What we're focusing on this quarter, Q1 2025
Hiring (send us referrals!), automations, "modifying the index", RFC processes, our employee handbook, and more...
Hello, friends of Titanium Birch.
We’re big on clarity—in how we work, make decisions, and share our thinking. So we’re trying a new format for our newsletter, where we pull back the curtain on what each of us is focusing on this quarter to give you a sense of what goes on inside Titanium Birch.
TJ 🤖
It’s the start of the year—I’m heads-down on improving the automations that feed financial planning and portfolio analysis.
We’ve engaged a vendor to automatically transcribe communications from private-market funds. I’m working on taking data from their API and creating continuously updated journal entries for our financial statements. I’m also working on updating our chart of accounts to account for all the new types of investments we’ve made in the past year.
I’ve gotten my hands on Larry Swedroe’s The Incredible Shrinking Alpha as a way to understand smarter ways of indexing. My favorite downtime activity has been to indulge in some generative art with R (my first programming language).
I’m excited as we start expanding our observability efforts from what’s happening in the portfolio to the broader market and economy, which is why we’re hiring another software engineer to help us!
Peter 👽
Our most important effort is hiring for our open positions in Singapore. (For our open investment roles, we’re now accepting applications from candidates who aren't already here.) We’re coming across many investment opportunities, and last year we often spun up the team to run due diligence, thus pulling us away from hiring and our “build the platform” work. This year we’re specifically saying “no more direct or fund investments until we’ve hired at least one more investment professional.” This increased focus has helped—we’ve all been spending a lot more time on hiring this year so far. We’re very keen to get more referrals to candidates. No need to vouch for the people you refer—if you know anyone who might be interested, please reach out! We’ve been steadily decreasing our requirements for specific experience and skills, and have been shifting the emphasis even more towards just hiring for personality and core abilities.
I’ve also been leading us through forming a more well-reasoned opinion on what the contents of the public-equities portion of our portfolio should be. Our starting point is a low-cost index fund of worldwide equities, such as funds tracking the FTSE Global All Cap index. Yet despite including thousands of stocks, that index allocates 4.1% to Apple and 1.3% to Tesla. The former might breach a single-stock exposure risk limit, and the latter seems so dearly priced that it’s exceedingly unlikely to meet our hurdle-rate for long-term returns. Do we really want so much weight in those stocks at those prices? Maybe, but let’s think it through. We’re exploring ways to combine Boglehead-style passive investing with value investing: start with a broad market-cap-weighted index of worldwide stocks, then “slightly modify the index” and reduce the amount of concentration in businesses that are already large yet still priced for perfection. While we don’t (yet) have the ability to form particularly well-researched opinions on what’s a reasonable price for a given stock, let’s try forming opinions on what’s “very likely to be a way-too-high price” for a relatively small set of companies where this really matters—the “high-market-cap and very high valuation metrics” companies such as Tesla in 2025-02—and potentially reduce their weights in our portfolio.
That’s led me to write some code, learn more Bloomberg Terminal, and play with AI agent coding tools. I’ve been particularly fond of Cursor. I can give the agent permission to run code (and I make that relatively safe by running the whole thing in something called a dev container, akin to a sandbox). As the agent and I collaborate on solving a problem, one foundational instruction in all interactions is to have it “communicate with its future self” by writing down learnings and rules in a format that we keep in source-control and that all future instances of agents will load and follow. A bit like how we humans use retros and postmortems to systematise a team’s learning, the agents can do it as well!
This also led to the creation of a new type of process for us. Our existing investment processes cover cases where we say “let’s try to increase a certain type of exposure, such as infrastructure” and then source and evaluate various funds offering such exposure and decide which, if any, to invest in. The challenge above is a bit different, so we’re currently trying out a lightweight RFC process where a memo defines the problem, argues why it’s important, and proposes a specific solution. Then we put that through the wringer by debating the many sides of the issues, including by getting written input from friends of the firm.
Justina 🐯
Hey, Justina here. Here’s what’s been on my plate lately:
Hiring (50%)
Branding (25%)
Office management (8%)
Miscellaneous (17%)
Bacon and pancakes
What I’m focusing on this quarter
Hiring: We want every candidate to have a smooth, positive experience throughout our hiring process. That means prompt responses, clear expectations, collecting feedback, and a thoughtful journey through our funnel.
Office-management: In December, we moved out of our serviced office into our own office space. Since our team is small, I’ve become the de facto office manager. The challenge? Keeping these tasks from eating up too much time—or mental space. Even when I’m not actively handling office tasks, they linger in my head. The fix? Systemising everything. For example, instead of grabbing oat milk one carton at a time at the supermarket, I’m ordering online in bulk, tracking consumption, and setting calendar reminders for repurchase.
Branding: We want to give people a clear idea of what it’s like to work at Titanium Birch. As a first step, we published our employee handbook on our website—something Peter suggested after reading about how a small startup built their employer brand. Another initiative is sending out this experimental newsletter, where we give you a peek under the hood.
What I’ve been reading
Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. My sister, who’s curious about a management role at her startup, recommended it—so I picked it up too. The premise? Leaders fall into two camps: Multipliers, who unlock the genius in those around them, and Diminishers, who stunt growth. This book reminds me how lucky I am to be in a role where I get to learn, experiment, and work with Multipliers every day.
I’m also reading Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie. I found this in a bag of books abandoned by my building’s recycling bin. My first foray into crime fiction happens to be with Christie’s last published novel. Now that I’m deep into it, I can’t describe much without risking spoilers. Let’s just say some passages have been haunting me in my sleep. And I can’t wait for the big reveal.
If you know someone who’d be a great fit for one of our open roles, send them our way—we love candidate referrals! And if you want to keep up with what we’re working on, follow us on LinkedIn for more updates from the team.
Disclaimer: The content in this newsletter should not be taken as investment advice.