Twilio: Racing Up the Stack?
Erstwhile Columbia professor Bruce Greenwald, in his book Competition Demystified, wrote that over time even products and services that initially might require a high
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Writing on businesses, technology, industries, and long-term investing.
Upstart’s Credibility Gap
Summary: What Upstart Network is, the credibility gap that emerged from repeated revenue guide misses and putting loans on its balance sheet, what Upstart
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Zuckerberg’s Meta Miscalculation
Physicist Richard Feynman delivered a commencement speech at Caltech, in 1974, called “Cargo Cult Science.” He pointed out all the mistaken theories we have,
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Should You Believe Spotify's Daniel Ek?
On June 8th Spotify held an Investor Day, its first such event since the company became public through a direct listing four years ago.It was a well-produced affair. Up-front, Ek acknowledged that the investment has been challenging (the stock is trading at all-time lows): “Some may also think th…
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Atlassian: Growing Ambition
“You don’t want to invest in growth companies, you want to invest in companies that are growing their ambition.” – Mike Cannon-BrookesEvery time I watch an Atlassian Investor Day I think, “This is one of the best businesses I’ve ever seen.” This year’s was no different.Atlassian is mission-critic…
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Why SaaS is Like Walmart
Software as a service (SaaS) companies are frequently misunderstood because they are investing for the long-term and don’t generate accounting profits today. This gives bears the ammunition to argue that these companies won’t ever generate a profit. It wasn’t long ago when quite famous “value inv…
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Why Empire Building is Important
Why is empire building important? Because it results in extreme outcomes. Consider the Mongolian Empire: “In twenty-five years...
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Roblox, the Coming Ad Titan
“In the next three to five years, every brand will have a Roblox strategy.”
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The BNPL Revolution
One of the largest BNPL companies, Affirm, became publicly traded earlier this year, and we became shareholders.
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Valuation, Portfolio Construction, and Lots of Companies
In this interview with John Rotonti of The Motley Fool, we really cover the waterfront. We talk about portfolio construction, valuation, and discuss the following companies: Shopify, Wix, Slack, PayPal, Square, Twilio, Roku, Spotify, and Zoom. We also talk about the ecological approach we use, wh…
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More Lemonade!
This week we are back with another conversation with my friend Ryan Reeves, this time on Lemonade ($LMND — we wrote a previous article about the company here). We talk about the bull and bear cases for the company, the financial model, the importance of using imagination when thinking about the f…
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Shopify, Slack and more on the Investing City podcast
We go deep into a discussion on Shopify and Slack, the competitive landscape with other ecommerce and collaboration solutions, and more.
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Discovering Innovative Companies with Marcelo Lima
As investors, we must keep an open mind, but most people resist new ideas. How to keep that mental flexibility and learn new things?
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Growth Underwriter: Marcelo Lima on valuing SaaS businesses
How did the internet fundamentally change business? It's all about zero marginal costs, and playing a different game: blanket the world, cap
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Boom Supersonic: Getting There in Half the Time
Who doesn’t want to fly across the Atlantic in half the time? This is the question that got me hooked on Boom Supersonic.
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Lemonade: A GEICO of the 21st Century?
In August 2018, in our Q2 letter, I made an analogy between Ben Graham’s investment in GEICO and our transition to focusing on businesses riding technology adoption curves. I also compared GEICO’s pervasive advertising as a means of acquiring customers with a long lifetime value to software as a…
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Investing in the Metaverse
What is the metaverse? Its full expression will be a persistent, immersive virtual reality.
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On Innovation, Our Portfolio and More
I concluded that we were undergoing a period of very rapid technological change similar to what we saw at the end of the 19th century.
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