Mike's notes.
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. The podcast with Bill Gurley and Patrick O’Shaughnessy about direct listings and initial public offerings was financially, technologically and psychologically interesting. I don’t know if Gurley’s emphasis is appropriate, but it’s clear what he needs to do, reframe the situation. Gurley and O’Shaughnessy expect that… Continue reading Bill Gurley
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. Bill Gurley was on This Week in Startups (LAUNCH Festival 2017 edition) and it was a fast half hour or so. Let’s not waste time here either, here are the notes. 1/ How many investments does Gurley make in a year? “As a partnership,… Continue reading Bill Gurley 2
Bill Gurley sat down with Kara Swisher to talk tech and his experiences. This interview was great. Among other things, when Swisher plugged Audible as a sponsor she asked Gurley for a suggestion. He said: “I’m going to give you two because we’ve been talking a lot internally about trying to identify great talent; one… Continue reading Bill Gurley
CAC is the most interesting problem in business because a low CAC makes for interesting unit economics. And, CACs can have unconventional solutions. “For kids that have taken the SAT, schools can buy their names for fifty cents a name from the College Board, which oversees the test. Schools get the name and address of… Continue reading Fifty cent students
Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked about clever customer acquisitions. The replies are pretty good. In college, I played ultimate frisbee. Recruiting was kind of difficult. The traditional method was to buy card stock table tents and litter the dorm eateries. That seemed cluttered to me. I took our marketing money and subsidized t-shirts to $5 each. One… Continue reading CAC Pack
This is an attempt at understanding R0 (reproductive number) as more than a numbing number. View these notes as less definitive. In his (2014) paper Risking It All: Why are public health authorities not concerned about Ebola in the US?, Yaneer Bar-Yam writes about why R0 isn’t an even distribution. One April report noted the coronavirus… Continue reading Fat Bottom Tails Make the Complex World Go Round
Recently on Twitter there’s been a trend of “it’s not that bad” tweets gong around. One said that half of Italy’s CoVid19 fatalities were people with three or more existing illness while people with no other illnesses existed in less than one-percent of deaths. Among the ‘maybe it’s not that bad’ list are Elon Musk,… Continue reading Disagreeing in a Crisis
“This kind of thing is manna from heaven, but nobody knows how to do it on purpose. At least, I don’t.” David Ogilvy As Ogilvy noted, word-of-mouth is divine. It’s a moment when culture quiets, someone speaks, and ideas spread. At it’s best, word-of-mouth follows the rules of a dream. At it’s worst, word-of-mouth runs… Continue reading Word-of-mouth, for-the-win.
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. People view acts of omission—the absence of an act—as far less intrusive or harmful than acts of commission—the committing of an act—even if the outcomes are the same or worse. Psychologists call this omission bias, and it expresses itself in a broad range of… Continue reading Omissions
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. How does someone make good decisions? There’s a lot of smart people talking about it and we’ve written about a number of them here. Michael Mauboussin, Nassim Taleb, Rory Sutherland, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Richard Thaler all come up on this blog. Part of what… Continue reading Ambiguity Aversion
The Waiter's Pad 