.”

In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours.

“Think slow, act fast: That’s the rhythm of success.”

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