code4tee

There is a winter coming for the online ad model when more people realize, as this author has, that most online ad spend was probably a total waste.

That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.

This DNA testing stuff intrigues me but there’s too much shady stuff going on with the data afterwards for me to want to give it a go. A lot of this “consumer grade” DNA testing may go down in history as a great product foiled by doing shortsighted dumb stuff with people’s data.

Status only matters if the other party cares about it.

The ultimate status game is truly showing that you don’t care that the other person is X, has done X, their dad/uncle is X, wants you to think X but rather are dealing with the person in front of you right then and there and what they are able to bring to the table at that time.

The reverse is incredibly powerful too. Those that have been most impressive to me throughout life are when they seemed like a totally “normal” person and then later I found out something about their “status” that others would have gloated endlessly about.

Legit service animals are very well behaved and never a problem.

There’s no question though that this issue of pets masquerading as service animals has become a big problem. Makes sense that places are starting to crack down.

Given the velocity it was going the capsule popping off the top basically turned the rest of the rocket into a supersonic flying brick. The amount of drag would be enormous and the rest of the ship basically just tore itself apart. As soon as the oxidizer and fuel combined in the crumbing mess you get a big explosion.

That was all expected to happen and why they launch these things out over the ocean. These rockets also usually have a self-destruct mechanism that a range safety officer can trigger if the rocket starts coming back towards land.

Looks like a total success. Great job.

The flip side is that top talent won’t want to put up with the BS so a lot of these companies end up shooting themselves in the foot to save a few bucks on recruiting.

I was interested in medicine in high school. I was able to shadow a few physicians and talk about career options. At the time I was shocked that most of the physicians I talked to said they would take a different career path if they could do it over again.

The common theme was that they felt it used to be a respected profession but now they’re broadly just cogs in a healthcare system that given them little freedom for professional discretion and lots of paperwork.

I ultimately didn’t pursue medicine.

Apple is clearly taking a position that some of the other big players can’t, and all indications are that they will squeeze this play very hard.

The likes of Google have rough waters ahead. Advertising on the internet is obviously here to say but the future of targeted ads based on all this tracking data is clearly looking very shaky.

Google and other companies have likely not done enough to diversify their business models to weather the coming storm without a lot of hurt.

Why are they @&$ing around on Twitter when they should be fixing the damn problem. Unbelievable.

These results are misleading for the same reasons why Microsoft’s market share claims are misleading.

Microsoft counts things like Office 365 and Azure AD as “cloud.” If you look at people truly using their cloud products in terms of things that pair off against AWS offerings the picture looks vastly different.

I’ve worked with many companies recently that are broadly “all in” on AWS but still use O365 and AD as core to their infrastructure. All these surveys and studies count such companies as Azure users but in practice they’re really not. Equally the companies that are still mostly not in the cloud but use O365 and maybe Azure AD for some 3rd party app auth are also counted as Microsoft Cloud users when they’re really not.

As they say 82% of statistics are mostly made up.

Milk as a beverage is in decline, but milk as a product has been steadily growing as a raw material (cheese, yoghurt, etc.) The companies in trouble are those that were too concentrated in beverage milk and failed to diversify their business models to stay relevant.

Some of these companies troubles also smell badly of PE shenanigans with over leveraged debt deals and other PE card tricks.

The major fallacy I often see is that people driven by “status and prestige” often fail to realize that those they are hoping to impress don’t care as much about these things.

It’s a bit like LinkedIn. Lots of people are on LinkedIn trying to impress people but the people they’re trying to impress aren’t on (or barely use) LinkedIn.

I look at these headlines a few ways:

1. People have been saying next year is going to be total doom and gloom just about every year since around 2011 or so.

2. They’ve all basically been wrong up until now and if you got scared and sold out when the headlines started you would have lost a ton of $$$

3. Eventually the market will go down and someone will claim to be right, probably through sheer dumb luck

4. When the next cycle starts the media will be all over the person from #3 saying they are now again predicting something will happen, but they’ll likely be wrong this time

When you’ve lived though a few of the above cycles you learn to do your best to stay calm and take a balanced approach to life and money. Things go up and down in the short term but in the long term things have reliably gone up.

Term sheet isn’t a deal. Same way an “accepted offer” on a house isn’t a purchase contract until you have an actual contract.

Clearly SoftBanks is having its challenges but this just sounds like normal deals falling apart during pre-closing due diligence. You don’t have a deal till you have a deal.

Certain high achievers in their career use their career as a cover for general failings in other parts of their life. I’ve seen it a few times and it ends badly when it all finally catches up to them, often too late in life to do much about it. Some people are very happy to have their career be their whole identity, but most don’t think that way and define “success” as success across multiple areas of their life.

It’s usually either those that spend a lot of total dollars with United or in some cases “influencers” in a company like the head of travel that control a lot of spend.

This era is gradually coming to an end as the airlines now heavily weight status to how much $ you give them each year vs how many “miles” you fly. It’s freaking some people out but at some level it makes sense that the amount of free stuff they give you should be proportional to the amount of money you have given them.

For example starting next year United doesn’t care at all how many miles you fly... it’s basically just how much you spend (with a slight discount if you fly a lot of individual flights, but length of flight doesn’t matter).

The premium, and highly profitable, market leader is more expensive than other offerings that are trying to play catch-up on market share. This is not exactly a groundbreaking or unknown finding.

BMWs also cost more then Fiat’s

Also, AWS has become the new IBM and as they used to say “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM.” In the current market if you choose something other than AWS people will question your decision if something goes wrong.

“Private pilots are enough of an additional risk that life insurance will charge extra if you are one.”

That’s often not true. They do ask and you have to provide records but it doesn’t necessarily impact rates. Pilots are generally wealthier, better educated and need to undergo regular medical exams to keep their certificate. All things that statistically make one healthier. There are many aspects that make a pilot a more attractive life insurance candidate from a risk standpoint, not less.

For charter flights things along those lines already exist. For example hopping a ride on empty leg repositioning routes.

For truly private jet flights it can be trickier. Many truly private jets operate as private flight operations under part 91 of the FAA’s rules. That has a lot less red tape for a private operator but means they truly need to be a private operator and can’t pickup others for hire.

Several startups have tried to get around the above via legal loopholes via ‘Uber for airplanes’ models and got shot down by the FAA.

It makes sense... I mean just look at stock trading. Manual stock traders used to be a high paying profession and now it’s a job that’s almost entirely been replaced by automation.

It’s not a ‘could’ in the future but something that’s already happening in significant amounts. The trading room floors of most the big banks are a tiny fraction of what they once were despite trading volumes skyrocking.

Have been on the receiving end of several McKinsey engagements.

The work itself was generally not all that good. The knowledge of “experts” brought into meetings rarely contributed more than what a reasonably intelligent person could dig up on Google search results in an hour. They were also often farmed out on random staff augmentation functions that just annoyed the hell out of people. “Hi I need you to fill out this excel spreadsheet with 35 columns so we can put a presentation together... oh and if you could do that by 6 PM tonight that would be great.” That sort of nonsense so they could produce some nonsensical 50 page PowerPoint deck that nobody read.

There were a few decent people there but by and large value was not generated. As others have pointed out a major motivator seemed to be to provide some C-level exec with CYA coverage to claim that programs being implemented were based on the advice of outside “experts.”

In the two main cases I saw the McKinsey strategy ended up being a total disaster that seriously damaged the company and the C-level exec that hired them in both cases got canned as a result so in the end even the CYA concept didn’t really work.

There are a lot of VC backed companies that are likely very upside down. You know the types with tons of money raised with very little revenue and little to no profit and an unclear vision on how the entity becomes a real business with a solid profit steam that justifies its valuation. The old model of “it doesn’t matter because we’ll always be able to offload this thing to others and cash out” is dead now.

What we’re seeing unfolding now in the market isn’t a bubble per say but it is the market asserting that revenue matters. Profit matters. Real business plans based on reality matter. Ultimately that’s a very good thing for the innovation industry but things are going to get real ugly for these upside down companies.

Well if someone wasn’t following procedures then I suppose anything is possible. But the general premise of the article (that ‘fumes’ are making their way back into perfectly good buildings via the plumbing) is problematic.

Sounds like the building has other more serious plumbing issues. Gasses and odors of any type shouldn’t be able to work their way back into a building via the sewer pipes. The pipes in the building can’t leak and that’s one of the reasons why properly installed drains have traps.

Code inspectors often use the “peppermint test” to test all the above. They dump concentrated peppermint oil into the sewer then go around the building and see if you can smell it. If you can then you have problems with the plumbing.

Buildings having issues likely have bad plumbing and thus their occupants were likely breathing sewer gasses for ages... the “liner fumes” just made all this more obvious.

There’s little question WeWork was a train wreck from a corporate governance and oversight standpoint.

Less clear if anything criminal happened but let’s wait and see what the AG comes up with.

Unfortunately they have to do this if they don’t want to lose the trademark. You can’t trademark something if it’s deemed to be of common use. Of course if your trademark is a color then this can be quite difficult.

The first time I got in an Uber and saw two other phones on the dashboard with the driver working Lyft and another competitor at the same time I knew it was game over for these companies. Both the drivers and the riders were taking the best deal each ride and the VCs were in the middle subsidizing the whole thing for both sides. It’s a race to the bottom.

I enjoy the product and will enjoy the cheap rides while they last but the business mode seems flawed.

The MBA has lost its once held stature in most industries. It’s almost become an acronym for dumb business decisions in many circles: “This must be something the MBAs came up with.”

If schools want to stay relevant they need to create programs that produce leadership candidates for today’s modern business environment. For too long it’s just been a cash cow for schools and people went because it was the thing to do. With market attitudes changing and applications way down schools need to rethink.

Dare I say an MBA case study is needed on making the MBA relevant again ;-)

Yes the networking element is there but seriously you don’t need to pay 50+k a year to do networking!