One Step Up Issue #5
This week, we look at Liberty Reserve, Zero to One and investment analysis, Shopify, notes from John Collison's interview with Patrick O'Shaughnessy & Inside the Mind of an Indian Monopolist
Sorry for the delay, but here are this week’s interesting reads:
The best books (or in this case articles) are those that read like fiction but aren’t.
This is the unbelievable story covering data crime, money laundering and scenes that I’ve only yet witnessed in movies.
Zero to One: Applying Founder Principles to Investment Analysis
Zero to One remains one of my favorite reads, partly because it was one of the first few books that challenged my thinking, and party because of Peter Thiel. Thiel made a name for himself way before becoming one of the first investors in Facebook by co-founding Paypal.
When investing for the long-term, the question to ask is not is this business valuable or cash flow generative today, but rather will this business be around and generating high returns 10 – 15 years from now? While current growth, profitability, and returns are easy to measure, long-term durability can’t be defined in the context of an excel spreadsheet. While most monopolies are unique by virtue of serving unique markets and end customers, they share common characteristics across proprietary technology or IP, network effects, scale economics, and branding.
Shopify and its Strong Competitive Advantages Continue to Take Market Share
Shopify’s road to being a dominant force in the markets has been, well…
Breaking news: Alex Honnold will free solo the East face of the Shopify stock chart as his next big challenge post El Capitan
Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO, has made the comparison that Shopify is like an operating system for retailers. I think this is a good analogy. The platform that runs a merchant’s sales is arguably the most mission-critical system that company has. Like the Windows operating system, once a merchant runs their business on Shopify, they are unlikely to switch to a competitor.
Podcast notes: John Collison (co-founder, Stripe on Invest Like The Best)
Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet.
Would highly recommend reading the notes in its entirety since Blake has pretty much done everything possible.
Inside the Mind Of the Indian Monopolist
The team at Marcellus did a fine job of highlighting how Indian behemoths came to be by using little known strategies and scaling.
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Till next time.
Education isn't something you can finish.
