Writing as Conviction Manufacturing

Finding out what you think by writing it down

Micky Malka on Ribbit Capital's small body of published essays: "we can sit here and talk about ideas for hours, but if you're not willing to put them in writing, you will never learn what truly they are, how deep they are."¹ The purpose is not persuasion or deal flow, it is conviction, and conviction is treated as instrumental rather than as a personality trait: "if you cannot have conviction, then you're going to be going in mood swings with the markets, up and down. The only way to really have a joyful investment life, or life in general, is to try to play this very long infinite game. And the only way to do that well is you need conviction in whatever you do. You've got to be willing to be wrong for a long time," an application of Infinite Game to the practice of writing itself.

The practice has three properties worth separating. It is written deliberately against the present tense, meant to conform to what the world will look like in ten or fifteen years rather than to what it thinks today, the same posture as Definiteness of the Future. It is slow, four or five months to a year for a single essay, and roughly eighteen months for the full cycle of thinking, articulating, testing, sharing, and reworking a thesis the firm is willing to stand behind. And publication functions as an accountability mechanism rather than as distribution: the finished essay goes to the founders Ribbit works with and to its own limited partners, specifically so they can hold the firm to it. "Because we want them to hold us accountable. This is our thinking. You have the chance. You can walk out, or you can keep believing in our thesis." There is a second-order effect Malka treats as a bonus rather than the goal: the founders encountered while a thesis is still being written are mostly not investments, since the firm is still learning from them, but the ones who read the finished piece and respond by saying they understand it and want to talk become the decade-long relationships the firm runs on, so the essay doubles as a filter for which founders read carefully.¹ The lineage is explicit: Malka has read and highlighted Warren Buffett's annual letters since he was thirteen, and says they "completely" influenced his decision to write.

Why it matters

Most investment writing follows a decision and exists to explain it after the fact. This practice inverts the order, using the writing itself as the process that produces a position durable enough to survive years of contrary evidence, a specific capability that a long, patient strategy requires and that discussion alone cannot produce, since talking allows a person to sound coherent without actually being coherent. Publishing a thesis to the people who can walk away converts a private belief into a public constraint, removing the option to quietly drift once a strategy stops working. See The Napkin Test, the compression check the finished essays still have to pass.

Open question

Conviction and stubbornness look identical from the inside, and an eighteen-month thesis published to your own limited partners raises the cost of ever abandoning it, which means the practice manufactures the willingness to be wrong for a long time without necessarily supplying a mechanism for noticing when that has actually happened. The output is also very small, only a handful of essays exist by Malka's own account, which leaves open whether the bar is genuinely this high or whether the practice is more occasional than systematic.