Intros & Minor Reflections
Hi! I’m Yaw (pronounced “Yao”, it means “a guy born on Thursday” in Twi, a language spoken in Ghana & Ivory Coast). I am a Ghanaian-American(I was born in U.S., both parents were born in Ghana), and I’ll be covering a wide range of topics on my substack. Growing up my parents told me to go by my middle name “Benjamin” or “Ben”, but I no longer go by that name.
A) When, I was in undergrad, people called me “Ben Ass” which I utterly detested.
B) I see “Ben” as like the former me. The Pre-2019 me. The “me” before I became smart, handsome, hardworking and confident in myself. In 2019, I read a book a week (sometimes I would be lazy and read a book every 3 weeks) until I started graduate school in August 2020. I read books on different topics: Bill Clinton’s autobiography, atheism, Value Investing, the collapse of the Soviet Union to 15 different countries, History of China, The Documentary Hypothesis critique of the Hebrew Bible, Keynesianism, How personalities influence political ideologies, History of Anti-Semitism, etc. I used to be that math & science kid who thought history and literature were for idiots who are afraid numbers. My Lord, I was quite a numbskull.
I am currently a software product manager at Capital One, building state-of-the-art fraud detection tools for your credit cards, and I’m having a good time so far. I live in NYC and I recently graduated with my MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management in May 2022.
I received my undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at RPI, in Troy, NY. My previous occupations were being an aero-structural engineer at Boeing’s Defense & Space division, and a real estate manager & investor at my family’s real estate firm.
I got tired of posting things on Instagram. It’s not really the medium for knowledge seeking or opinion sharing, and Twitter’s platform makes it difficult to put all your thoughts down in a post. Substack is a good medium for people to digest my ideas and respond to them.
I do not claim to have an infallible, Giga-Einstein IQ. I’ll probably get things wrong and some of my claims might be contentious. I’ll try to be intellectually humble. I write because I find it incredibly therapeutic and enjoy bouncing my thoughts off other people.
What You’ll Get at This Blog
Posts that I have industry experience in (Boeing taught me about American Manufacturing & the Military Industrial Complex, my Family’s business taught me finance, housing regulation, and the NYC Real Estate market, & now I am learning about Financial Technology and Banking)
Posts where I synthesize knowledge that I have learned from econ & finance professors at MIT with my own readings and knowledge. I’ll write about topics in an understandable and snarky way. I’ll share my own answers to questions you probably asked but didn’t dig deep in the rabbit hole for: (Why America acts as the World Police post-WW2, Fall of the Soviet Union, Greek Debt Crisis, Deficit Spending, Electrification of our economy)
Posts on attending a top business school program: (GRE/GMAT prep to 700+, what path to take at business school, etc.)
Book Reviews — (I just finished “The End of the World is Just the Beginning” by Peter Zeihan)
If you enjoy reading about serious topics: finance, history, economics, technology, and politics then this substack is for you. Some of my articles might go into topics that somewhat basic and some will be somewhat complex. We will see.