Tech, Business, Finance and Everything Else
I came across this image a while back from Derek Sivers (who started CDbaby). Its an old image, but I think it explain a lot.
A few people have mentioned to me recently that they have new business ideas, but they are scared to tell too many people as they think their idea could be copied. I replied to them stating that they shouldn’t be worrying about the idea – and everything comes down to execution!
Life feels like an endless To Do List at the moment.
Its amazing – when you learn about business the courses really teach you about being able to run a small business. They never tell you that as it gets bigger your job becomes harder and harder and its all about your ability to learn a completely new set of skills at every different size of the business.
Manchester City has officially pulled out of the European Super League – and now Chelsea is going to be the next one.
This league was all about American PE greed!
Americans don’t understand football here in the UK and Europe. Football here is Tribal. Its all about the average working person wanting to watch their favourite team play every week … from big clubs to small local clubs.
Football is about the fans!
Coinbase went public the other day on the NASDAQ. Coinbase have a very exciting business and I have been trying to learn as much as possible about the Crypto world for the past year or so (but feels like I’m barely scratching the surface).
At one point Coinbase hit $100 billion in valuation, but I suspect that will drop below half over the next few months as the froth from the initial trades die down.
It will be very interesting to see how Coinbase performs over the long term, but it does seem to be a good hedge if you expect cryptocurrencies to be strong in the next 10 years or more.
Prediction – it drops below $30 billion in market cap and then it starts to climb again.
Do you need to have a big ego to be an investor?
I have had an experience for a long time now with one investor who for the most part is your perfect type of investor (silent and then helps when required). However, the only problem is that they tend to over inflate their involvement to everyone they know (even to the point of flat out lies), which then end up making their way back.
Why?
Why can’t some people just be happy with what they have? Why can’t they simply say they have got the best investment of their lives and they didn’t even need to do anything apart from be in the right place at the right time with a little bit of money at Seed stage?
Venture Capital by Numbers:
Venture Capital business is 100% a game of outliers
It’s funny… when you start a company you think the larger it gets the easier it is going to be – as you’re able to start handing off jobs and deligate your team.
However, no one really explains to you the larger it gets the harder it actually gets.
Yes.. you can hand off those jobs to the other members in your team and they can take complete autonomy over the decision making, but there are all the little things that no one ever talks about – culture, strategy, team structure, heirarchy, wages, policies on pretty much everything from HR to Finance.
Sometimes a lifestyle business in which the owner can have an amazing lifestyle really is the best way to go!
Justin Kan (Co-founder of Twitch and Justin.tv) has started to vlog on YouTube with handy business tips. Justin has had a lot of adventures with Twitch and beyond and its great to see him giving something back.
Plus, these videos are actually entertaining, short, and provide a recap at the end (which is great).
Keep up the good work Justin!
Coinbase is looking to go public very soon and its valuation in the secondary markets has just gone over $100 billion.
Coinbase’s valuation over the years:
Coinbase reported revenue of $530M for 2019 and $691M for the first nine months in 2020. The company posted a net income of $141M between January-September 2020, up from a loss of $30M in overall 2019. Notably, these numbers don’t include 2021, when the Bitcoin price surged more than 90% YTD.
The US Commerce Department recently announced that DJI is now on the US Trade Ban list.
DJI has since come out and stated that Americans will be able to continue to buy and use its products “normally” despite the companies presence on the list.
This ban only affects the companies from purchasing parts from American companies, so I’m assuming DJI saw this ban coming and already had a plan B supply chain in place ready to go at any time.
I’m not entirely sure how a drone company is helping to support human rights abuses in China. It seems like if this is the case then all Chinese companies will be in the same position!
Yes.
Companies are now able to see their page followers on their Linkedin company pages by going to their company page > Analytics and then See Followers.
This is a feature that has been requested for a very long time and it’s great to see that Linkedin have listened and finally added this feature.
It has been confirmed that Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s energy unit will acquire Dominion Energy Inc’s natural gas transmission and storage business for $9.7 billion.
This puts Berkshire Hathaway Energy into a very strong position in the market.
Potentially, this is why Warren Buffett has been holding onto an extra large cash sum? Maybe not.
I found myself stumble across this video and this is one of the best speeches I have heard in a while.
It made me step back and ponder.
I hope it does the same for you. Enjoy!
Very interesting video about SpaceX and how they purchased a very small village called Boca Chica for their original space port.
Here is the key difference.
Alibaba is a marketplace. They do not own the inventory of the merchandise sold. They put buyers and sellers together. Buyer and seller agree on terms online via their platform or offline.
Amazon’s main business is they own the inventory, and sell directly to the customer.
Both models have their Pros and Cons. Amazon has also turned into a very strong third party seller platform in recently years, but they still like to control a lot of the fulfilment.
(NRZ) New Residential Investment Corp have announced that because of the Coronavirus they are reducing their next dividend payment to $0.05.
This now means that the yield will be around 5%.
Tesla is a very interesting beast! It looks and feels like a car company, but really it’s not!
Here is a link to an interesting article about Tesla not being a hypergrowth company.