1/ Bill.com allows SMB customers to pay their bills and get paid in a streamlined fashion.
Jan 27 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
8 interesting quotes from Tesla's call:
I can understand why bears think Elon is delusional. But the execution is unbelievably impressive. That's his MO -- set impossible expectations and when they fail, they will be much farther along than if he hadn't set those goals.
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1/
"Lastly, thanks to $5.5 billion of GAAP net income in 2021, our accumulated profitability since the inception of the Company became positive, which I think makes us a real company at this point. This is a critical milestone for the Company."
"Real company" at $1 trillion 😅
Jan 25 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
1/19 thread
Opendoor is intriguing to me now that Zillow is out of the picture.
Here are some bear theses I see and some potential rebuttals...
#1: Housing will crash
#2: Unsustainable business model
#3: Capital intensive
#4: iBuying is unsustainable
#5: Low gross margins
2/
#1: Housing market will crash
Even in 2008, the biggest single-month decline was 2.5%. Opendoor holds houses for about 90 days and about half of that is in contract with a buyer.
The actual exposure/duration is quite short and Opendoor has a strong pulse on the market.
Jan 12 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
1/ My thoughts on $SE and why I believe right now is a very important period for the company.
Here's a 22-tweet thread for ya 😁
⬇️
2/ The main bear case I've been seeing is:
"if southeast Asia is still such a big market, then why is $SE trying to get into so many markets?"
Dec 20, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
1/7 Why did Affirm only grow revenues 3% sequentially this past quarter?
Even if you back out the distortion from Peloton, non-Peloton GMV only grew 9%.
Yet the number of merchants has grown insanely fast from the Shopify deal.
The installed base is growing very well but...
2/7 it doesn't quite seem to be flowing through to revenue yet.
As Peloton has decreased (from 28% to 9% of revenue), the percentage of revenue from merchant revenues has slowed down a bunch.
Why?
Because the Peloton partnership is 0% APR deals.
Nov 20, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
"To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.”
- George Soros
On defaults ⬇️
1/ It's important to think about our "defaults"
Do we approach every decision with the default setting that we're always right?
Or that we could be wrong?
Nov 20, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I think it's important to break down revenue into its components.
That way, you can get a more granular sense of the business drivers.
Within these, you have different sizes of customers though. In SaaS, oftentimes enterprise customers are growing faster and have lower churn because of the high dollar amounts.
Sep 14, 2021 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Notes from Affirm's earnings call:
1. BNPL value prop 2. Very excited about the new debit card 3. New savings product 4. Decrease of Peloton concentration 5. Not as many multi-year 0% APR deals 6. No Amazon GMV embedded in guidance
1/ "Our core insight was that the generations coming of age after the financial crisis of 2008 were no longer willing to tolerate getting into permanent debt by putting it all in the card, or getting burned by late fees and deferred interest"
Sep 14, 2021 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Notes from Global-E's last earnings report:
1. Value prop is making cross-border e-comm easy 2. Shopify is ramping 3. Expect acquisitions 4. Merchant growth is good 5. Gross margins continue to scale 6. Retention is 98%
Quotes below...⬇️
1/
"We use a proprietary built localized pricing engine to present prices in more than 100 currencies & support different pricing structures based on the shoppers’ location, local market conventions & the merchants pricing strategy"
Jul 31, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Just a few interesting sections from Twilio's Q2 2021 earnings call:
1. On IoT
"As you imagine, you've got an IoT humidifier, or truck, or garbage dumpster, or trombone, you don't want to have to remanufacture that thing every time you get better connectivity technology...
...You want to be able to continually silently upgrade it in the background. That's what Super SIM enables companies to do because their connectivity is not something that is set into the device, and it's something that they can continually evolve in the cloud."
Jul 7, 2021 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
I've recently taken a small position in Doximity (DOCS), violating my rule of waiting until at least the first earnings report for a recent IPO.
Here's how I'm thinking about it and the risks involved. Would love some pushback!
[THREAD] ⬇️
1/ Doximity (a combo of doctor and proximity) started as a LinkedIn for doctors but has really evolved into more of a productivity suite for medical professionals.
Connecting with other physicians is important but the company also offers HIPAA compliant e-fax, voice dialer, etc
Jun 29, 2021 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
1/ Some random things I've learned about the auto industry value chain recently...
2/ Car dealerships typically don't have the capital to outright buy all of their inventory so vehicle manufacturers will provide "floorplan facilities".
This is a type of loan that allows dealerships to hold inventory and pay back the loan as cars get sold.
Jun 24, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/ "The map is not the territory" is a very interesting mental model.
The idea is that abstractions aren't the real thing.
Well, duh! But there are actually a lot of applications...
2/ An obvious one is that stocks are abstractions of businesses.
A stock is not a business.
Even the concept of a business is an abstraction.
No two businesses are the same. A business is just a collection of people doing things and making decisions for others (customers).
Jun 23, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
1/ Investing is hard because it takes the perfect balance of conviction and humility.
For instance, a stock you know well has gone up a bunch.
Do you trim because the forward return is lower than alternatives or do you hold?
2/ On one hand, the decision seems easy. Lower forward return -> trim.
On the other hand, there are lots of considerations:
• Are you adjusting for taxes?
• Are your forward return assumptions are too low?
• What about when adjusting for your level of company knowledge?
Jun 15, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1/ I didn't realize just how big Binance is.
In the TTM, it did $10.5 trillion in volume. 2/ In comparison, Coinbase did $700 billion, less than 7% of Binance.
SentinelOne looks like it's where CrowdStrike was 3 years ago.
The numbers are extremely similar. We'll see how SentinelOne scales from here. It's a tough act to follow as CrowdStrike has executed wonderfully.
• SentinelOne's (S) FY '21 TTM revenue was $113 million
• CrowdStrike's (CRWD) FY '18 TTM revenue was $118 million
27 added to My Authors
