Cali is tough- the regulator is really standing in the way of a functioning market and is driving insurers away... Allstate stopped writing new policies in Nov 2022 and said they would pull out of the state entirely unless they could increase rates drastically... so they were allowed this increase.
The 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons wiped out nearly two times the combined underwriting profits for California homeowners’ insurers for the prior 26 years… it’s acceptable to have large losses in this business but you need to have years of gains to offset them. CA is the only state that doesn’t allow for consideration of reinsurance costs in ratemaking.
CA requires insurers to underwrite using historical data from the past 20 years (which doesn’t include housing growth in high-risk regions or increased fuel load following years of drought and poor fire suppression strategies) to determine catastrophe losses vs predictively modeled data incorporating climate change. It is the only state that disallows forward-looking models when pricing wildfire risk.
Until California does something to ensure that the prices of insurance reflect the risk (letting them use modern catastrophe models, letting them price in reinsurance, approving rate filings in a timely manner), insurers will continue non-renewing folks and pulling out of the state altogether. It filed the rate increase in April 2023 and was just approved. In the meantime, Allstate has not added a single new homeowner in the state.
Semi-relatedly, I had my parents sign up for https://www.charlie.com/
There are a bunch of great anti-fraud features including one that lets me be a co-pilot on their account.
Some features: it doesn't allow transactions while they are asleep, can block all transactions online except for merchants that you allow, limit international spend, and they have a feature that you can forward any email that you are curious about and it'll tell you if it's likely to be fraud.
Leo does a great job explaining why VC's want liquidation preferences.
But founders/employees want them too! With all the crazy founder-friendly deals of 2021, I never heard of one in the US without a liquidation preference.
Why? Liquidation preferences allow the VC bought securities to be treated as "preferred" and reduce the common stock price in the 409a valuation report, allowing early employees to get options at low prices.
If VC's invested in common stock the strike prices would be much higher, making it less lucrative to be an early employee.
In parts of Europe there is different tax treatment for options and employees generally don't own as many shares due to it... and some of those companies don't have liquidation preferences. I believe Klarna (Sweden) doesn't have preferred shares, meaning the huge swing in valuation they had over the past few years is not as bad as it seems.
TBH the whole 409a thing is a charade & we probably need to clean up how we do accounting & taxes but until we do, preferred shares are here to stay.
I've been there a few times & spoken to people who live there. It's beautiful but requires a LOT of maintenance. There are 20,000 bushes and 800 trees. Just maintaining the gardens costs $200,000 per month! There are 113 units, so maintenance itself comes to $1,800 per month per unit.
Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor in Pittsburgh in 1999-2000, while I was at CMU. He would really go out of his way to have social interactions. He would always say hello and ask how you were doing in a way that felt like he actually genuinely wanted to know the answer. Case of the person in real life being exactly like what he seems like on TV.
I have a link to http://sheel.wtf (a public motion page) in my twitter bio. I’m surprised at how many people read it and reference stuff from it when we talk. I’m often on podcasts and it gives the hosts something to talk about.
I’m a VC and a few founders have mentioned they like knowing about their investors as people and mine helps them understand that.
I think the main reason the Bloomberg article got to the top rather than the source (theinformation) is that The Information is beyond a paywall that you can't bypass.
It uses an “on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real-time.” Perhaps it doesn’t work as well on the old Apple TV? Or just an excuse.
It reminds me of the oligarchs in Russia, license raj in India, privatization in Mexico etc…
being close to political power lets folks buy up crown-jewel assets at a fraction of their true value.