Intersection notepad

Thiel just announced the relocation of one of his many investment vehicles to the hopefully upcoming tech talent town of Austin, Texas. And digging deeper into his history of investing and building, not only is he only for his involvement in PayPal, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Facebook, all of which are generational-defining startup of their own … Continue reading Mimetic Theory + Product Creation Cycle

Harvard Business Review launched a quick piece today on Lifestyle Brands Are Building Hotels Now. Here’s Why That Actually Makes Sense. From the targeted customer experience perspective, one's got to build something that they can really response with their brand. In the case below, people expect Godiva to offer classy but not too extremely pricey chocolate … Continue reading Cross Pollination of Brand Equity Across Other Product Experiences

Most of us have heard that Apple's products, or for that matter, most technology products, last on average ~ 2 years. Manufacturers of these hardware can put the pieces through strenuous test cycles, one that closely mimics the average amount of times we will press on that phone button etc. over the lifespan of 2-year … Continue reading Product Life Cycle and Duration + Revenue Optimization

Synopsis of the Marketing of a Luxurious (“Royalty”) Experience for soon-to-be-retired-term "Royalty" guests.  I tied in facets of human psychology and emotional reactions, capital market, capitalism and ultimately, pulling a circle of life back to Ben Horowitz's (co-founder of Andressen Horowitz) recent state about pricing power and moat in your product. Since the dawn of humanity there … Continue reading Synopsis of the Marketing of a Luxurious (“Royalty”) Experience

Robinhood is well known within the retail investment community as one of the first, if not the first to reach sizable scale, in the free-to-trade equity platform. But often times, any regular business and numbers person will wonder how they make their revenue. Some might very well extrapolate with their Robinhood Gold product, which essentially … Continue reading Robinhood: Structural Order Routing + Revenue from Routing Your Orders

Aside from the number of members, company workspace creation and design (i.e. created workspace for Morningstar, Microsoft, Expedia etc.), revenue and expenses that can be easily derived with a quick G search. Below are some interesting models and metrics that might be relevant for us from the cashflow, budget and general planning purposes if and when … Continue reading WeWork Stabilization Model + Economic Occupancy

Most public came to the realization of the great dominance of Amazon in and around 2013 as evident by the # of times it was mentioned in publicly traded companies' earnings. Things like this goes up and down per the hype cycle, including things like the ups and downs of terms such as "AI" and … Continue reading 21 Years of Overnight Success at AMZN + Magic of FCF

Been a fun ride in the past 3 weeks (bear in mind the whole thing tanks -85%, yep negative 85%, from a few months ago). Below is the actual trading log for the past month. This specific market is so inefficient in that: Buy Side Order Book: Studying the second handle on the buy-side order … Continue reading Crypto Market Structural Inefficiencies + Key Takeaways Learned

Today's our administration is in the process of putting a proposal that will allow capital gain to be calculated with an inflation hedge. This essentially means that if someone buys an asset for $200k in 1980 and sells it in 2018 for $800k (inflation puts the the original $200k in today's dollar-term at ~$605k), they … Continue reading Implications of Inflated-Hedged Capital Gain Tax Breaks + Asset Price

Decided to write a quick piece on my flight back to Austin from a Venrock x Plato product mentorship event in June 2018. Most consumers and public equity investors know Amazon via Amazon.com, AWS (margin creator), logistical networks (owning Prime planes and 1000's of trucks) and soon their marketing ad products, but not many know … Continue reading Growth of Insurance Tech in EMs, Implications on Capital Market and Growth of Middle Class in SE Asia

Harry's (also founder of Warby Parker) is setting up their own venture fund today, called Harry's Ventures. They plan to deploy $112M they raised from VCs to invest in other brands, similar to the Slack Innovation Fund. It's similar to the quick overview about the observations though one major difference is between Harry's Ventures fund is: Harry's … Continue reading Startup [Corporate] VC Arm

Amazon announced a few days ago they will now deliver packages to the trunk of your car. Taking on Uber/Lyft model from the financial perspective as: It shifts the upfront capital expenditure to acquire logistical assets to the existing assets in the whole marketplace (in this case, the everyday cars). VCs has blog a lot … Continue reading Consumer Demand Drives Logistics Opportunity

In honor of Netflix's 20+ Year Anniversary and the fact that my usual early morning coffee read today, 4/23/2018, was awakened by the beauty of yet another inspiring debt financing structure, I decided to write up a quick synopsis about NFLX below broken down into sections [jump to the end for the juiciest financing part … Continue reading Netflix: Dependency of Future Revenue Acquisition on Access to Credit

Studying the patent portfolio and patent pending filings can help present a decent gauge of not just the corporate strategy of corporations (and to some extend, the types of startups that will be build in the future as in an 'efficiency market' or shall I say, knowledgeable market, startups are created to cater to an … Continue reading Future Consumer Purchasing Behavior + Implications of Amzn Patent Filing

Arbitrage between human tendency to see linear relationships and the nonlinear nature of reality. Or say it in another, arbitrage between the linear environment that we evolved in and the nonlinear environment that we’ve created. In layman's term, consume information from a wide range of industries, verticals and sources, even better if you read the … Continue reading Linear Thought Process vs. Nonlinear Reality