Zillow: Experiments Gone Wrong
Recently I wrote about Zillow’s tough decision to enter iBuying and how Zillow was trying to disrupt themselves. Then shit hit the fan. What Went Wrong A tech company entered a capital-intensive business. Why would ...
Roku and Spotify: Streaming the Future
I bought Roku for the first time today. I’ve always been interested in the company, but I try to avoid buying stocks trading at 30x sales unless the stock is flawless (see Shopify). I had ...
30 Lessons from 30 Years
I just turned 30. It’s been a wild decade. I found the love of my life, went from $12 per hour to $200k+ per year, got married, bought a house, started my blog and learned ...
Power to the People
Some ideas hit you like a freight train. They are so simple, yet complex. Explained in a sentence, but leading to profound conclusions. For me, power to the people is one of those ideas. Power ...
Regret Minimization: Fly High, Try not to Die
Sometimes a video is etched into your head. For me, an example of that was Jeff Bezos talking about the regret minimization framework. This video is amazing on multiple levels. Bezos almost didn’t start Amazon ...
What is a Mental Model?
Life is hard. We live in a dynamic world that is simultaneously interconnected and pulling apart. What if we had a better way to deal with all the complex issues facing us? Mental Models For ...
Netflixland: Autocatalytic Overreactions
I’m torn on Netflix. They are clearly a great company, but the content spend worries me. Billions of dollars are spent every year, but what will be the long-term benefit. From a surface glance, the ...
Passive Research: Easing the Burden of Stock Picking
Passive due diligence is a great way to ease the burden of investing. I’d consider active due diligence reading investor reports, substacks, etc… These forms of research take a long time and a lot of ...
Zillow: A Beautiful Business Ready to Be Torn Apart
“This hunger for freedom and an innate drive to empower consumers is also the spark of the ideas behind my philosophy of company creation and investment—what I call “power to the people.” Revolutionary companies give ...
Commoditizing Culture: Rebelling Against Algorithms
The world has become too commoditized. By commoditization, I mean “the transformation of goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information and people into commodities or objects of trade”. Uniformity is good, but so is differentiation. I worry too ...