BC BUSINESS
Saved by @Alex1Powell

I’m a firm believer that more & more entrepreneurial ‘builders’ will evolve their operating company into a HoldCo

Scaling initial capital light successes (like a service co) & redeploying cash flow into concentrated bets leveraging existing know-how, infrastructure, & expertise

 Why?

- lower barriers than ever to building asset light/capital light co's
- existing co infrastructure makes acquiring/building another co easy
- more non-dilutive funding options available
- talented operators/investors can use brand, capital, & know-how to scale meaningfully
But first… what is a HoldCo?

It’s fancy term for “holding company” which is an entity that owns/controls the assets of other different companies
Most HoldCo portfolio companies operate autonomously... with their own team, balance sheets, systems, processes etc.

Major capital allocation decisions are performed at the “TopCo” (ie, primary owners of the HoldCo)
Most HoldCo’s are C-Corps due to structural/tax advantages, but sometimes you see them operate as LLCs

Distributions to shareholders are less common, w/ free cash flow used instead for new acquisitions, spinning up new products/services, or using for existing portfolio co needs
How do HoldCo’s get their start?

A common route is starting w/ a capital light co & using excess cash flow to invest in new companies or spin up new products/co's under same entity

Its a natural evolution of owning a great company where excess cash is put to best use outside co
What are the benefits of the model?

- FCF can be effectively deployed to highest value-creation activities

- Stronger dealflow/network/resources due to spending a lot of time in a given service/product/space

- Capital deployed in co's/industries you already understand deeply
I’m always blown away by PE firms flipping companies so quickly… they spend all that time to know the team, company, & industry...

... yet they flip in 2-5 yrs to then start all over again by selling and moving onto the next investment
What are HoldCo examples?

- Tiny Capital
- Chenmark
- Berkshire Hathaway
- SureSwift Capital
- Social Capital
- Constellation Software
HoldCo’s can be all shapes and sizes, but what separates the good from the great:

- expert capital allocation

- ruthless focus (industry, business models, trends)

- have an edge in driving value creation

- typically wear two hats... dynamic operator + good deal nose investor
Most HoldCo’s execute on a playbook of building expertise & distribution before product…

1. Start, acquire, &/or scale an asset light/capital light service co
2. Discover pains/needs/wants in that industry or type of model
3. Deeply understand where the industry is going
4. Productize and brand your know-how through existing co
5. Acquire & build new products/services to add scale and diversification
6. Rinse/repeat through effective capital allocation
For those interested in being a co-founder within a HoldCo focused on digital assets in the pet space… shoot me a note!

DM or contact info here: https://t.co/KIwrnugHsD
I love 'arming the rebels' & its a unique opp for someone who wants to:

- loves building great (effective) product
- looking for a capital allocator/biz builder to supplement technical chops
- stay entrepreneurial but sophisticated investing
- build a LT portfolio+own economics

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So while America was forced into a high percentage of unemployment, billionaires in America made 406 billion from their “essential” businesses.

I wonder how much came from the

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This is a GREAT argument to pull up when talking to people about minimum wage. Some others nested below


A large number of new jobs being created are minimum to low wage, so looking for a new job generally won’t increase pay.

Raising minimum wage helps things not directly related.

Helps Infant mortality? Yup.

Lowers Suicide? Yup.

Reduce smoking rates? You bet.

It also boosts the local economy! Minimum to low wage earners spend more % of their money, so an increase means more is spent, often in community!

Low paying jobs are often in sectors which would gain from this. More people spending money in your shop makes your business more money! Now you have more profits and increased labor costs are covered.
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A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.

But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.

Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.

Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.


The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.

V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.

V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?

Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.

There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.

But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.
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Claire Wardle
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The question of how TV news amplifies disinformation is often discussed but we have little concrete research on this subject. So we partnered w/ @r_macdonald & @kalevleetaru to understand how cable TV amplified Trump’s tweets. The results are interesting.

Between Jan 1 2020 and Jan 8 2021, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC spent 32 hours showing Trump’s tweets on screen, eg. blowing them up full size. This doesn’t include when anchors and correspondents mentioned things Trump had tweeted.


We then focused on the ways in which the three networks broadcast Trump’s tweets that falsely claimed the election would be fraudulent (before Nov 3) and was actually stolen (after the election).

In the weeks after the election, the cable news networks broadcast nearly three times as many Trump tweets about election fraud than they had in the nine months leading up to it. They even broadcast Trump’s old tweets after he was removed from Twitter in January.

4 points: 1) there was a drumbeat of tweets undermining the election throughout the summer. Many were broadcast & there were no labels from Twitter until middle of Sept. We need more research to understand how a foundation supporting the false narrative was laid by platforms & TV
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Travis
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It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/
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It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974.
This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate.


When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes yet because they'd just been invented.
Back when this mistake was made, There was only one Phone Company, because they hadn't been broken up yet. Ted Bundy was still on the loose. Babe Ruth's home run record was about to fall.

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The next Acharya was Nrisimha Bharati [1389-1408]. Harihara raya found a town for this Acharya - Narasimhapuram. Acharya helped the king by guiding him in political affairs. He also initiated the kind with mahamantras for spiritual development.

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Stan Lee’s fictional superheroes lived in the real New York. Here’s where they lived, and why. https://t.co/oV1IGGN8R6


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