Ryan Reeves Profile picture
Sep 15, 2020 22 tweets 9 min read Read on X
Check out what some of the best VC's were saying about...

- Wix
- Shopify
- Twitch
- Twilio
- PagerDuty
- Fiverr
- Pinterest
- LinkedIn

...when they were still small companies.

[THREAD] 👇🏽

Thanks for sharing @BessemerVP
bvp.com/memos
1/ Wix pt. 1

Wix was a customizable MySpace. Funny to think how things change so quickly.

bvp.com/memos/wix
2/ Wix pt. 2

Look at this user interface! Wix has come so far.

Goes to show you that pace of innovation matters more than where a company is in the present.
3/ Shopify pt. 1

So interesting that replacing Tobi was even in the realm of possibility seeing how well he has performed.

bvp.com/memos/shopify
4/ Shopify pt. 2

The company has been focused on organic, word-of-mouth growth since day 1.
5/ Shopify pt. 3

$400 million exit rate in the best-case scenario. Off just a little bit 😂

I know these projections are so difficult but fascinating to see how people thought about the opportunity without hindsight.
6/ Twitch pt. 1

Never thought about it like this.

Raw materials were the streams and Twitch was acting as a marketplace to get those streams monetized.

bvp.com/memos/twitch
7/ Twitch pt. 2

Great insights into the value props of Twitch.

They are able to take a high rake because streamers view the money as a cherry on top, they aren't entitled to it.

Also, Twitch is aligned with publishers because it is essentially free marketing for games.
8/ Twilio pt. 1

"While growth has not been explosive..."

- it's still growing faster than 40% after all these years

And check out that valuation.

- $800k for its seed

bvp.com/memos/twilio
9/ Twilio pt. 2

The company hadn't even rolled out SMS yet. It was only a voice application.
10/ Twilio pt. 3

Twilio was on the verge of landing Google. Apparently, Google picked it over its internal Voice team.
11/ PagerDuty pt. 1

Those numbers are a thing of beauty.

137% MRR growth

bvp.com/memos/pagerduty
12/ PagerDuty pt. 2

Teams were previously just using Google Docs to record incident reports.
13/ Fiverr pt. 1

I finally understand why it's called "Five"rr 😂

bvp.com/memos/fiverr
14/ Fiverr pt. 2

Great origin story. Always cool to see a company born out of a founder's frustration
15/ Pinterest pt. 1

Pinterest first started out as a product catalog for iPhone apps.

Pinterest was a pivot.

[Forgot to mention this but so was Twitch. Gaming was not the original focus.]

bvp.com/memos/pinterest
16/ Pinterest pt. 2

"Very expensive..."

Last time I check, Pinterest's market cap was $22 billion
17/ Pinterest pt. 3

The company didn't have an established business model yet. Interesting how the affiliate model seemed more obvious than the ad-driven model.
18/ LinkedIn pt. 1

The company was pretty efficient from the beginning.

bvp.com/memos/linkedin
19/ LinkedIn pt. 2

Very cool to see how user growth was scaling. Took 477 days to get to 1 million but then only 77 days to get from 7 to 8 million.
20/ LinkedIn pt. 3

LinkedIn still has a lot of business model optionality. From advertising to subscriptions to vertical offerings, it's cool to see what growth was like in the early days.
End/

So cool to see how Bessemer's investors thought about analyzing these companies when they were still very small.

Thanks again for releasing these @BessemerVP!

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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

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