Hey Friends,
If you only read one article this week, it should be the Killer D.A by David Sacks.
Hours after posting on Instagram about her optimism for 2021, Hanako Abe was killed by a hit-and-run driver in San Francisco. She was 27-years-old.
The drunken driver, Troy McAllister, struck her and another woman with a stolen car.
Troy had been arrested five times for various crimes, as recently as December 20th, but San Francisco’s District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, refused to press charges.
When Chesa Boudin won the election as D.A. in 2019, he said, “There can be no justice when we utilize prison and jail as the solution to all our problems. We must think differently.”
That’s reasonable.
But, he’s been very vague in describing his alternative solutions.
Furthermore, he leveraged the pandemic as a catalyst to reduce San Francisco’s jail population by 40% and wrote a piece titled “I’m keeping S.F. safer by emptying the jail.”
But, this strategy has been a complete failure.
Compared to the prior year, homicides increased 32%, burglaries 49%, and motor vehicle thefts 35% in 2020 according to SFPD statistics.
Boudin prefers to prosecute tech companies than the Fentanyl dealers who serve their clientele across the Tenderloin in broad daylight.
He believes locking up criminals destroys communities.
Sure, locking up people is not always the right answer, but neither is decarceration.
You cannot have a vibrant, dynamic civic life if young professionals don’t want to work here, and even more crucially, don’t want to raise a family here. Tiptoeing around dirty needles and human feces, keeping their cars off the street for fear of break-ins or just mindless vandalism, being confronted in their homes by naked, masturbating meth addicts, getting mowed down on city streets by a drunk in a stolen car, and seeing all this and more go unpunished makes people want to leave and put down roots elsewhere. - David Sacks
How do you bounce back from a forecast miss?
My friend, Brian Kotlyar, SVP of Demand Generation at New Relic, answered this question and schooled me on all things marketing in our recent interview:
You can find the full interview on my blog.
SoFi
Chamath announced his latest SPAC merger with SoFi, a company that is disrupting the lending space. He explains his bullish thesis in the interview below:
Quick Summary:
Before Chamath makes a new investment, he identifies patterns in his previous successful ones, i.e., Amazon, Tesla, etc.
He mapped those patterns to the Financial Services—it’s clear that our current banking infrastructure doesn’t meet the needs’ needs.
What are those needs? Low to no-fees, Fair and transparent lending, and a suite of products, i.e., one-stop-shop.
SoFi checks all of these boxes.
You can read Chamath’s 1-page investment thesis below:
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Bardia