Ten years ago, Dyn discontinued service for Wikileaks. It's incredible to think about how much time has past but also how similar the conversation is today on platforms and publishers. 1/

I spoke to 5 global enterprises about remote work last week

Here’s what they told me about their plans for the future

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌎

💰 Office space: All of them have $Billion real estate portfolios

All of them plan to cut it by atleast 50% and as much as 70%

📍 Talent Access: The thing they are most interested in is access to talent

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they’ll hire the best person on the planet

📈 Efficiency: Their concern about remote work post-pandemic was that productivity would slip

It’s increased. They now know remote work works

🤔 Remote Dilemma: A big concern is losing their best people through not giving their teams what they want

Each company plans to let people work from home 60-100% of the time

If you're new to real estate twitter this is a must-read.

A thread on how most real estate folks structure deals with outside investors.

Most GPs utilize the "preferred equity" structure when they raise money from outside investors. They "syndicate" deals.

Here's the basics:

The person (or team of people) putting the deal together is the "sponsor". Also called general parter. Referred to on twitter as the GP.

They find the property, do all the work, hire the management company and take fees. They often co-sign debt and always secure the financing.

The investor is generally passive, doing no work and putting in cash. This is the "limited partner". Referred to on twitter as the LP.

They don't co-sign debt. They simply read reports and ask the sponsors questions and cash checks every month (if the deal is going well).

There are two equity classes.

"Preferred equity" belongs to the LPs. Cash talks, so this is a higher class of shares. They are first in the "capital stack" behind the debt (bank loan).

"Common equity" belongs to the sponsor. They are generally last in the capital stack.

Sponsors generally co-invest. That means they hold both equity classes. A 10% co-invest is standard.

That means the GP has skin in the game. His 10% co-invest makes him both an LP and a GP.

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

Obviously Jay Hoag on ILTB is as self recommending as it gets

It is hard to build a profitable internet business at scale in India, but not impossible. Let me talk about ixigo's FY2020 performance. But first, the back story (with @rajnishkumar)

It was 2016. We had 3 Million MAUs (mostly organic) and were getting closer to 20 crores annual revenue. We were trying to raise money because we had just 12 months of burn left in the bank.

Out of many conversations, I remember one with a VC in our office who asked us our CAC-LTV ratio. TBH, we didn't track it in those days because we always made money on the first transaction itself and didn't spend a lot on customer acquisition, but I remember the look we got !

Yet another one gave us advice - "Look it's been 10 years since launch, travel is done and dusted, why don't you guys try doing something else". We felt dejected for a bit but went back to work the next day - not the first or last time we would face rejections.

I met @shaileshlakhani (after many years) at an Unpluggd event in Bengaluru in early 2016, and we sat down to chat about ixigo. He was the first investor we met in a long time who saw us not for who we were but for who we could become.