1/ Notes from @_ram_ episode @InvestLikeBest

A bit late to this, but I was really looking forward to listening to Ram on Patrick's podcast.

Ram is one of the most kind, humble, smart, and approachable PMs active on fintwit, and boy he did not disappoint.

Here are my notes.
2/ Lots of quick and dirty method of estimating the potential of internet.

Ram thinks global e-commerce and marketplace is a ~$40 Tn opportunity in 2040.

Show me the numbers? See the image.
3/ That's just products and services sold on the internet.

On top of that, you have advertisement which is typically ~1% of GDP. Advertising itself can make ~$10 Tn worth of businesses.

No wonder $AMZN wants a piece of that even if it comes at the expense of consumer experience
4/ Ram says his firm covers 45 stocks which in aggregate are worth $10-15 Tn.

But just those two aforementioned pieces alone are worth $50-60 Tn in 20 years.

Now consider payments, content, software. He believes we are looking at $100 Tn+ internet driven market cap in 2040.
5/ Four things Ram used to focus on:

Team
TAM
Growth intensity/growth culture
Unit economics

He dropped TAM because he consistently underestimated how big internet scale business can be.
6/ He's a fan of picks and shovel (think Instacart instead of $WMT or $TGT)

Prefers *brands* who are focusing on e-commerce as it might potentially expand TAM (think $LULU/ $NKE)

Also fan of infrastructure providers (think $DASH)
7/ When a business reduces friction and attains virality of consumer adoption, unit economics looks really good.

Once you have good unit economics, you can pour growth marketing dollars to scale it.
8/ About India:

"I think we're at the cusp of kind of that hockey stick opportunity because you've now got a young and extremely entrepreneurial ecosystem that all want to go and build wealth, that should remind us of America in the 1800s."
9/ Two things matter in ad-supported internet business.

a) Scale of the users or the time spent
b) the quality of tools to onboard advertisers

For direct content subscription business, the most important thing is the quality of the content. The next question is affordability.
10/ For e-commerce/marketplaces, Ram looks at contribution margin excluding all the discounts. He is a big believer of the power of convenience.
11/ "On-demand is a hand to hand street fight business on the ground. Street by street, location by location, street fighter business."
12/ On payments:

"Can you add value to the merchant by increasing conversion rates, reduce transaction losses? "

I don't have a good handle on the payments space, but the fees difference between US and other places is staggering. See the second image.
13/ For hiring, Ram looks for four uncoachable traits

Deep love for learning
Incredible work ethic
Mental flexibility
Persistence/grit

"I've come to the conclusion that I want to only hire givers and not takers."
End/ Thanks for this conversation guys, @_ram_ and @patrick_oshag. I'm sure fintwit would love another round in a few months.

Link to the episode: joincolossus.com/episodes/22392…

All my twitter threads: mbi-deepdives.com/twitter-thread…

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More from @borrowed_ideas

9 Jan
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If you are not American, chances are extremely high you probably yawn when a political leader who lost the election allege and claim the election was rigged.
2/ If Trump claiming election as fraud and inspiring supporters to protest lead to permanent ban on Twitter, what will happen to all those opposition leaders in all those countries?

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As telegraph operators were scattered all over the world, a telephone would be a great help for operators to coordinate with each other.
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1/ Thread: Limits to the asymmetric payoff for Bitcoin

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Just buy 1% of your portfolio; you really don’t need to understand anything.
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29 Dec 20
1/7 From 300 followers in March to 30,000 in December, I will remember 2020 as the year I got completely hooked to fintwit community.

Thank you to everyone for making fintwit such an enjoyable experience. Let me share my journey here in a short thread.
2/7 I started lurking at fintwit since mid-2019 and by the end of '19, I wished I were part of this cool little community on twitter.

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And it did. Everything changed when Paul Graham retweeted this $FB thread. Followers increased from 500 to 2.5k in 1 day.

A few days later, I RT that $AMZN thread again. This time, 3 PMs DMed me.

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23 Dec 20
1/ Thread: $AMZN Marketplace in 2020

I read an interesting piece on marketplaces today which reviewed the best year for marketplaces in a decade.

I came across some very interesting data points for $AMZN marketplace which will be the focus on this thread.
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Losers are: $GOOG, $WISH, and $EBAY.
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