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Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

5 May

Some businesses I've watched rise and fall:

DEC • Wang • Prime • Tandem • Silicon Graphics • Sun • Atari • Osborne • Commodore • WordPerfect • Lotus • Ashton Tate • Borland • Lucent • 3Com • Banyan • Nortel •Novell • Motorola • AT&T (long distance business)

“When your sales slow down, its probably because of some horrible mistake you made a couple of years ago. By the time your sales go down, you’re dead, because it’s too late to do anything about it.”

Bill Gates said this in the mid 1990s but I've lost the source. Probably 1994.

“Novel has a commanding lead in networking. Apple is known for better ease of use. Lotus has captured the market’s imagination with Notes, and we have been slow to respond.”

Bill Gates
Chicago Tribune, January 24, 1994

Read 5 tweets

Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

4 May

Every beam of every satellite has a capacity limit. Beam capacity can grow but there's always a limit based on laws if physics. One way to ration that capacity is based on contention and another is to limit users in a beam. news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…

One way to increase the number of beams is to increase the number of satellites:

"SpaceX continued the deployment of its Starlink broadband megaconstellation May 4 with the second launch of 60 satellites in less than a week." spacenews.com/spacex-continu…

One way to increase the number of satellites (which creates more beams) is to use Starships which have a planned capacity of 400 Starlink satellites instead of 60 on a Falcon 9. news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…

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Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

2 May

1/ I remember writing a paper for this Bill Gates retreat in 1993 like it was yesterday. It was the year the commercial internet was born.

"This first ThinkWeek was the first time Bill looked deeply at infrastructure for the information superhighway."
…rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/023-thinkweek

@stevesi

2/ I wrote a new briefing paper each time Bill Gates retreated to Hood Canal to read and think:

@stevesi writes: "The April 1994 ThinkWeek was my third and last. Bill devoted a good deal of time to writing his first strategic internet memo."

Business + internet was emergent!

3/ When Bill Gates/Craig McCaw invested in Teledesic in 1993 we had this crazy idea for a broadband "Internet in the Sky" composed of a constellation of hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit. People thought we were NUTS, which was a signal that we were on the right track.

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Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

1 May

1/ What might you want to take away from today's Berkshire meeting?

Focus on the way they think about the investing process. You are not them.

You have a different circle of competence and different resources, needs and goals.

How they think about investing is what matters.

2/ As an example, the idea behind circle of competence is so simple it is embarrassing to say it out loud:

risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.

A VC might know a lot about software, but not much about biotech.

Recognizing the edge of your competence is valuable.

3/ Margin of safety is simple:

No matter how wonderful a business may be, it’s not worth an infinite price.

Paying less than assets are worth is protection against making errors.

The best margin of safety is the value of a company's sustained competitive advantage over time.

Read 46 tweets

Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

1 May

Buffett, 90, and Munger, 97, will give me all I can handle tomorrow. My game plan is to channel my inner Bill Walton using obscure references early in the first half. That will cause inexperienced investors to avoid my thread. Then I mix in a few jokes. finance.yahoo.com/brklivestream/

One luxury I have in doing BRK play-by-play is no paid subscribers, advertising or content marketing. If I want to channel Bill Walton and tell jokes, I can. Of course, if I did have paid subscribers, sold advertising or peddled merch, I might still channel Walton and tell jokes.

"The reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, ‘My god, they’re purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?’ And he said, ‘Mister, I don’t sell to fish.’”

Read 5 tweets

Tren Griffin

@trengriffin

30 Apr

1/ Gwynne Shotwell: "The total addressable market for launch, with a conservative outlook on commercial human passengers, is probably about $6 billion. But the addressable market for global broadband is $1 trillion."

SpaceX is a communications business.

interactive.satellitetoday.com/via/may-2021/a…

2/ Shotwell: "Starlink is best set up to serve rural villages and the rural population. We can do work in the city, but you can't put enough bandwidth down in a city to cover any sort of percentage of consumers in that cell." We want Starlink to look like consumer electronics."

3/ Shotwell; "We are definitely focused on consumer first. Not that we're not looking at enterprise markets — we definitely are. But the priority and emphasis are always on the consumer."

Consumer markets not served by fiber are a vastly bigger total addressable market.

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