Author: Jerry

Today, the Federal Reserve proposes easing regulatory framework for foreign banks in the US (but it lacks liquidity framework for foreign banks with domestic presence – which holds multi trillion of assets as of YE2018. Relaxing banking regulation is a fine double-edged sword – for one, it opens up the # of transactions and credit … Continue reading Proposed Easing of Foreign Banking Organization (FBO) Regulatory Framework

The Antifragility of the Open Source: Like peer review of scientific publications, open source software is subjected to thousands of eyeballs to find bugs, and hands to fix them. And that this mass collaboration structure creates powerful and robust systems. Indeed, the underlying mechanism is best understood as an antifragile system. Yet breakable, changeable systems … Continue reading The Antifragility of the Open Source

Theory: in the beginning of a tech revolution, capital light “sharing economy” models win. They can roll out faster. Inevitably, they get crushed by “fatter” competitors with operational excellence. Example: Ebay -> Amazon Future: Doordash/UberEats -> "ghost kitchen" brands. Consumers are slowing associating their palate to the dish itself, and not so much the restaurant … Continue reading Capital-Lite Model “Ghost Kitchen” Concept

Important takeaways from Lyft’s S1 Filings Rev PAU (per active user) has essentially doubled in the past two years alone. 25% comes from increase in # of rides, and rest comes from ASP (38%) and take rate (48%). Raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat… The … Continue reading Pricing Power

Thinking about thinking. “Because of limits in human mental capacity, the mind cannot cope directly with the complexity of the world. Rather, we construct a simplified mental model of reality and behave rationally within the confines of our mental model.” Most listen to speak, few listen to listen. Leonardo Da Vinci. Because of his proclivity … Continue reading Thinking about thinking.

It is surprisingly easy to have this happen, often due to mgmt team attention being elsewhere, metrics collection lagging major trapdoor decisions (like hiring), the costly behaviors feeling really success-inflected in the moment, locally-optimized decisionmaking. Example of locally-optimized decision making: if you hire an ambitious person and give them a budget for ads, it is … Continue reading OKRs, KPIs and Decison Making in Companies

Just to add a bit more on the credit side of the story. Even though credit spreads have widen considerably since Q4 2018 (we did not see this type of widening in Q1’18, but saw a little bit of it in Q1’16) WeWork’s bond spread continues to widen substantially relatively. Credit market often times provides … Continue reading WeWork Meets Credit Market Reality

This is interesting as laptops are getting real thin and semiconductors still continues to obey the Moore’s Law but camera lens has yet to reach magnitude of improvements in terms of thinness...so manufacturers are getting creative on where they can stuff their camera lenses. Latest iPhone is going through similar hardware innovation challenges as well. … Continue reading Microsoft Launches their own Webcam Product

Given the mainstreaming of yield curve inversion, can argue it could either lead to reflexivity in action i.e. cause the behavior it supposedly predicts, or a reflection of goodhart's law i.e. its lost its predictive powers since everyone is watching it. That is in the short-term, the so-called reality will thereby be created by the … Continue reading Short-Term US Treasury Yield Curve Inversion

Besides this potentially being the fastest unicorn exit, and/or perhaps, this will boost the next round of financing, this recent scalability push is worth noting. The Bird Platform (similar to Amazon Flex) is set up to let independent operators run their own fleets. Operators upload a logo and choose a sleeve color, and Bird manufactures … Continue reading Modern-Day Franchise Model @ Amazon Flex and Bird

Business models, indeed, also go through cyclical adjustments as other variables of the tech and financial systems matures. It is difficult to trace back the business that first deployed and utilized the marketplace business model with high degree of success, though some have argued Craigslist is actually one of the first. But one thing we … Continue reading Marketplace Dynamics and Network Effects

With the saturation of smartphone adoption in the developed countries and soon developing countries, I think it's worth noting what has already happened and will likely continue to happen when it comes to the pricing of goods and services. The rise of, and there of, the hockey stick like adoption curve of smartphones have essentially … Continue reading Product Strategy – Pricing Compression due to Tech Adoption and How Product “Utility” Plays a Huge Role

This simple equation below is complex #oxymoron. But hey, according to the real renassiance man, Leonardo da Vinci said "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."   Detailed PDF attached. This below: "SMI extends the NDVI methodology to industrial activity. Cement and steel on the ground uniquely reflect light of differing wavelengths, which, when adjusted for atmospheric and meteorological effects, allows … Continue reading SpaceKnow – Using Satellite Heatmap to Validate Every Country’s “Official” Economic Data + Roman Military Strategy

Fractional asset ownership has been tested in Eurozone region for at least 1-2 years now but there are lots of financial / bank risk mgmt implications to it. Also, disposal of assets is also another concern as risks is shared between the "would-be" homeowners and "interim" homeowner / in this case, Ribbon. The European startups … Continue reading Fractional Asset Ownership