Recording this second follow up podcast with Jim was big fun. One theme of this conversation are the many ways we are the same and yet use different approaches to reach the same or a similar conclusion. There is no one way to successfully invest or live a full and active life.
2/ To illustrate, Jim and are friends with Michael Mauboussin. In Michael's essay released yesterday He describes my natural approach to business and investing, which is bottoms up. morganstanley.com/im/publication… Jim's natural approach is to use statistical factors. Vive la différence!
3/ My first podcast with Jim is linked to below. In our second (linked above) we discuss how our investing and business styles evolved to reflect our personalities and the people who influenced us. We talk about the dotcom era and other shared experiences.infiniteloopspodcast.com/tren-griffin-e…
4/ Both Jim and I participated in the Dotcom bubble "up close and personal." If you lived through it you saw high valuations, but little cash being generated. That creates a muscle memory that's useful today. Cash creates optionality; needing cash creates negative optionality.
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2/ "Customers, revenues, and costs are the core drivers in the CBCV model. It is essential to consider how they interact when assessing how various assumptions affect value. Specifically, there are trade-offs between the drivers."
The interaction of factors makes the game fun!
3/ "For example, a price increase grows cash flow but raises the churn rate. A price drop shrinks cash flow
but lowers the churn rate. A focus on new customer acquisition increases the number of customers but raises
acquisition costs."
John Malone: "Recently somebody said, ‘Hey, you lost weight,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, thirty-five pounds and three and a half billion dollars’.” “I’ve done lots of bad deals. When I stick to my knitting I do okay. It’s – it’s when I listen to some pied piper.” google.com/amp/s/25iq.com…
John Malone: "A lot of mergers fail for cultural reasons. Vertical acquisitions are much tougher than horizontal ones. You are essentially buying a business you don’t know and you don’t understand."
"Gross margin decreased from 42% during the year ended Dec. 31, 2019 to 41% during the year ended Dec. 31, 2020, primarily due to an increase in Revenue Share amounts paid to Customers."
People don't talk enough about the "special purpose" part of a SPAC.
The best explanation of that is in the Steve Martin movie "The Jerk."
Navin explains that he plans to use his special purpose every time he can -- which is just like SPAC sponsors. thetimes.co.uk/article/cyber-…
A screenplay about using BBM92 protocol between two buildings, connected by a 350-m-long fiber, resulting in an average raw (secure) key rate of 135 bits/s (86 bits/s) for a pumping rate of 80 MHz, without resorting to time- or frequency-filtering techniques is a special purpose.
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD): As you know, superposition and entanglement are used in quantum communication/QKD. A generator produces two entangled photons where the quantum state of one photon is perfectly equal to another photon, even over great distances!
At minute 4:46 Bill Gurley describes an approach that is straight up Michael Mauboussin style "Expectations Investing." Take the Airbnb stock price today and reverse engineer what must happen to support that price. One thing you do know for sure is the current price. Invert!
The other Michael Mauboussin style approach Bill Gurley talks about is that multiples: 1) are shortcuts; and 2) are very often not apples to apples. Gurley says in the video that markets may start to be "more discerning" about something like price to sales.abovethecrowd.com/2011/05/24/all…
3/ People can make jokes about ketchup packet supply chains being under stress now, but at 12:22 my friend Josh Wolfe asks a question about far more critical supply chains.
Comedy often is about revealed truth. For example, inside every ketchup pack joke is an important truth.
"We have a very unusual group of shareholders who look at Berkshire as a lifetime savings vehicle... one they don’t have to think about [and not] look at it again for 10 or 20 years." WB
2/ That Buffett and Munger have different objectives, time horizons and circle of competence doesn't mean that Munger's investing process isn't worth understanding if you do have a technology circle of competence. You are not them or one of the shareholders they think most about.
3/ If you have a technology and early stage venture heavy portfolio want to balance that with something other than cash or bonds you may want to create a barbell portfolio with some smallish percentage managed by BRK as if you were 75 years old (even though you are 35 years old).