Before Amazon aggregators, the typical buyer of Amazon businesses were corporate executives who wanted to try their hand at entrepreneurship. I have some buddies who sold to them. I’d estimate that 90%+ of those loans went bad. One story that sticks out…
One guy spent like $5 million on a business. The former owner told him “hey you need to order stock for prime day. You have a lightning deal.” He did too late so he flew an entire container to Amazon $180k vs $5k. It arrived after prime day. Stuff like that.
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I can’t speak for all of SmB but I can tell you why these execs usually failed.
1) the sellers were doing blackhat tactics to maintain sales rank 2) thé buyers weren’t 3) buyers saw the Chinese competition coming in and eating margins 4) execs have big egos but running a smb
is wildly different from being an executive. You have to scramble regularly in a way that someone with a 9 to 5 or maybe 6 mentality does not understand.
So these guys got killed.
Just like most aggregators will.
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This “cope” coming to an American media purveyor near you!
“Yes, they may no covid, much less crime, better infrastructure, a healthier economy, less unrest, a stronger military, live longer, free healthcare, essentially free education…
Lot of people misunderstanding this tweet. What I am trying to say:
China is getting better (either closing the gap or exceeding) than the USA in a growing list of important factors (healthcare, gov't competence, education, crime, etc.) that corporate US media will abandon
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the "Made in China? LOL" (the same as "Made in Japan? LOL" from decades ago) viewpoint and transition to one where instead of belittling the country for being backward we will say "well they might be better than us but we have freedom!"
When I first started my business, I ran everything extremely lean. That’s the best way to do things when you’re young and have no money. However as you get older, you start to want to trade money for stress reduction and you realize that insurance in the form of slack in the
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system (maybe an employee that is not fully utilized, extra cash on your balance sheet, actual insurance, not taking too many projects on at once, etc) is long run more profitable than doing everything balls to the wall.
I want to have expensive redundancy in every part of
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my business that is important, the opposite of what they teach in business school.
To that end, I duplicate our entire Google cloud drive onto my computer’s hard drive in case Google fails.
(Yes I am baiting you into answering a computer question…)
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The best simplest way to measure the happiness of the people in a place is the median income divided by the median housing price.
This is the most basic explanation for why everyone is so unhappy globally, despite huge advancements in technology.
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Think about it:
You want to know how “well-off” you are. You have a salary, but that’s a number. So you ask yourself: what can I buy with this salary? Stocks are too abstract to mean anything. Education you probably don’t need. Healthcare expenditure is random.
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Food is cheap and hard to calculate; “what is $25 times 365 times the number of years I will live? Too complicated.” So what do you use to measure how well off you are? Housing. Everyone needs a house and they want to own it so they’re not owned by their landlord.
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