One Step Up Issue #12
This week, we look at Steven Spielberg & how to maximize your value as an artist, moats, the greatest deal in sports history, TikTok, Snap's business breakdown, Nicholas Sleep, DCF, SPAC + more
Steven Spielberg, movie-making and understanding how to truly maximize your potential as an artist on the commercial/business front
The Greatest Business Deal In Sports History
The story of Ozzie and Daniel Silna, and how they made over $800M from the NBA without ever actually owning a team.
The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company ByteDance
There’s more to Snap Inc. than just Snapchat. It’s grown to become a company that is delving into AR and includes the Snapchat App, Spectacles, and Bitmoji.
Snapchat has seen considerable competitive improvement in the last year and a half. The company reaches more 13-34-year-olds than Facebook or Twitter. And surprisingly, Snapchat is close to beating Instagram in time spent on the app. The average Instagram user spent 53 minutes per day on the app, compared to the Snapchat user’s 49.5 minutes.
Investing Mistakes, Chapter 1001
However, the pain I feel about this mistake of commission is trivial relative to the pain I feel about my mistakes of omission. The stocks I did not buy in March 2020 cause me much more pain and represent much more significant errors in my mind. In, “I, Claudius,” when Claudius writes of the death of Germanicus, he says “of my own sorrow, I do not trust myself to write.” That is how I feel about several stocks that I carefully considered buying in March of 2020 and did not. A 1% position in almost any of them would have generated 3–6x more profit than was lost on Intel. Mistakes of omission are always more painful than mistakes of commission for a growth investor. Investing is ever humbling
Investor profile: Nicholas Sleep
Think of him like Keyser Soze (if you’re wondering who this is, best to watch The Usual Suspects right away).
Here is a FT column I wrote about the British investor Nicholas Sleep, who has become something of a cult figure for a younger generation of investors. As a bonus feature here is a thread of excerpts from his letters to clients outlining some important aspects of his thinking.Mr. Sleep has an uncanny ability to summarize his investment thesis in a supremely concise manner. As an example, look at his investment thesis of Costco from back in February 2005.
Popular among banking professionals, investors and business school students - the DCF or discounted cash flow model, is a method to calculate the intrinsic value of a business. For a simpler explanation, that doesn’t use jargon, see below tweet-storm.
SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company. It is essentially a “blank check” company that goes public and raises money from the public with the intent of using the proceeds to acquire a (typically) private company to be determined after going public.
The Most Provocative Woman in the World
ON TRUST AND SUCCESS: There is a formula for success in business, and it goes like this: You set out to find the very best talent in the marketplace, and then give them a compelling and inspirational vision of what you want them to achieve for you and the company. Then you empower them to achieve those goals using their own skills and talents in any way they choose. If, at the same time, you demonstrate how enormously you value them, not just through compensation, but also verbally, every single day, and if you enable that talent to share in the profit that they help create for you, you’ll be successful. It’s so simple, and virtually nobody does it, because it requires a high-trust working environment, and most business environments are low-trust. In order to own the future of your business, you have to design it around trust.
I say to every woman, ‘You just set out to make as much money as possible, because we don’t get taken seriously until we get taken seriously financially.’
Till next time.
