Ryan Reeves Profile picture
May 13, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
I like this mental model of "ground states."

Tobi Lutke mentioned it yesterday on "Invest Like the Best."

It's from physics and the definition is -- the lowest energy state of an atom or other particle.

In other words: what do you do when you don't have energy?

Mini-[THREAD]
2/ Tobi said his "ground state" was consuming information and learning how to make better decisions.

A lot of people's ground states are watching Netflix or if you're reading this, maybe it's scrolling Twitter? 😉

Another way to phrase this: how do you spend your free time?
3/ This feels like the essence of competitive advantage.

If one person's ground state is personal growth while another's is watching Netflix or going on Instagram, the divergence, in the long run, will be huge.

The next question then is: can ground states be learned?
4/ It feels like there is a good amount of innateness here. But I think it comes down to what you find interesting.

If you really enjoy learning about something, it can become a ground state.

When you're doing something you find super fun, you don't have to force focus.
5/ Without the need to expend energy, an activity can become a ground state. It's the perception of "expending" that's key. An activity can be a joy for one person and a drag for another.

This comes to the "follow your passion" vs. "get good at something" debate.
6/ This relates to career advice. Should someone follow their passion or master a skill and then come to enjoy the skill?

My intuition is that it's harder for the latter crowd to turn that skill into a ground state.

What do you think?
7/ Here are some closing thoughts on some ground states that would be great for investors:

- reading 10k's
- analyzing financials
- reading business biographies
- journaling
- consuming information
- understanding business models

What else?

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Ryan Reeves

Ryan Reeves Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @RyanReeves_

Jun 29, 2023
Some good sections from Chris Mayer’s 100 Baggers

1. The main job of an analyst is understanding how the company will create future value.
2. Average company life spans have been decreasing
3. Years it takes to get a 100 bagger. On average it takes 25 years at a 21% return
Read 7 tweets
Jun 27, 2023
Going back through “Measuring the Moat” by Mauboussin.

Here are some helpful things:

1. Industry Map

- Important to understand all of the players in an industry and how the whole value chain works.
2. Profit pools.

- Once you have the players, you need to understand which points in the value chain capture the most value. Profit pools are the factor of the excess returns on capital and the share of the industry’s total investment.
3. Market share stability

- Another important concept when studying an industry is how much the market share changes. If it is all over the place, that likely means the barriers to entry aren’t that high.
Read 7 tweets
Apr 11, 2023
1/ Over the past 13 years, Apple has brought in $758 billion in free cash flow.

And it has returned 93% of that to shareholders, shrinking share count by 37%.
2/ In 2010, the company's market cap was under $300 billion.

At that price, the entire market cap was paid back in cash in just 6 years!

After year 6, your yield on original cost just from free cash flow would've been around 20%.
3/ Today, the iPhone makes up 52% of revenue these days as services and other products have grown pretty quickly.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 21, 2023
1/ Intuit is probably most well-known for TurboTax.

If you take the average cost of the Deluxe offering ($80), the $3.9 billion in revenue means that roughly 48 million people use the software...
2/ But Quickbooks still accounts for a greater piece of the business and for SMBs, Quickbooks is definitely the outright leader.
3/ TurboTax has gotten some bad press over the past few years and it had to pay a $141 million fine last year for deceiving consumers that could've used their Free-to-file option.

If you didn't know, the IRS partners with firms to give free-to-file options if you make < $73k.
Read 10 tweets
Mar 12, 2023
1/ Visa's network effect is crazy.

4.1 billion of its cards (pre-paid, credit and debit) have been issued and 100 million merchants accept these cards.
2/ Below are comps of the card networks.

In 2022, Visa did about $14 trillion in total volume with about 707 million transactions per day.
3/ While doing $14 trillion in total volume (for context, US GDP is $23 trillion), it "only" did $30 billion in revenue.

This is about a 0.21% take-rate.
Read 8 tweets
Mar 7, 2023
1/ McDonald's has $54 billion in gross PPE.

Now, that's a lot of real estate! Image
2/ Before Prologis bought Duke Realty, it had $56 billion in gross PPE.

That means McDonald's has as much real estate as one of the LARGEST holders of industrial real estate in the world.
3/ But it didn't start out that way. Ray Kroc was struggling to make a profit after discovering the McDonald brothers.

The switch to buying the real estate and charging rental rates to franchisees really changed the underlying economics.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(