Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, style bias, and whatever else made me think last week. Please grab me on Twitter with any thoughts or feedback.

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In today’s post: this week we have a video interview with our investment team and a brand new whitepaper on corporate structure and culture. SITALWeek will return to regularly scheduled programming next week, in the meantime enjoy a week off from reading my rambling thoughts!

How Structure Impacts Company Culture
One of the top questions we get at NZS Capital is how we assess corporate culture inside of companies as part of our investment process. As outsiders to the companies we invest in, this is one of the hardest things to do. There is no easy answer, and often we disappoint people when we explain just how intangible uncovering excellent corporate culture is: we know it when we see it. But, there are questions you can ask and signals you can look for around the structure of a company itself that yield insights. Having the right structure in place allows an organization to slow down time and get more done than the competition. Brinton is a big network theory nerd, and he worked on this brand new whitepaper with our editor to convey a few of the important elements of high functioning teams and companies. There are three elements of any network inside an organization: the number of nodes in the network (few or many), the style bias (how many things the network is trying to accomplish), and connection structure (hierarchical or dense). It turns out there are only three combinations that work sustainably while creating the potential for healthy culture: 1) few nodes with a narrow style bias and dense connections; 2) many nodes with a narrow style bias and dense connections; or 3) many nodes with wide style bias and a hierarchical structure. Sound geeky? It is, but the paper has a lot more examples and graphics to help explain the basic concepts. You can read the PDF here.

Live From Brinton's Treehouse
Brinton and Jon on the investment team joined John Rotonti for a deep dive discussion of our investment process. I hear they even shared some top secret NZS slides. You can watch the hour-long video on the NZS YouTube channel. Thanks to the Motely Fool for having us on. In other news NZS Capital has been appointed as an additional manager on the Mediolanum Challenge Technology Fund and Jon Bathgate was recently in this Bloomberg Businessweek magazine article discussing big tech platforms becoming chip designers.

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Disclaimers:

The content of this newsletter is my personal opinion as of the date published and is subject to change without notice and may not reflect the opinion of NZS Capital, LLC.  This newsletter is simply an informal gathering of topics I’ve recently read and thought about. It generally covers topics related to the digitization of the global economy, technology and innovation, macro and geopolitics, as well as scientific progress, especially in the fields of cosmology and the brain. I will frequently state things in the newsletter that contradict my own views in order to be provocative. Often I try to make jokes, and they aren’t very funny – sorry. 

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Nothing in this newsletter should be construed as investment advice. The information contained herein is only as current as of the date indicated and may be superseded by subsequent market events or for other reasons. There is no guarantee that the information supplied is accurate, complete, or timely. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. 

Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal and fluctuation of value. Nothing contained in this newsletter is an offer to sell or solicit any investment services or securities. Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) are highly speculative investments and may be subject to lower liquidity and greater volatility. Special risks associated with IPOs include limited operating history, unseasoned trading, high turnover and non-repeatable performance.