Jurgis

There's always two sides to this. There are good/great investment managers who started from friends-and-family and did great. Hey, Buffett is one of these. ;) There are good/great investment managers or just investors who never take friends-and-family money to avoid the issues that people describe. You just have to know the pros/cons and where you fall in this divide. Either can work, either can fail or lead to problems.

IMO ARM-chip Macs is probably the most substantial AAPL innovation in recent years.

This was expected. If FB censors content in US (whether that's positive or negative is Politics section debate), then every other country can ask the question why they can't make FB censor content according to their wishes.

I sold my YY position. I think the MuddyWaters report about fraud ( https://www.muddywatersresearch.com/research/yy/1/ ) is mostly crap. On the positive side, YY sold (most of?) China business to Baidu and it's likely Baidu is not buying fraudulent business/accounting. On the negative side, YY got pretty cheap price for its China business, which either indicates that their China business was crap (fraudulent ;)) or that their arm was twisted or that they want to get out of China at any cost. All three possibilities are not positive. Also, investment into YY going forward is based on assumption that they won't siphon the cash from sale to management/whoever and that they will manage to grow non-China business (Bigo) and make it profitable, etc. There are too many unknowns for me. Anyway, I'm not China expert, so I'd be happy to hear in depth input from people who know the business and the politics around it. Edit: OT: I stopped watching movies. Listening to investment pitches and reading (short) investment reports is much more fun, drama, and action. I'll quote MuddyWaters: "You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. Well...Actually You Can"

https://www.linqto.com/ is Keiretsu Forum funded company with app that lowers the amount you have to buy to get in. From what I understand they prebuy a bunch of shares with legal agreements and then you're buying from their pool of shares. Which means that you're paying extra to them. How much "extra" who knows. They may disclose - I did not dig. They have a bunch of companies "listed" on their app including Ripple and Linqto itself ( recursion rules LOL ). If anyone sees anything attractive on it and wants to discuss, please post or shoot me PM. If you sign up, you can get a free "The Intelligent Investor: Silicon Valley" ebook: https://www.linqto.com/ebook YMMV. All caveats apply. For accredited investors only. I have not used Linqto myself. I am not affiliated with Linqto or any company mentioned.

Blue Horseshoe loves Tesla.

They already tested Donnie? :o

You're my kind of guy. Can you buy me a houseboat in Belgrade?

You could put high-powered lasers on the satellites and call them "Death Star"

We found who the 2 star guest is Lol Value investors don't like value investors to be their customers.

IDWM claims that going forward they gonna be asset/expenses lite, pretty much licensing shows to be made by others and collecting "royalties" rather than putting their own money into productions. Expecting 2-5M EBITDA per show per year. Hoping to get to 10 shows+. New CEO is past CFO so there is a question of why the heck he went with the "not-so-expense-lite" model in the past. In any case now he has seen the light. ::) FWIW. No position.

The biggest (known) risk is Microsoft Teams pretty much bulldozing Slack in organizations. I know some places that use Slack and some places that use Teams. I think there's very little chance that Teams organizations will take up Slack in the future. Not sure about the opposite. Edit: well, Stratechery covers this and more. One note though: IIUC MS Teams are also trying/supporting some limited version of shared channels across organizations. Not sure if it's going to be good and adopted though.

Thanks. I agree with Spekulatius that this is a good analysis. The only part that I would push back without going into concrete details is that I disagree with blanket statement that SaaS has to be inherently sticky and that the only reason for SaaS to collapse is incompetent management selling poorly functioning software. There are a number of SaaS markets where the offerings are very competitive and it is possible to lose market while having OK software and OK management. One example would be no-moat games.

I am not sure I understand BAMs thought process of first spinning off Trisura (which has been growing gangbusters after spinoff) and then going into reinsurance themselves. Maybe Trisura was too small to matter compared to potential reinsurance but still you'd think it could have been a foundation for insurance/reinsurance group inside BAM. ::)

Thanks jfan. I am not sure how you get to "It would take ~ 25-30 years to lose that customer." from 10% annual churn. Seems to me approximately all customers will turnaround in ~10 years. I am not quite sure how you get to $18M value in 3 years. I'd say that net margins account for CAC, no? Although it might be not the best way to account for it. And likely CAC will push down margins way lower in a growth phase than I wrote. You probably should have pushed back on my "then a wide distribution of outcomes: drop, plateau or capturing up to 100% of TAM", since it's so wide as to possibly make this un-valuable and un-investable. So Y3 sales are: 12M. Y3 earnings are 3.6M. I realize now I am probably way too generous with 30% net margins in 3 years for anything realistic, but maybe. Otherwise we can drop this lower. Post Y3, I'd probably go with some distribution: 25% chance drop off after year 3, value at ~5M or likely zero to shareholders (they may sell to salvage, but may just fizzle off). 25% chance muddle through, not significant growth, so whatever value we put at slow/no growth 12M sales/3.6M earnings company. 25% chance of continued 15-20% growth. Value that at 3-5x Y3 sales - and here we have issue that 3x sales is 10PE because of high margins (/shrug) 25% chance of 20%+ growth. Value that at probably 10x+ Y3 sales. At some point the risk becomes that company get close to TAM which kills growth. Value these separately, then get estimated value across all of them and discount to Y1. Unfortunately figuring out the distribution is likely very hard.

Thanks for writing and posting. I took a look at the company and it's not a business I am interested in investing into, so sorry, but I'm gonna bail after asking you to write. ::) Hopefully this is going to be useful for others though. 8)

Alternatively there should be hard moderation that nukes political posts in the Coronavirus and other threads. I think that Sanjeev is too busy and too nice to hard moderate. I think this is not having a good effect on CoBF. But hey it's Sanjeev's site and it's only MHO ::)

+1

Can you tell what attracts you to GDYN? (Maybe start a thread). I took a glance and it looks like no growth in recent quarters and years. It's possible that financials are messed up due to SPAC conversion, IDK. ::)

Looking at some ideas, input, etc. on valuing a SaaS company. For simplicity sake assume monthly $10 fee per customer ($120 yearly). Assume 2 year+ contract, i.e. no churn for 2 years, then possible churn at 10%+. Assume TAM 1M customers. Assume company starting with 10K customers now and growing to 100K in 3 years. And then a wide distribution of outcomes: drop, plateau or capturing up to 100% of TAM (unlikely). If needed, assume 50%+ gross margins, 30%+ net margins on 100K+ customers. How would you broadly value this? I won't post my thoughts for now to avoid too much anchoring. 8)

Fairfax is short Zoom? :o

I wonder if Charlie's catamaran is going to hit the market. ;D :P

I think ANGI is trying to address this issue via fixed-price. They're pitch is that they will vet the contractor and guarantee the work. I think it's fair to be skeptical of that claim, but I think many people find it appealing, because they have little ability to vet contractors themselves. It's the same with used cars -- car people want to look at the car themselves because they can do their own evaluation; other people prefer to rely on some type of third-party inspection/guarantee (Carvana) because they know nothing about cars and thus cannot effectively evaluate the product themselves. They also fear being taken advantage of by a used car dealer, so prefer the online experience. And, of course, it's convenient to enter some information on a website have a solution show up at your door. ANGI's fixed-price offering is going after the same consumer mindset. OK. I have not seen their fixed price offerings yet. Might look at that. I think it's tough to fix-price the home improvement work. I've seen this offered by another company (I posted it here: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/home-projects/msg391300/#msg391300 ) for door/window installation. It was fixed price for specific door/window models. I did not try it then though. It was below the quotes I got, but difficult to compare since I could not make the contractors to write the quotes with apples-to-apples comparison of parts. They tell you that they don't offer this specific model of door or they don't get back if you ask to adjust the quote for different door model. Anyway, yeah, fixed price is somewhat good and may work for certain jobs.

I pretty much agree with what people above posted about ANGI. I think I raised similar questions and issues when discussing ANGI. And, yeah, as KJP wrote, ANGI is valued rather cheaply compared to other platforms likely because they are not growing fast even this year where everyone and their dog are doing home improvement projects. My personal experience with ANGI has been subpar. I actually never registered, but I got some leads for work I needed to do. One of their very-highly-recommended contractors seemed very professional, but his quote was through the roof (pun intended). IMO, like people wrote in various home improvement threads on CoBF, if you manage to find a good/great contractor, you should try to keep them, wine and dine them, since finding another one is a pain. Edit: A bigger issue, which IMO ANGI does not resolve, is that if you need a specialized work once in X years (roofing, insulation, etc.), and you need to choose a contractor for that, it is very hard to choose someone who is good/great and has reasonable pricing. Reviews only go so far. And some of the highly recommended ones either are flaky (never show up for estimates, show up for estimate and never return estimate) or hugely overpriced and not necessarily high quality. I've had a plumber who is still top recommendation across a number of services who charged me $2K over the price that was later charged by another plumber for same work/parts. You can get 2-3+ quotes for non-urgent projects, but if your heating system is on the fritz, you cannot wait 2+ weeks to get multiple quotes. On the positive side, outside of ANGI, just through yellow pages and/or internet search, I've had great experiences with some specialized contractors (e.g. garage door replacement). So there are good ones out there, they are just not easy to find and identify. Disclosure: I have positions in ANGI and IAC.

Are you sure about this? Links?