> "There are other business models. For instance you could make a product that people kind of want, or that they would want if it were affordable. Then you convince people to buy it by selling it for much less than it costs you to make it, or by paying them to buy it. If you do this well, you will have high revenue and rapid revenue growth, because lots of people are buying your product. You will not, however, get rich, because you’ll be spending more money making the product than you get from your customers. Your revenue will be high but your net income will be negative; it will cost you money to run this business.
> But then you will go to investors, and you will say “look, I have a company with rapidly growing revenue, that’s worth something, you should pay me for a share of my company.” And they will agree—“we love rapid revenue growth,” they will say—and you will sell stock in the company for hundreds of millions of dollars. And then it will cost them money to run the business, and you will be rich. There are various possible endgames; in some of them you go to prison but in quite a lot of them you just stay rich and become an elder statesman admired for your business acumen."
The later part about the Chinese coffee company fraud also getting caught by motivated short sellers was also great:
> "The thing about inflating your revenue by pretending that you sold more coffee than you did is that people can go to your stores and watch you sell coffee. It is a reasonable bet that they won’t do that, because it’s incredibly boring. “Who is going to send 1,500 people to our stores to watch us sell coffee all day, count how much we sell and compare it to our financial statements,” Luckin could reasonably have thought. 1 But the answer was “short sellers”! They actually hired people to sit around watching the coffee get made, so they caught the fraud."
Matt Levine is a good writer (often funny too) - I'm impressed he can continually write up these high quality newsletters almost every day.
Between this, Stratechery, and Preet's podcast I find it really hard to actually read all of this.
How do other people do this?
It's hard to really have the time for even just one newsletter or podcast (at least with the podcasts you used to be able to listen in the car, back when we still drove places).