How Mismanaged is Block?
I used to think that Block, the payments and digital banking company previously known as Square, was well-managed. It’s a consistent grower,
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Writing on businesses, technology, industries, and long-term investing.
Tesla FSD Could Be Big
During Tesla’s second quarter earnings call last week, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla is “very open to licensing our FSD software and
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Tesla Opens Up Superchargers to Competitors: Bad Move?
In the last few weeks Ford, then GM, announced that they would adopt the Tesla-invented NACS charger and allow their vehicles to use
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Apple Vision Pro: Is This Meta’s iPhone Moment?
There is a scene in the recently released movie Blackberry in which the employees at Research in Motion, maker of the eponymous smartphone, are
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Okta’s Execution Mess
Okta, the cloud identity provider, reported earnings this week and while the results were very strong on the surface, the company flagged extensive challenges
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Salesforce’s Best Acquisition Yet: Itself
Salesforce is the granddaddy of cloud stocks. It was the first sizeable SaaS company to go public, in 2004, and put the idea of
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Stripe vs. Adyen: Collision Course
Adyen reported earnings last week and the company showed its usual strong growth with processed volumes up 60 percent year-over-year to €346
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Twilio’s Margin Target: How Achievable is It?
Twilio reported Q2 earnings on August 5th and despite delivering on its promise of organic growth of at least 30 percent—it reported 33
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Square’s Margins, Square vs. Shopify
Square, now called Block, reported Q2 earnings last week. The company delivered solid growth, with net revenues excluding bitcoin and AfterPay of $2.41
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Ping and SailPoint: A Look at Thoma Bravo’s Identity Rollup
Thoma Bravo is a private equity company with ~$100 billion in AUM and a strong track record investing in software businesses according to a
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Tesla and Shopify: Integration, Modularity, and Value Capture
This is a follow-up on my recent posts on Shopify and Tesla. It occurred to me that there’s an interesting connection worth
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Shopify: A Rake Not Far Enough
Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist, once wrote a post called A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy. “Rake” is the term for what
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Chasing Tesla: There is No Catalog
In chapter five of their book The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor wrote that managers must ask, “What do we need
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Netflix’s Advertising Ambitions
Consumers are feeling the pain of inflation. Yesterday, AT&T reported that its wireless customers are having trouble paying their bills on time.
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Stock-Based Compensation: Friend or Foe?
In the border skirmish separating so-called “growth” from “value investors,” few topics spark a more heated battle than that of stock-based compensation.
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Unity: Doesn’t Add Up
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the Unity/ironSource merger announcement. The most two most salient points I’d like
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Unity + ironSource: A Look at the Deal
Yesterday, Unity announced the acquisition of ironSource in an all-stock deal. Unity is a game engine with a dominant position in mobile and
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Twilio’s Go to Market Evolution
This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Twilio’s margin pressures, the growing apps business, and what this means for investors.
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