LC

Have these guys spoken about the rationale behind allocating their $10B? I never heard of them prior to their anointing, did anyone follow them when they ran their own funds?

Ted Weschler is one odd dude, lol. But good to see them getting their faces out there.

In the hobbyist CPU market, people literally track which factory and production run the chip was assembled in to determine quality. I wonder why people don't do this with cars. There must be a german factory somewhere still pumping out quality BMWs. Same with toyota, honda, jeep, etc. And the same with some factory from the same automaker which is assembling garbage.

We're all unlucky that we were born now, and not in 4000 AD when the secrets to cellular degeneration have been uncovered and reversed, and everyone lives forever in total comfort and splendor across the entire universe.

SD, just write your damn memoirs already, you've always got the craziest stories ;D As to luck vs skill....who cares? All we can do is try our best regardless.

The bear case on Elon Musk: https://np.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/651p76/welcome_to_capitalist_america/dg7eovf/

DIS

Relatively, I think you can skew the odds in your favor...the key is to remove the current price (or current multiple) from the equation entirely. The only way to do that is to think on such a long-term horizon (decades) that price becomes more irrelevant. Which reminds me of that Ben Graham documentary quote (spinoza): "You must look at things in the aspect of eternity" And, maybe even more importantly, by doing so you can generalize a lot more and make arguments based on industry and economic dynamics rather than daily minutia. Take the SP500 constituents. Imagine they are all trading at the market multiple. Can someone make relative claims on the value/"moat" of one company vs. another? Which company has a better chance of being around in 20 years vs. another? I think so, maybe not conclusively but you can make a strong argument of one vs. the other.

Hey folks, Does anyone remember a report/article/whitepaper from a few years ago that tracked blue-chips from the 50s/60s? Essentially it looked at PG as one example, and the P/E multiple it was trading at in say 1950. Then it took the next 50 years of earnings/dividends/splits etc. and discounted it back to that same point in 1950, in order to figure out what P/E it *should* have been trading at. Essentially making the point that quality companies are undervalued over the very long term. I thought I saved it on my computer or google drive but I can't find it :( Hopefully one of u guys remembers or has it saved. Cheers LC

For every Chinese city which has grown exponentially out of poverty based on manufacturing and engineering, there are 30 cities which have done the same based on critical reviews of Shakespeare and the next great American novel. Nobody is saying these degrees are worthless, but hard sciences have higher average salaries with less variance. Who would you lend 150K to?

The difference is that the PhDs/Engineers have an automatic call option because they can perform 2 useful skills for society. They can dig ditches and perform surgery. The literature majors/ditch diggers can only perform 1 useful skill towards society. So yes: society needs to allocate the resources efficiently (marry the PhD with the VC) to utilize that call option. If you live in an inefficient society, maybe you want to be a ditch digger and forgo the education expense. I live in the US.I graduated with a Bcomm from a Canadian Uni in finance in 2008. Not exactly a great time to be entering that workforce. I dug my ditches for years. But eventually the call option paid off. On a side note: everything I learned in Uni (aside from the social skills) could have been learned for free online. Of course, employers don't think that way. But that is another of society's inefficiencies. Imagine 2 students, both with the same knowledge. One came from a big uni and has ($150K) debt. The other debt free and learned everything online. As an owner, I can pay the debt-free student less money, and get the same output. The indebted student requires more salary because he has an additional expense.

Not sure I agree with either of these statements. An unemployed surgeon is more valuable than an unemployed ditch digger. Price does not equal value. Free education does not devalue the education. The price is just a transaction price. Look at the Chinese cities built upon free IP, they are in fact more valuable because they have removed the transaction cost. Most education and information is already out there to learn freely. Heck, I can download a med school's worth of textbooks and watch all the lectures online. That is not the reason we don't have a civilization filled with doctors, engineers, etc.

"The expected pressure inside the tube will be maintained around 0.015 psi (100 Pa, 0.75 torr)"

There's no hate...it's like if someone told u they were only going to buy 200+ PE stocks and get become a billionaire. I mean, I personally don't think it will work but it's your money...

1 rail tie being removed does not instantly destroy the entire network of railroad tracks and every train on it. 1 small hole in a boat does not instantly destroy the entire boat and every other boat in the ocean. I have come to agree with rukawa. This is a technological nightmare to build properly.

The more I read about it the more it reminds me of the monorail episode from the simpsons...

Well, regardless of the critics, it looks like they're going to try it anyways: https://hyperloop-one.com/image-gallery

"I'd argue that in general, the greater the variance in performances indicates the greater the irrationality in the market" Upon first glance maybe, but think of all the crashes in history. In the irrational period prior to the crashes, was there a wide or narrow performance variance? Seems like it narrows as we approach a crash, at least to me.

There is no number. No 42%, no approximately 30%, etc. Common thinking is mobile spend as a % of total digital spend is going to continue to trend upwards. Why can't we really pin a number on it? A big reason is what Slow Appreciation mentioned earlier. Imagine a client has TOLD ME to spend $10M/month, and hit X% ROI. I can probably spend $8M and hit that. That other $2M? It goes wherever I can find it. The worst thing is to leave money on the table. But of course sometimes I can't hit the number and disappoint everyone. Sometimes I can get a good deal on desktop, sometimes mobile, sometimes nowhere so I try and stretch it... So this question of % on platform A vs platform B...there is no rhyme or reason to it. Some people can tell a client, No i cannot spend that, it is a giant waste. Others would rather try and spend it, and then try even harder to justify it when their results suck. So the % looks more like a crapshoot. Look at it from the top down. Digital budgets should be between 5-20% of a total marketing plan, depending on the product/brand. Marketing spend has been consistently increasing over at least the last 5 years. There's only so many billboards, so that % is probably ticking upwards. Mobile as a % of that is growing fastest as it is newest part of the mix.

LTV - The first response was "that is the vaguest $(*&(# question ever" ;D I hope you find that funny...anyways, for a better answer: Depends on the vertical, the client, the business objective, the use case...probably in about that order. In other words, car makers are not buying mobile ads to convert. However the mobile spends are growing overall, and where you would suspect it would: branding.

I pretty much agree- I've tried my own share of small business/direct to consumer marketing on hyper-niche places. A lot of the stuff I buy, for things I am passionate about and really research, use exactly this technique. And it's exactly the kind of stuff you mention, usually small-sized/high-priced goods. Stuff like really nice leather wallets made by a dude in a workshop in the middle of nowhere, etc. Custom stuff made by an artisan or whatnot. Cue the artisan ice cube jokes...haha No offense taken! I used to work in the big ad world so I probably talk too much like a d*bag about it. Anyways, I'll take a contact-high any day of the week.

FB is different. Because of the unique nature of what Facebook does and what kind of data they collect (and the perceived value of that data), they have had the ability to put more controls around how their data/analytics are validated. There are far more partners in the space who can drop tags on campaigns running through Google (for example) to keep their reporting numbers more honest. To be fair, Google is showing signs of moving towards FB's approach. As that happens more, comparisons will be even more valid between the two.

I misunderstood your earlier post! Sorry :D Oh...you mean DRM as in direct response marketing. Yeah, I mean I'm talking about the digital marketing industry. The marketing around online newsletters are pocket change to these guys...the big branded campaigns is where the real money is. The tension between clients/agencies vs. the online platforms they market on, how this relationship plays out will move a lot of resources around.

When you're spending $15M/mo on a branding campaign across 10 online platforms it absolutely matters. Do you say that what numbers a company reports doesn't matter, when you are allocating investment dollars between competing investments? Of course not. Companies must report using a common standard - GAAP. They have auditors who provide assurance over numbers like revenue, margins, etc. You have no insight into what Facebook's self-reported metrics mean, and have no confidence when comparing them vs. competitors. Of course that matters when determining where to allocate ad dollars. I'm not talking about some dude with a small business spending 10K on an adwords campaign who can easily measure results. I'm talking about huge clients and their agencies trying to manage very complicated campaigns, where digital spend may only be 5-20%. Even within just digital, with all the attributions that go into trying to measure the success of a campaign, it becomes extremely complicated to gain insight. When facebook essentially FVCKS you on the data, making your job much more difficult, it is easy to see why savvy marketers do not like working with them.

"the eonomics"? what metrics are you talking about? and frankly, data rights is a pretty tangential field. facebook data cant really be compared to other outlets, one of the big problems. just fyi, my info is coming from analysts at the largest digital agencies and tech co's out there, who have been running 8 figure campaigns for all types of verticals, cpg, auto, telecom, etc. for over 5 years. they're the ones responsible for the oreo ads people see on FB, to use an example mentioned previously.