CEOs interviewing other CEOs, Public Dating Shows, @sriramk + @aarthir becoming the next great show hosts.

I cannot read 2 tweets without seeing something on Clubhouse. A new room, a thread on Elon, a bull case on their $1B eval.

Let’s take a look at the rise of Clubhouse.

Clubhouse is a live-voice chat app.

People can join different rooms, where predetermined topics are set by hosts who help moderate the discussion.

With quarantine, it gave people the space to shoot the shit and listen to high-quality conversations.

Clubhouse was founded by @pdavison and @rohanseth .

Davison’s past projects show a bias towards products based on spontaneity:

Highlight: People-meeting location app
Shorts: Reveal your whole camera roll (Acq. Pinterest 2016)
Talkshow: Instant radio call-in shows

2 weeks ago, Elon made waves by appearing on the app. With hundreds of Clubhouse rooms created beforehand to pregame the conversation like a UFC fight.

However, Clubhouse has already attracted stars to the platform, with Drake, Oprah, and Virgil Abloh all making appearances.

However, star power alone cannot be the sole explainer for Clubhouse's rise.

What are some of the other factors that have played a role in their growth?

Seeing a ton of (warranted) criticism re Dems on impeachment — but like where was everyone? We know politicians don’t act boldly if we’re not in the streets to make them. But multi million dollar “movement” orgs are writing petitions & posting graphics instead of organizing

I will always remember the first impeachment trial- pre-Covid-, when a mere 10,000 people marched in NYC. Dems are cowardly and ineffective, and Republicans are fascists but also the grassroots left is all over the place and has some reckoning to do.

These groups have millions of people on their email lists. How are they using that platform? There was zero coordinated national action(not emails, but action) re impeachment that I saw. Not even an ask to post something on social media or take a photo, let alone in person.

And I’m putting the focus on the people with money and resources to organize rather than on Individuals trying to survive a pandemic intentionally.A smattering of groups did some impeachment texting or phonebanking. That’s all I know about.

And because of this lack of direction from the people with resources (seeing this in the climate movement too) local groups or affiliates are getting wrapped up in super local politics, which while fine, is not going to move the national Democratic Party the way we MUST.

1/12
In light of the recent events involving the owners of #Cannoli and their manager,
we at the Centre for Labour Research (CLR), in the interest of protecting the
fundamental human #right to #dignity, condemn any and all forms of #harassment.

2/12
The viral video in which the owners of Cannoli are seen singling out and
humiliating their manager due to his inability to speak the colonisers language for
their entertainment depicts a form of #workplaceharassment. Such behaviour is
unacceptable.

3/12
It is the responsibility of the employer to ensure that each and every employee,
regardless of their #employment status, the sector of employment, or their
occupation feel safe, respected and included at the workplace.

4/12
As entrusted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and article 14 of the Constitution
of Pakistan with regard to the inviolability of the dignity of a person,

5/12
#CLR recommends all #labour legislation explicitly prohibit harassment to
ensure promotion of decent work in relation to education, language,
socio-economic status, race, gender, sex, age, colour, caste, domicile, religion, creed, political opinion and disability.

10 reasons your product will fail.

Words: @BrianNorgard

↓

1. Too complex

2. Can't be easily described

Want to know how to get brokers to bring you deals first?

Want to build a machine that can buy real estate while you play golf?

Have a very professional and organized METHOD for closing on a property.

It's a system. And here's how we do it.

A thread 👇👇👇

The thing is most sellers (that I deal with) have never sold a property before.

They don't know what to expect. They don't know how it works.

So they naturally have unreasonable expectations and there is a lot that can get lost in the shuffle.

And it creates stress.

And most brokers are working several deals at a time. And they aren't at liberty to tell a buyer how to do business.

So their hands are tied.

And for that reason a lot of closings are shit show. They are delayed. They end up with lawyers huddled up on Thursday night at 10pm.

And for that reason its YOUR JOB as the buyer to take charge.

Set the expectations.

Set the timeline.

And be a professional.

Step one:

Get a signed letter of intent that lays out the terms for your attorney to draft a contract with.

Step two (5 minutes after signed LOI)

Send out an email linking all of the parties and outline their role and a timeline.

1/20 Q. “What are the best and worst things about being a CEO?”
A. “If you don’t like working 24/7 7 days a week, this job is not for you; also, it’s a little bit of being a school teacher, meaning like, you know, I have 150 employees, the company I ran

2/20 “before @CelsiusNetwork had 1,500 employees, and every day you have issues: The kids are fighting, somebody didn’t show up to school, somebody forgot their lunch, you name it. A lot of kind of making sure that everybody is happy. Also, if you think of it like OK, you

3/20 “have a bus, but you need to fill it with people and you need to make sure that everybody gets put in the right seat on the bus. If you put the wrong person in the driver’s seat or on the brakes, or whatever, holding the door from opening, keeping the windows

4/20 “closed, disaster will happen. So a lot of it is kind of looking at the macro things that make a company successful. For example, for me with @CelsiusNetwork, we had a lot of employees who kept saying to us, ‘You’re giving too much to the community, we’re never going to

5/20 “‘break even, we’re never going to be profitable’; even CEL token, they kept saying, 'CEL token is stuck at $0.03 for a year and a half.' It was stuck at $0.03. You could have bought millions of CEL tokens for $0.03, it’s now $3.00.

LEGACY AUTOMAKERS - 2020 NOVEMBER YTD

As we approach the close of the year, how do the legacy automakers see themselves in 2020 ?

Total global industry volume is down -16% so far, and the two largest players reflect that same reality

Renault is down -22%

Nissan is down nearly -30%

And Mitsubishi is down nearly -39%

Which has brought this unstable alliance down by -28.1% overall

Of course, these numbers only reflect the way the industry likes to present itself to you

And many things about them are not quite as robust as they would have you believe

Let’s touch upon a few :

1. A lot of the volume that VW likes to report does not actually belong to them

2. Instead it belongs to Chinese companies that they only have partial ownership stakes in

3. So when VW actually files its own financial statements, a large part of this volume does not get included

4. On this particular scorecard they are reporting production and not sales

5. This is important for investors to understand because you only earn profits on sales and not on production

6. Any reports of sales numbers from legacy automakers have proven to be unreliable, and are prone to “sales reporting abuses”

Did you know that 30% of funded search funds end up not making an acquisition?

We have bought eight beautiful businesses this year and learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

Read below for case studies of the two best (20x) acquisitions I have seen. Happy New Years!

First - you pay for existing profits, but you usually pay nothing for the growth potential. Buying at 4x EBITDA and doubling a business, you now paid 2x. Your loan payments are only based on the price you paid. You keep all the growth as equity.

So there are businesses out there that have both boring, predictable profits today AND potential for substantial growth. Make sure you find one with both.

Business #1: Buyer paid $400k for an ecom business. High margins, bad marketing. Paid about 4x cash flow. Put 100% of his energy on social media growth marketing. Kept going and testing until he had the formula.

Key ingredients there: low purchase price, proven useful product, Hugh margins, poor marketing. The buyer brought the hustle and creativity to scale through social media marketing. It wasn’t a passion product for him, but he liked the market.

So I’m looking at Exodus Cry’s business partners & you can really tell who benefits from this definition of “freedom”.
One is called Cedar & Twine.

Basically a bunch of white women moved to Nicaragua, did missionary work, targeted poor Nicaraguan women to manufacture their stuff

We know this business model.

You create a business in a poor country & target people from poor neighborhoods. You pay them like $100/mo, $1/day, pennies/hr. You create a retail store in the US & pay them more.
You get a tax write off from the percentage that goes to charity

It is disturbing that businesses can just donate to anti-trafficking/anti-slavery organizations and claim that they’re ending slavery as a marketing tool.

They found a way to make ending slavery profitable and a way to avoid taxes.... for themselves.

Do you ever notice that all these anti-trafficking/slavery orgs never talk about workers having their wages stolen or being forced to take wages that keep them in poverty forever?

We have to ask the question of who these organizations really serve?

Another business partner of Exodus Cry is Matchless.

Which...I soon as I entered the site I saw a rant on Hooters Girls. They explain that we weren’t really “choosing” to do this, that “it was all we knew”, & only some women willingly “live in sexual sin”

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

President of Arconic's French arm accepts customers were 'deliberately and dishonestly misled' over fire classification of cladding panels, as he is asked about email saying failed fire test must be kept 'VERY CONFIDENTIAL'

The most interesting point of this morning's evidence came right at the end of the session when Claude Schmidt was grilled about an email his colleague Claude Wehrle sent regarding the serious failure of polyethylene-cored ACM panels when bent into a cassette form in March 2010

Remember: Arconic in 2004/5 tested its ACM PE panel when bent into cassette and when bolted to a wall with rivets. The cassette version failed spectacularly, burning 10 times as fast. But Arconic dismissed this as a 'rogue result' and drew no distinction in its marketing...

... simply presenting the panel as a 'Class B' (the rating for the rivetted panel, and the required standard for many European countries). Skip forward to 2010, and this email chain.

Mr Wehrle, the firm's senior technical member of staff is told about a trend in Spain and Portugal where clients are demanding more fire resistant panels, and warned that with this type of panel "our prices are no longer in the market"

One of the things I learned from @KentBeck years ago was to see cohesion in terms of divergent change rates. If you have a class and there's a set of methods that you tend to change together while leaving others alone, that set of methods could be a separate responsibility.

Once I saw this, I went so far as to write a script to mine classes in Git and find clusters of methods that all seemed to change at the same time.

Often the results were not surprising. You could've see new responsibilities emerging just by looking at the names of methods and variables. But, sometimes this time view of the code was the first indication that a class was trying to split.

Code isn’t special that way. This is all systems stuff. If you have a group of 10 people and 3 of them often change their minds together, you can start to see them as a separate group. They may even start to see themselves as a separate group. Why does this happen?

At its base, it’s because of the tension between N and N^2. As the number of things increases, the number of possible interconnections grows (bounded by N^2). It’s harder for 10 people to coordinate than 3, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see groups from cliques periodically..

There is a world shortage of chocolate. People are dying because they do not eat enough chocolate. A company, AstraChocolate, one of the few companies that knows how to manufacture chocolate bars, enters into contracts with governments worldwide. 1/

Most of these governments agree to fund AstraChocolate's efforts to research and secure production of highly nutritient chocolate bars. In exchange, AC promises it will deliver X chocolate bars per day to governments once they are produced. 2/

Because edible, safe, chocolate bars need to be approved by national and international regulators, their production and manufacturing takes a while. To ensure a smooth supply chain, AC and other similar companies use factories all around the world. 3/

In Europe, AC uses mainly three manufacturing sites: one in the UK, one in Germany and one in Belgium. In its dealings with governments, AC has promised to deliver 500m of chocolate bars to the EU and 100m to the UK by March 2021. 4/

Now this is a mighty task and there are bumps along the way. Nobody has ever produced edible, safe, super-nutrient chocolate bars at that speed and under that much public scrutiny. So AC and other, similar companies, like Cfacao-BionChoc run into some supply problems. 5/

A thread on how real estate investors, developers and operators can make millions a year and pay almost nothing in TAXES by using depreciation, bonus depreciation, and 1031 exchanges.

How it works:

Depreciation is the act of slowly, over time, deducting the initial expense of an asset against your taxable income. Generally over a 27.5 (residential) or 39 (commercial) yr time frame. So each year you can write off 2-3.6% of the purchase price against your income.

Thats a big deal. We're buying a new property, a $3MM self storage facility. Thats a $60k a year write off against about $260k in NOI and 200k in cashflow on a $3MM deal.

It makes 30% of our cashflow tax free.

Very powerful but there is much more to it...

Different parts of the asset can be depreciated on different schedules.

We'll have a cost segregation study done to split up the depreciable lifespan of different parts of the building. The raw land can't be depreciated so you have to give that a value.

But other items can be depreciated on a quicker timeline. A roof, road, sidewalk, fencing, walls, gates, doors, latches, flooring, air conditioners, pavers, curbing, landscaping, etc.

The IRS has a depreciation schedule for each type. Some parts are 5 yrs. Others 15 years...

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

If I were looking to do my first real estate deal with zero prior experience and no money, here's what I'd do (I did).

I'd start with the target of buying a single-family, duplex, 3plex, or 4plex in an area close to where I lived and that I was familiar with.

I'd take an online RE course to get my license as quickly as possible (I did it in 2 weeks). Upon completion, I'd sign up for the MLS system so I could start looking at deals.

I'd call the listing agents involved and pepper them with questions about active and sold listings.

I'd also tell them about my plan to buy an investment property.

I'd call local banks or mortgage brokers to get an idea of loan terms I'd be able to qualify for. Rate, Loan Amount, LTV, Term, Guaranty, etc.

I'd be building relationships with these bankers along the way.

They should be able to give you an answer in 1-2 weeks on what you'll qualify for.

**Be sure to ask them what options you'd have with an FHA loan, 3.5% down government backed.**

I'd get laser focused and pick 1 or 2 neighborhoods and learn every single thing I could about the area.

I'd drive the streets, search public city planning for the area, know every proposed & ongoing development, talk to all the listing brokers that have properties on the market

16 key customer service skills.

Why you need these for your business.

// THREAD //

1. Patience

Be patient and listen.

Every customer has their own problem and needs.

Ensure you understand their perspective and be willing to help.

Take your time and provide them the best service you can.

2. Attentiveness

Pay attention to the customers issues.

Work with them and understand what they are seeking.

Take this feedback and improve your business moving forward.

This changes can move your business forward.

3. Communication

Be clear, concise, and to the point.

Communicate your point clearly to your customer.

Make sure they know you understand them and want to help.

4. Know your product

You should know your product better than the customer.

If you don't, you're not doing your job well enough.

Study it until you can sell it in your sleep, literally.

@KhayaMaloney Thank you very much for reading all the way.

So SARS is not lying.

These companies hire big guys are transactional advisors who help with structuring the deals.

The tax specialists use the income tax act to help minimize the tax obligation of their clients - tax avoidance

11 controversial lessons I learned from my father on running a small business.

While these lessons are not the gold standard.
At times I've seen these to be true.

A Thread.⤵️

1. If you're going to run a business start from the bottom and work your way up.

Knowing how everything works from the bottom up is key to managing properly.

Or in his words, no one can bullshit you when you know what it takes..

2. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself.

Obviously you can't do everything yourself. You have to be in charge of following up constantly to make sure it gets done, and done right.

3. Don't buy anything you can't pay for.

Taking out loans is okay if the work is there to pay it back. The last thing you want is for work to slow down and you'll be stuck with a lease bill.

4. There are three stories. Your story, their story, and the truth somewhere in the middle.

When disputes and rumors start going around. Get all parties involved together to narrow down the truth.

I own 7 stocks that are 15+ baggers (and counting)

Here are 10 traits they all have in common:

The data:

Stock / # of bags / purchase year:

$AMZN / 15+ / 2010
$FB / 15+ / 2012
$GOOG / 15+ / 2009
$MELI / 15+ / 2011
$CMG / 20+ / 2012
$NFLX / 60+ / 2010
$TSLA / 60+ / 2012

1: Founder-led

$AMZN - Bezos
$CMG - Ells
$FB- Zuck
$GOOG - Page
$MELI- Galperin
$NFLX - Hastings
$TSLA - Musk

Founders tend to be:
+Detail oriented
+Innovative
+Mission driven
+Think long-term
+Have skin/soul in the game

Look for founders!

2: Consumer-facing

All of these companies attract millions/billions of consumers

This eliminates customer concentration risk and enables long-term brand building

3: High sales growth

All of these companies were growing revenue 20%+ BEFORE I bought them

Sales growth is the engine that drives profit growth

Profit growth is the engine that drives stock appreciation

Find companies that can grow sales 20%+ for decades