it demonstrates that investors want to see a return on their investment more quickly in a higher cost of capital environment. Look across tech, all of these companies staffed up hard, raised at too high of valuations, and are now fat with slow growth and no profitability.
Looks like the stock is up 11% on this news. Does this and the the staff cuts at X demonstrate you can take out significant numbers of engineer without drastically impairing the user experience?
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
Nice unit economics:
Our Connected Fitness Subscriber Lifetime Value for fiscal 2017, fiscal 2018, and fiscal 2019, was $267.1 million, $604.4 million, and $1,053.8 million, respectively, or $3,433, $4,015, and $3,593 per Connected Fitness Subscriber, respectively.
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.
I could never get into Farnam Street because it just seemed like appropriating Charlie Munger's mental models to sell self-help services.
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.
Waymo progress seems to be slowing on critical disengagements (in older CA DMV reports these were called "safe operation disengagements" - they stopped reporting this type in 2017). These disengagements deal with perception issues, the software leading to unwanted maneuvers, inability to react to reckless road users, and incorrect predictions.
You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers:
Berkshire fundamentally was not a good business, he invested in a textile firm right around the time the North American textile industry started to face really heightened global competition. If I recall correctly, in '64 Buffett took control and tried to keep the thing going and had the mill invest some of its cash flow into the business, but all those investments ended up worthless as the mill eventually had to shutter. He could have deployed the capital elsewhere and earned positive returns.
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.
I'm an analyst at a hedge fund, I have a job as a generalist so I look at pretty much every asset class/geography/industry.
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.
I think the best example of recruiting good members is the SumZero model. SumZero is a buyside investor site, where buysiders can exchange and rank investment ideas with each other. It was started by Divya Narendra of Facebook fame.
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.
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.