Matthew Giampetroni

Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it

The primary job of senior management is to create value over the long term.

Firms should invest in innovation while cutting losses when a strategy is unlikely to pay off. This is an explicit recognition of the value of quitting

Speculative investment, with ambitious but inexact expectations of financial return, is important fuel for founders who build the unknown future. However, investors and operators are often deeply misaligned: investors think in bets, while operators think in consequences. The relationship is tense, but can be explosively productive.

The exceptional (sometimes criticized) margins at Louis Vuitton did not arise from excessively high prices, but from the removal of all costs and damages due to intermediaries. Louis Vuitton’s competitiveness

was therefore structural”

As the bubble grows in scope, the contradiction becomes more visible, leading to a third common characteristic of bubbles: the bifurcation of viewpoints into totally-

positive or totally-negative

A more suitable mindset is that capital is accessible but comes at a cost...

many executives act as if the cash that the business generates is essentially free. The right mindset is that all capital, whether from an internal or external source, has an opportunity cost.