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The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

 Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.
A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.
Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible
The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.
Payment apps have finally made loyalty points and bulk ticket (回数券) purchases fast enough the convenience stores, which have strict throughout budgets measured in seconds per customer, can offer them across a chain.

And since booze and tobacco can’t meaningfully be used...
Duh duh duh The Coffee Payment War.

Family Mart has a closed loop store value app called Family Pay. It is a barcode based payment and does basically what you expect it to.

It is also a coupon platform, and will sell you an anywhere-in-chain “11 drinks for price of 10.”
The UX of actually redeeming them is a little weird; you have to select the ticket out of your book prior to checking out. But it gives you a great reason to use Family Mart for all your coffee, even if you have to walk 2 minutes longer than a 7/11 closer to your home/office/etc.
7/11 comes at it from a different angle; they gamify coupons. If you buy 10 coffee, you get a coupon for one coffee for free (or equivalent discount).

App tracks progress. 6 more to go!

(I cropped the screen to avoid giving you a barcode that would let anyone snatch my coffee.)
A fun payments wrinkle: one reason chains don’t love coupon books/“buy 10 get 11” historically is that it throws off their internal funds flows if they are franchised. You’d think purchases and redemptions are approximately symmetrical but they are often not.
This tends to “drain cash” from the redemption heavy franchisees, who (because they are in a business of picking up pennies) hate this and complain to corporate over trivial money.

Automating all of this and having funds flow go Corp -> franchisee not F>C>F ameliorated problem.
Think of it as a happy bit of efficiency introduced into the world by computers being utterly not bored by the prospect of tracking 40 million coffees a day in Japan individually, which is A Task even by Japanese logistics standards.
There have, of course, been a lot of presentations in Tokyo with the punchline:

“You know what would make this process even better? ... A blockchain.”

(*sigh* Seriously.)
Fun question left as an exercise to the reader: why does Starbucks have an entirely different offering in the US (and Japan, where it is broadly similar) for their closed-loop stored value?

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Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.


I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING

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January:

A reminder of @morganhousel cash strategy.

For every $1,000 in cash:

More: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️


2/ February

If you've truly found the next $AMZN, $AAPL, or $NFLX and can hold for years, it's nearly impossible to overpay.

But finding them is hard.

3/ March

Millennials have seen tech crash, 2008, and now #COVID19

I'm worried that many of them will swear off the stock market -- the greatest wealth-building device ever -- for life.

4/ April

Want to see the checklists used by

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Greenblatt
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and

5/ May

When the P/E ratio is:

Useless (Stage 1, 4) - $MDB, $SHOP, $PINS, $GME, $JCP

Semi-useful (Stage 2) - $TTD, $NFLX

Useful! (Stage 3) - $MSFT, $AAPL, $V

In determining valuation
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The Great Reset is a massively funded, desperately ambitious, internationally coordinated project led by some of the biggest multinational corporations and financial institutions on the planet.

Devised and put in motion by 0.0001% of people, who honestly believe this world and society need somekind of reset. You might also be wondering what are we resetting from/to as this new firmware is desperately trying to upload itself by another tsunami of mainstreamed propaganda.

One of the most obvious reasons for pushed reset is the infinite expansion economic model reaching its limits and going bust, a fact admitted even by themselves.

However, the super wealthy apparently want to continue staying super wealthy and have no intention of abandoning their position at the top of the world.

Nature’s resources found on Earth are definitely limited in their absolute quantity thus excluding an idea of infinite extraction and wealth accumulation. But this is not their understanding of limited resources, you see.
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Trung Phan \U0001f1e8\U0001f1e6
Trung Phan 🇨🇦...
@TrungTPhan
The most memorable interview I did this year was w/ Stanley Druckenmiller, who famously made $1B shorting the British Pound.

The trading legend's track record includes a 30-year stretch returning 30%+ a year (without a single down year).

Here are 8 investing lessons🧵

1/ Make concentrated bets in high conviction plays


2/ Concentrated bets can sometimes *reduce* risk


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@GhoshSubhag
Way to #Financial freedom

1) Rule of 72 (Double Your Money)
2) Rule of 114 (Triple)
3) Rule of 144 (Quadruple)
4) Rule of 70 (Inflation)
5) 4% Withdrawal Rule
6) 100 - Minus Age Rule
7) 10, 5, 3 Rule
8) 50-30-20 Rule
9) 3X Emergency Rule
10) 40% EMI Rule
11) Life Insurance Rule

1) Rule of 72
No. of yrs required to double your money at a given rate, U just divide 72 by interest rate
Eg, if U want to know how long it will take to double your money at 8% interest, divide 72 by 8 and get 9 yrs

At 6% rate, it will take 12 yrs
At 9% rate, it will take 8 yrs

3) Rule of 144

No. of years required to, quadruple your money at a given rate, U just divide 144 by interest rate.

For eg, if U want to know how long it will take to quadruple your money at 12% interest, divide 144 by 12 and get 12 yrs

At a 6% interest rate, it will take 24yrs

4) Rule of 70

Divide 70 by the current inflation rate to know how fast the value of your investment will get reduced to half its present value.

The inflation rate of 7% will reduce the value of your money to half in 10 years.

5) 4% Rule for Financial Freedom

Corpus Reqd- 25*Annual Expenses

Eg- the annual expense is 500,000 then the corpus required to retire is 1.25 cr.

Put 50% into fixed income & 50% into equity.

Withdraw 4% every yr, i.e.5 lac.

This rule works for 96% of the time in 30 yr period
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🏦Third Space: Office and Working from Home will be joined by somewhere close by that a number of people will use

Supermarkets or local bank branches should emerge as a convenient ubiquitous location option – if they are smart

⏰Asynchronous Work: Offices are instantaneous gratification distraction factories where synchronous work makes it impossible to get stuff done

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Ok, I'll hop on this Elizabeth Warren/Native American testing bandwagon (gently and non-politically).

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All is more or less as expected....except for this bit about Native American.


The family is almost completely composed of Spanish peasants (from various regions) who emigrated, along with a massive wave in the late 19th-cent./early 20th-cent., to Cuba back when it was a booming economy (richer than Spain's) and worth emigrating to (Communism killed that).

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(Note: the North African/Arab background is less mysterious. The Iberian peninsula was part of the Muslim world for centuries. It would be odd *not* to have some Arab/Middle Eastern background coming from Spain. Given the family is mostly from Northern Spain, it's small though.)

I have a Spanish passport, have been back to the ancestral villages in Spain, seen the church where my grandmother was baptized, my grandfather told me stories about growing up as the child of Spanish colonists in rural Cuba. The native bit just clashes with all the family lore.
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Sculpture of Bhagwan Shiva as the destroyer of the Asura Andhaka - Cave 29,Ellora caves

Asura Andhaka hangs on to a trishula held by 6-armed Shiva.

Once Parvathi & Shiva were relaxing in the pleasant gardens of Mount Mandhara.


Bhagwan Shiva sat down there to enjoy the happiness.Parvati closed the eyes of Shiva playfully & darkness covered the whole universe.Parvati was perplexed & her palms were wet with perspiration.A few drops of her sweat mixed with sweat from Shiva’s body& fell to the ground.

From this sweat,a fierce creature was born,it started to roar.Child was born blind as Shiva's eyes were closed so was named as Andaka.Andha means darkness&also ignorance.Around the same time Asura Hiranyaksha was performing rigorous tapas Shiva for a boon of powerful son.

Bhagwan Shiva was pleased by tapas of Hiranyaksha & blessed him with darshan.Hiranyaksha asked for a powerful son,Shiva told him that he cannot have his own son,but can adopt a blind child who would become very powerful later.Shiva gave child Andaka to Hiranyaksha.

Hiranyaksha returned to his kingdom with Andaka.Later after the vadh of Hiranyaksha, Andaka is said to have lived with his cousins.He was ridiculed,so dejected Andaka went to forest.He did severe tapas for over many years towards Brahma Dev. Brahma dev appeared before him.
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🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
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Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"
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