soniman

ATT has more debt than the Phillipines, it's no surprise that they're trying to cut costs.

The point is that the if you do x for the sake of y, then you really don't care about x, and x will suffer as a result.

Thanks but I still don't get it. "Bosses are jerks, middle managers are clueless sycophants, and workers are chumps." That does sound like a TV sitcom view of the world.

I've tried to read this about 3 times and can't understand it. Could you ELI5 it?

Shopify is a service provider, it's not a platform because it doesn't control the relationship with the consumer. Wish is an aggregator on both sides and that's why it's a platform.

Did you miss the part where it said that it's been net profitable? "net cumulative cash flow from operations of $16 million from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2020"

Wish was valued at $11 billion in the last VC round in 2019. Since then Shopify is up 200% so if Wish is being valued off Shopify then $37.5 billion isn't far off. Shop's price to sales is 50x so 15x isn't outrageous for Wish. Shop is growing faster but Wish's economics are better.

Assuming run rate revenues of around $2.5B, I assume this will be valued around 15x revenues, so $37.5 billion. Just a wild guess.

"Our growth has been highly capital efficient. We have been able to achieve this massive growth and scale by having net cumulative cash flow from operations of $16 million from January 1, 2017 to September 30, 2020, aided by our positive cash float, where we receive an upfront payment from a user, and remit payment to a merchant a number of weeks later. In 2019, we generated a net loss of $129 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(127) million, compared to a net loss of $208 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(211) million in 2018, and a net loss of $207 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(135) million in 2017. For the nine months ended September 30, 2020, we generated a net loss of $176 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(99) million, compared to a net loss of $5 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $(11) million for the nine months ended September 30, 2019."

According to Wikipedia the most famous book on the depression, Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 offers a single cause for the great depression, falling money supply. That might be right or wrong, I don't know. But I know that Housel's "it was a lot of things" is lazy thinking that sounds like wisdom.

The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is literally a tautology. Or "progress requires optimism and pessimism" could be turned into "progress requires blind optimism" which would be equally true. Finally, I don't think Morgen Housel exists. Look at his photo, it's obviously generated by an AI, as are his tripe-filled posts.

That's what money is for. You want to do something useful? Somebody will pay you. It's like he's saying "We need a system that allocates prestige to people who do useful things" and we literally have that, it's called a market.

Thanks. I've wondered whether the Linkedin "people also viewed" could be used to predict M&A transactions.

Can somebody give an idea of what are the most common alternative data sets that are the most widely used?

This is an amusing story about when David Bowie would hang out on message boards.

http://dokearney.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-beautiful-exit.html

My supervisor said he's never seen such a straight line but yeah, it is back breaking work.

I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and learned how to tile a floor. I imagine if you do it consistently you can learn a lot of things.

This is going to get downvoted but note taking is yak shaving. Don't waste any time thinking about optimal note taking.

As a tree-lover this is a heartwarming story but it has to be put in context: the population of Niger will double by 2050. The country will be growing by almost a million people per year. How will it support all those people who will be living on the edge of starvation? And how many of those desperate people will be tempted to cut down the trees?

You have to wonder what the firing of Eich was really about. Hard to believe Eich would've done the same thing.

Microsoft might want to get rid of the advertizing businesses (like Bing) and merging Bing with Tiktok would create a mini Google-Youtube spinoff that would be very hot.

As soon as I read that first sentence I said "Has to be Scott Locklin"

There have been other cases like this, right? I can't think of them right now but powerful people get obsessed with anonymous message board commenters and then go on a rampage. Musk has called people at home and where they work. Back in the day Yahoo message board posters used to drive companies crazy. It's a weird phenomenon because literally the only people who care are the executives themselves. Nobody else, not even their spouses or competitors, cares. I'll call it Fishbowl Syndrome because the executives think they're in a fishbowl under constant scrutiny and literally nobody else cares what's going on with the fish.

Finally somebody makes some sense. I have an even lazier system, I type a search into bing like "bizidea - hydroponic urban farming" and save it to bookmarks and when search "bizidea" there are all the billion dollar ideas.

Linkedin is literally used a little by a lot of people.

Did a mainframe write this?

Uber 10-K has operating lease payments in 2019 of $196M and in 2020 of $216M. That's not all data centers but a lot of it is data centers.

How is this not at the top of HN? This is hilarious. "Just average all the runs and call it stochastic, nobody will notice that we can't reproduce the results"!

AirBNB raised $1B and Stripe $600M. Just a guess but terms would've been MUCH better if they'd done it in the stock market. Really puzzling why they didn't go public when markets were ripe, now YC is paying the price.