Repeat after me: neither venture capital investment nor easy access to risky, highly inflated assets predicts lasting success and impact for a particular company or technology. Remember the dot-com boom and the subsequent bust? Legendary investor Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway recently noted that we’re in an “even crazier era than the dot-com... See more
“The bar for freemium models at the time was Skype, which converted about 7% of their users to pay at least something—maybe a dollar. We hit that in a few months, but it just continued from there. Past 10%, 15%, 20%—and we realized that we had stumbled on what might just be the most effective freemium model the world had ever seen.”—Gustav Söderstr... See more
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists
From the outside, Substack's strategy has seemed to be the following: 1) Create a beautiful, simple blogging platform, which Substack most certainly is. 2) Very slowly release control of who can use Substack to create cachet. 3) Pay some people to post to the site, but not most of them. (Sub-strategy: Don't disclose who's working for Substack and w... See more