5,759 karma · joined January 31, 2009
I doubt most tech execs would have the wherewithal to make this kind of decision but it's clearly the case that many big tech cos staffed up too hard during the pandemic with average salary per employee rising too much
As we expand our content offering, develop new interactive software features, and grow our community of Members, we believe we can maintain a low Average Net Monthly Connected Fitness Churn, resulting in a high Connected Fitness Subscriber Lifetime Value. In addition, with the growth of our Connected Fitness Subscriber base over time, we expect to improve our Subscription Contribution Margin as we scale our fixed content production costs.
Net Customer Acquisition Cost (profit) can be calculated as Adjusted Sales and Marketing Expense (which excludes depreciation and amortization expense and stock-based compensation expense) less Adjusted Connected Fitness Product Gross Profit (which excludes depreciation and amortization expense and stock-based compensation expense). Our Net Customer Acquisition Costs (profit) for fiscal 2017, fiscal 2018, and fiscal 2019, was $14.2 million, $(4.9) million, and $1.6 million, respectively, or $183, $(33), and $5 per Connected Fitness Subscriber added, respectively. We believe we will continue to drive rapid payback and efficiencies in Net Customer Acquisition Costs (profit) by further leveraging sales and marketing investments as a result of heightened brand awareness and growing word-of-mouth referrals. Changes in Connected Fitness Product margins or sales and marketing expenses may result in an inability to fully offset our customer acquisition costs.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1517413/000119312519... ^fastly data on p. 66 shows cohort expansions that are much faster
I'm more intrigued by something like Online Great Books (https://onlinegreatbooks.com/) which seems like a lot of effort but would probably force me to widen my knowledge - In reality, I wish something like Online Great Books included some first principles math/science books to round it out more beyond the philosophy/literature bent.
A company's value is the free cash flow available to owners from now to kingdom come discounted back to the present.
You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers:
2015 0.16 disengagements per 1000 miles
2016 0.13 disengagements per 1000 miles
2017 0.12 disengagements per 1000 miles
Eventually (circa '67)he realized it was a lost cause and stopped investing in the mill, instead he used its cash flow to go out and invest in other companies (insurance, etc) which remain there to this day.
Historically have done very little investing in tech, but I'm interested in it and HN is a good way to keep up with the industry.
I look at startups as businesses or industries where the rate of change is much faster than normal. I think as an investor you're really a student of business and that makes startups a really fascinating area to observe.
Are you running on rest days or doing a combo?
Here's the counter argument from a noted short seller:
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2013/07/it-was-night-befor...
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2013/01/notes-on-visiting-...
When I first signed up for SumZero, the application process was pretty extensive. It involved a phone call with Divya or one of the other co-founders to check you out and make sure you weren't just some wannabe, that you actually worked at an investment fund.
I actually think was critical early on to make sure the membership base was high quality and acted as a self-reinforcing mechanism to continue to attract good members.
by Richards J. Heuer, Jr.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978-86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis. The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. Richard Heur has selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. He then translates the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.
"The way CEOs become CEOs in America is a travesty. This is one of our major problems. I use the anti - Darwinian metaphor. The survival of the unfittest.
If you remember if you were in college the fraternity president was always there for you. When you had nothing to do or when you were a little depressed. Feeling down. You go to the club and the fraternity president would always be there. You wondered when he had time to study which he probably didn’t do very much of in school. He was there to sympathize with you if your girlfriend didn’t show up or didn’t call you back and you obviously sort of liked the guy because the fraternity president was usually a likeable guy.
When the elections came up you would always vote for him. He had a couple qualities - the fraternity president. Politically, he was a survivor and he never made many waves. He did not promote controversy. Therefore when he went out into corporate America he was able to move up the ladder fairly quickly. Remember he survived, he didn’t make waves, and he wasn’t a threat. He kept moving up and up.
Eventually he becomes the assistant to the CEO. The CEO had the same qualities. He’s a survivor. He’d never employ anyone underneath him who might be a threat. The boards like these guys… this type of CEO. The boards generally don’t own any stock (another problem with our system). The boards don’t really care to hold CEOs accountable. Remember it’s a symbiotic relationship. These guys pay the boards very well – they give the boards perks. The boards don’t care to hold them accountable because that might endanger the perks they love so much.
When the CEO retires the assistant becomes the CEO. And remember what I told you. He’s a survivor. He would never have anyone underneath him as his assistant that’s brighter than he is because that might constitute a threat. So therefore, with many exceptions, we have CEOs becoming dumber and dumber and dumber. We can all see where this is going. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t such a threat to our ability to compete and to our economy in general."
I think it's been proven that investors aren't adequately compensated for taking on "growth" risk. The risk premia attached to "growth" doesn't outperform passively owning the index over long periods of time.
Seems like all A16Z is trying to do is juice the IPO market for more liquidity (from dumb money middle class investors) so that they can have an easier time exiting when they're ready.
All of these efforts to create valuable journalists will probably fail. The fact is, the business side of news has a lot going against it. The current newspaper model just isn't very viable because ad spending in newspapers continues to go down and page views can't mitigate the decline enough. Subscriptions help, but those dollars tend to flock to really important publications which offer some kind of differentiate product to an affluent client base. E.g.: the WSJ serves the business community and businesses will continue to pay for it.
That's very different from something like the Boston Globe, which doesn't offer enough value. Sure, there's local reporting, but I have a feeling that people don't care as much as you'd hope about that and as a result wont be willing to pay up for subscriptions.
You can learn programming and R to do some data viz, but it's not going to be enough to counteract the secular decline you're facing as capital exits the industry.
Honestly, I think journalism and being a journalist will be a career that eventually goes to rich people / people with other income sources than their primary job. Those are going to be the only kinds of people who can afford working for long hours and really low pay and gradually working their way up during school and afterwards with unpaid internships.
http://www.amazon.com/Option-Volatility-Pricing-Strategies-T...
It's my understanding that VC works in a manner similar to PE, where investors are given their returns when the entire fund they invest in is run down. Each fund has a vintage, so if you invest in the 2006 fund you might get paid back 7 years from then in 2013, that's kind of a long time.
For a liquid asset class to compare to, equities have done something like 6-6.5% real historically.
It's great to do big things and change the world, but the pension funds backing Fred want to earn a good return.
I don't see anywhere where he said everyone was speculating on property as a savings mechanism. Obviously some parts of China are very poor. The fact remains though that people are choosing to speculate in property, which is logical given the negative real rates in China.