Some wonderful bits from @scuttleblurb

"If you're wrestling with both long-term questions and short-term questions, the short-term questions are always going to win."

this one in particular is worth reading in full.
"we often think about a large addressable market as this unalloyed positive thing. In the wrong hands, I feel like the bigger the TAM, the more rope you can give a company to hang itself, right?...
...Because the way that you get yourself in the position where you've got this big unsustainable debt load and huge cash burn and negative profits, is that you're able to justify that by saying, "Well, we only have 2% of the TAM."
"I think all good investing is qualitative at the end of the day because there needs to be some kind of theory or basis backing the numbers that go into this spreadsheet that people use to come up with their valuations."
All quotes are from this podcast:
libertyrpf.com/p/interview-wi…

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More from @borrowed_ideas

Jan 28
Management Compensation and Incentives

I was recently reviewing management incentives at $AAPL, $MSFT, $GOOG, $AMZN, and $META in their 2022 proxy statements.

My best to worst ranking purely on incentive structure below:
Best: $AAPL

In 2011, AAPL granted time-based RSUs to Tim Cook with no performance condition i.e. as long as Cook remains CEO, he would receive the RSUs in two installments: 2016 and 2021.

See original 2011 grant here: Image
Cook requested in 2013 to insert performance condition: he would get those RSUs only if AAPL outperformed two-third of S&P 500. (image shows amendment)

If $AAPL were bottom-third among S&P 500 companies, Cook would receive zero RSUs. Image
Read 14 tweets
Jan 27
Some interesting quotes from WSJ piece on $META:

"The damage (ATT related) had diminished from the more-than 8% hit to revenue early in the year to just 2.5%, and likely would disappear entirely in the fourth quarter"
"One approach Meta has experimented with has been bargaining with users to get them to agree to tracking in Meta’s own in-app privacy settings. Under the approach being tested, the company promises to show users fewer ads if they agree to provide their data."
"ads based on first-party data are currently only 18% of revenue

...the measures have the potential to add $18 billion to $25 billion in revenue by 2026. Analysts expect Facebook to report revenue of about $116 billion for 2022."
Read 10 tweets
Dec 23, 2022
Ben Thompson's podcast with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman is SO good that I had to stop listening after 40 mins as I wanted to take notes.

Leaving my notes after the first 30-40 mins of conversation.
Interesting implications for "Apple and the Local opportunity". Apple seems to be well placed to capitalize on some of these recent trends in AI.
"My guess is that the people who just discovered AI with ChatGPT, it won’t be as big a moment in the sense that it won’t be as big a leap."
Read 11 tweets
Dec 16, 2022
$ADBE 4Q'22 Update

While the days of 20%+ topline growth is clearly behind us, Adobe remains the juggernaut in creativity software industry.

Digital Media, Digital Experience, and overall revenue in 4Q'22 increased +13%, +16%, and +14% YoY respectively (all FXN).
More encouragingly, Creative Cloud just had the best net new ARR quarter.
While we typically see an untick in net new ARR in Document Cloud in Q4, there wasn't any this time. Why?

"some portion of the Acrobat business is also represented in the creative business. So the Acrobat growth number is probably a bit understated in this point."
Read 14 tweets
Dec 6, 2022
Hot take on EU news

EU is $70 ARPU market for $META.

I wonder whether Meta should run an experiment by launching two monetization:

1. $10/month with no ads to access FOA (FB+IG+WhatsApp+Messenger)

2. Opt-in to targeted ads

Users decide what they value.
I get it ads ARPU likely to go down because

1. You lose perhaps higher purchasing power users
2. The ad infra appeal itself goes down (lower inventory, lower purchasing power userbase)
But subscription monetization would be 70% higher than current EU ARPU, so probably net net not a disaster. Subscription could also be higher quality revenue, so higher multiple maybe ?

Also allows Meta to do a forced experiment. If very successful, Meta can launch elsewhere.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 4, 2022
Thanks to @zugmanfabio, I came to know about a follow up study by Bessembinder on long-term stock market returns.

Leaving my notes here.
A common criticism against cap-weighted index such as S&P 500 is that it inherently allocates capital to overpriced stocks. Cap weighted index also inevitably leads to high concentration over time.
Bessembinder identified stocks whose gross (one plus) returns since a prior low point accumulate to 5x one time, two consecutive times (to a combined 25x), three consecutive times (to a combined 125x) and consecutive four times (to a combined of 625x).

See the method here.
Read 11 tweets

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