Good news everyone, Jay Hoag gave us the simple 5 point playbook for finding Magical Companies in consumer technology.

1. product offers combo of value, convenience, selection
2. there's tremendous engagement
3. a virtuous cycle
4. tremendous execution
5. kinda crazy leader

1. A company that has been brewing just outside our Top-5 for some time now is the electroporation (EP) company MaxCyte. Modelio assesses it as one of the best investments to capture the growing gene editing and gene therapy space, especially in allogeneic ex-vivo treatments.

2. We estimate that MaxCyte stands before a huge inflection point that will accelerate both growth and profitability. We have seen signs of the accelerating underlying activity by the fact that they in the last two years have added 9 of their 12 commercial agreements.

3. What makes MaxCyte unique compared to other “pick-and-shovel” businesses is their claim to milestones and royalties, something usually reserved for pharmaceutical companies.

4. As per the January update, MaxCyte has a potential pool of $950m in milestones, and a 2-3% (our estimates) of sales in royalties, that excludes licenses and consumables for the machines.

5. Reviewing the partners' pipelines, we think milestone revenues will unleash themselves in 2021 and beyond as they move further into clinical trials.

There’s rumour about confidential negotiations btn the Biden admin and the German gov. Their goal: to find a way out of the mess in which the whole transatlantic community finds itself because of Merkel’s support for Putin’s pipeline—Nord Stream 2

2/ The preferred solution for the Biden team would be to deny Putin the ability to exercise energy blackmail against Central Europe and Ukraine, while at the same time foregoing sanctions against Germany.

3/ Early in his career, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony @SecBlinken had analyzed the decision of the Reagan administration not to levy sanctions against West Europeans for building the Siberian pipeline with the Soviets.

4/ See for example:

5/ Reagan decided to take a step back, calculating that the unity of the West was more important than the gas pipeline. Not even Lady Thatcher supported Reagan’s policy.

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

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Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures