On a related note, in college ca. 1999, when I took a history and philosophy of science course on nuclear weapons, the instructor, a retired Los Alamos physicist, assigned an excerpt from The Sum of All Fears as required reading.
He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find in the open literature.
Amazing class, which also included a field trip to Oak Ridge, TN, where we got a fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of the K-25 gaseous diffusion facility[1] while it was in the process of being decommissioned, and a far less interesting "tour" of the basically nonexistent public areas of the Y-12 weapons plant[2], where the only interesting things on display were the extensive security precautions.
No “just” about it; with those things in place, getting a business loan is far simpler than getting a VC to invest in you. To a (big) bank, your business is just an entity with a credit score. That credit score is based on those factors you listed. No weeks/months of glad-handing and human-factors evaluation like VCs do; hand a bank the data, they plug-and-chug, and you either get a loan or you don’t.
Yes, and? We're talking specifically about companies that have "solid growth, unit economics, and cashflow" — i.e. which have a stable business model + revenue engine. Businesses that have been de-risked. Businesses where the only reason they're not bigger already, is that they need money to throw into the coal furnace to power the train up the hockey-stick hill.
At that stage of a business, you wouldn't be taking seed-stage or series-A funding; it'd be series-B or series-C — where the type of investors who do those investments are just as risk-averse as banks, and are looking at essentially the same things banks look at.
At that stage of a business, you know there isn't anything on the horizon that'll kill your share price. Your market cap is stable (save for the growth you're trying to enable.) So you should be extremely wary to let go of any more equity. You should highly prefer debt-backed investment (i.e. loans) over equity-backed investment, because your equity value increase from the growth should be predictably paying off that debt, and then some, likely the same fiscal year you take on the loan. Selling any equity at that period in a company's growth is throwing earnings down the drain.
It comes down to two things: consistency of brand, and constantly creating content. Media does the rest. If you think about 45, he almost always wore the same thing, put his name on everything, applied the same style of opinions to everything (either loved or hated something, with limited nuance). Offered a simple opinion on everything.
He was always slightly outrageous which the left wing media had a job dealing with in a way that did not benefit him. He'd say something a bit bad which was then on the cover of all the newspapers when it would have been politically better to ignore him.
This is a solid point about Donald Trump. I owned the Trump board game as a kid. (Released in 1989! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump:_The_Game) We thought he was such a goof, but he was definitely a social media star before social media networks.
Jobs offered to buy them in 2009 when AAPL stock was around $5 a share (obviously a lot of splits happened), compared to today's price of over $120 so that $1B in stock would be around $25B, more than double Dropbox market cap
But like I said, it would have almost certainly been a cash transaction, right? So yeah, engineers who were retained would have done better with their AAPL stock grants, but that’s not really the measure to compare is it?
By that logic most companies should have dissolved and simply bought AAPL shares with their proceeds (I mean that’s true up to some limit but it falls apart in some macroeconomic sense obviously).
I've tried a few of them and always end up a bit disappointed since you have to spend a ton of time being very specific with the task, otherwise the person on the other side inevitably does a mediocre job at best since the incentive is to do as many task as quickly as possible, since they're paid per task
Yep I live on Reunion. I might be biased, as I was born there, but if you have a job, a decent house, and loves nature living here is quite pleasant. It's like France with less grumpy people, tropical weather but with some third-world issues. Problem is jobs are scarce and aren't well paid (unless you're a french expat) and rents are astronomical.
They've grown a ton, but the four founders have low EQ and don't know what they're doing