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Tag:competitive-advantageClear

You have a $50 billion company printing 5.5 billion in free cash flow. You can use a lot to finance debt, obviously, which is what's proposed here. Uh 400 million uh consumer accounts. So, lots of consumers have PayPal accounts, have Venmo accounts. Maybe they're not fully active, but they're ready to be engaged. It's a huge footprint and huge distribution mechanism. Uh, and they have bank info attached. That's difficult. You can't get that from many other consumer applications.

Diet TBPN
2w ago

The vast majority of the best investors who I've ever met, they have some sort of an edge, right? And when you think about that edge, it usually comes from a very specific life experience or a very specific type of intellectual curiosity that they've developed over decades. And that is very hard to replicate.

2w ago

The beauty of permanent capital is that you can say no to a lot of things. You don't have a fundraising cycle, you don't have to worry about returning capital to LPs, you can take a very long view. And that long view is actually a massive competitive advantage because most of the investment world is driven by relatively short-term incentives.

1mo ago

The best businesses we've found are ones where the value of the business actually increases the longer you hold it, not just because of retained earnings, but because the competitive position strengthens over time. That's the opposite of what most people think about when they think about an investment decaying or having a terminal value that you have to discount back.

1mo ago

Most people think about incentives as financial. The real incentive is truth. If you create a culture where people can tell you the truth, you will make better decisions than your competitors. And making better decisions than your competitors over a long period of time is the only sustainable advantage.

1mo ago

The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.

1mo ago

The companies that matter most are the ones that can actually translate technological capability into economic value, and that translation is much harder than it looks. Most technology waves produce enormous value for society but relatively little for investors, because competition drives returns to zero faster than most people expect.

1mo ago

The S-curve is a very well-known concept in technology investing, but what's less appreciated is that the most dangerous moment is often at the top of the S-curve, when a technology looks the most dominant and the most entrenched. That's precisely when the next S-curve is being born underneath it, and the incumbents are most blind to the threat.

1mo ago

The mistake most investors make is they think about technology investing as a static exercise — you find a great company, you understand its competitive position, you underwrite the earnings, and you hold it. But technology is defined by change, and so you need to have a framework for thinking about how industries evolve over time.

1mo ago

The other thing about platform transitions is that they reset competitive advantage. So the incumbents that have accumulated distribution and integration and switching costs — those advantages largely reset with platform transitions. That's what makes them so valuable for investors; new winners can emerge from what looks like chaos.

1mo ago

The big players, the OEMs, they didn't want to give up their customer relationship. And I think that was a mistake, because the customer relationship is actually a burden when you're going through this transition — you're on the hook for the whole experience. We were able to essentially be asset-light, take the best of breed from all of these networks, and essentially build a better product for consumers.

1mo ago

I would describe AI is all chip no salsa and that is real insight like what is it you're going to do differently with your business what is it that's unique about your business most new businesses make no sense at the outset otherwise they would already exist.

3mo ago

Without a coherent industrial strategy covering energy, skills, investment, and R and D, we're effectively putting headwinds in front of our most productive exporters rather than giving them a competitive advantage.

3mo ago

Getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. Uh, it and Lyft has fallen to just five billion. like he won the capital war and Dar has done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up.

4mo ago

if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research. You know, much of the AI boom that we see today comes from just a couple of major advancements in AI that happened, for instance, alexnet, which was this seismic event in neural networks.

4mo ago

if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research.

4mo ago

It's basically impossible to sum up Yahoo's story over the last 25 years, but the short version is that once upon a time, Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and everything immediately went sideways.

4mo ago

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