I always enjoy reading IAC shareholder letter and this was no exception. Q&A, however, gets a bit too lengthy and repetitive.
Here are my notes.
2/ ANGI
“They say home improvement projects usually take twice as long and cost twice as much relative to expectations going in, and one of our goals at Angi is to prove that axiom false. Ironically, delivering that proof appears to be, well, taking us longer and costing us more"
3/ “Exercising options creates the most attention, but creating options builds the most value.”
This was classic.
4/ While the brand change led to more severe impact than expected, management believes this was indeed the right strategy. They shared more data in Q&A and explained why HomeAdvisor brand was just too generic.
5/ “A more conservative approach might have staged some of these changes over time, but we are plowing
ahead with all at once under the belief that we know and like our destination, so let’s not waste time getting there.”
6/ “Building a brand takes time and capital as does building a disruptive start up, which we’re doing in Angi Services. We will likely operate the business in and around breakeven for the balance of 2021 at least”
7/ “If other shareholders lose patience during this phase for Angi, we at IAC are happy to own more through continued share repurchases at Angi.”
Love how IAC communicates with the shareholders.
8/ Angi services have three components: retail business, book now, and managed services.
Angi payments +70% QoQ, now $3 mn/week
Financing tripled, although on low volume.
Also bought a roofing business to increase supply.
9/ Lots of things to be excited about, but the fact remains Angi has been a perennial “work-in-progress” for a long time.
It’s a very difficult business, but do believe it remains a very convex bet.
10/ Dotdash
Four big segments: finance, health, lifestyle, and beauty (smaller than the other three which are roughly equivalent in size)
“our content investment's up 50% year-over-year this year, and I hope to continue to grow that faster than revenue for a while.”
11/ “From 2019 to 2021, the top 25 advertisers, those same 25 names are spending 139% in 2021 of what they were spending in 2019 and I think 123% or something like that of what they were spending in 2020.”
12/ IAC is pitching Dotdash from the data privacy angle.
Dotdash has indeed a great advertising product, but I’m sorry Joey, I think advertisers are the last group in the world who would find data privacy pitch compelling.
13/ Great growth momentum for Dotdash in the last 3 years, but “tough comps” now.
14/ Care
Enterprise segment continues to be the shining light whereas consumer segment still faces headwinds.
15/ Care is not about just child care, but senior care is also big part of it which enjoys demographic tailwind.
16/ “When mobile apps became a thing that we launched an incubator very early which was entirely focused on building mobile apps. And that's where Tinder came out of.”
New incubator’s focus on blockchain, but the first 2 biz on incubation have nothing to do with blockchain
17/ “we’re building options everywhere. The process is rarely easy or fast, but one of the most important elements of an option’s value is duration, and the structure of IAC allows us to take the time to build to win.”
Mixed quarter. Slightly disappointing guidance, and some word of caution for even beyond 3Q’21.
We have entered the treacherous stage for Covid beneficiary stocks, and the broader picture may remain a bit hazy for quite some time.
Here are my notes.
2/ For the past 5 quarters, Etsy comfortably beat high end of GMS guidance. Not this time even though it spent 31.7% of revenue in Sales & Marketing (+491 bps YoY) in 2Q’21.
3/ # of sellers sequentially increased by 531K QoQ which is really impressive. For context, it took Etsy 4 quarters pre-pandemic to add 587K sellers.
Many one-off mask buyers left which stalled # of buyers.
@mjmauboussin and Dan Callahan published another piece on valuation defending the use of DCF model.
Here are some interesting quotes from the piece.
2/ "Whenever investors value a stake in a cash-generating asset, they should recognize that they are using a discounted cash flow (DCF) model."
3/ "A speculator, who buys a stock in anticipation that it will go up without reference to its value. Investors and speculators have always coexisted in markets, and the behavior of many market participants is a blend of the two. But it is useful to keep in mind that these are...
I have been active on fintwit for almost a year and half now. When I decided to get out of my lurking phase, I could never imagine this account could ever become such a huge part in my life.
Let me share my philosophy for building this account.
2/ I treat fintwit as my workplace. I try not to tweet something that I would not tweet if my followers were my colleagues.
3/ I do not want to get on a content treadmill which many creators seem to suffer from.
I want to create a fair amount of detachment from input and output.
We have all been whispering about tough comps for Covid beneficiary companies, and the comps were indeed quite tough.
Let’s look at segment by segment and some highlights from the call.
2/ First, here’s the breakdown of revenue by segment (both product and geography)
3/ Given 2Q’20 was the beginning of the massive pandemic tailwind, it is more instructive to see 2-yr and 3-yr CAGR to see the underlying strength of the business.
As investors kept searching for the next “Google”, it turns out you could have done pretty well betting on the real Google with YTD of ~60% or ~30% CAGR in the last 3 and 5 years.
Here are my highlights from the earnings call and quarter.
2/ Every quarter, big tech continues to bend our minds with their numbers.
Regression to the mean? Pfft.
3/ YouTube is growing at 40% and YouTube ads revenue itself was 95% of $NFLX revenue last quarter.
In 1Q’19, YouTube ads was ~67% of NFLX revenue.
YouTube is a beast, and perhaps NFLX isn’t really “big tech”!