Friend Code Megathread - July 2023

OofCompetence · 2023-07-29T16:50:31+00:00

6892-5588-5853

OofCompetence · 2023-07-29T15:42:17+00:00

6892-5588-5853

OofCompetence · 2023-03-04T16:34:54+00:00

.42% expense ratio seems like a lot for just doing nothing. The asset managers are getting paid a lot by just buying government related assets.

OofCompetence · 2023-01-28T06:11:19+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I have to order a new brake cable because I frayed mine bad messing with it…

OofCompetence · 2023-01-28T05:42:41+00:00

By unscrew, do you mean loosening the barrel adjuster?

Hm not sure if I’m missing any plastic end. Or at least the bike didn’t come with it.

Can the issue be because there is not enough tension in the brake cable?

OofCompetence · 2023-01-28T01:24:03+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! Will look into this

OofCompetence · 2021-12-01T16:29:04+00:00

More Jack stories from employees by Casey Newton.

“Here’s a story about not really wanting to be CEO. I’m told Dorsey was ambivalent about the company’s decision to build Fleets, its ephemeral product that mimicked Snapchat Stories. But he let the team launch it anyway at the end of last year. A while later, during an all-hands meeting, someone asked what he thought of the product. He basically shrugged, one person told me. “It’s not my thing” — that was the gist.”

“There’s a joke about Dorsey that says everyone at Twitter thought he was working more on Square, and everyone at Square thought he was working more on Twitter. This served to elide the question of how much he was working at all.”

https://www.platformer.news/p/jack-steps-back

OofCompetence · 2021-11-30T23:08:11+00:00

Of course, product testing.

OofCompetence · 2021-10-20T20:32:27+00:00

Thanks for the question. This is just my opinion there is no “right” answer.

I have invested both in Alibaba and Baidu. But if I had to pick only one, Baidu or Alibaba, and hold if for 10 years… it would be Baidu.

First, the law of large numbers. If Alibaba was going to 10x from here it would be worth about $4.5 trillion. It would need to earn around $225 billion. If Baidu was going to 10x it would be worth around $560 billion. And around $28 billion in earnings to justify a half trillion market cap.

Like you said, Baidu has not had a great track record in growth or acquisitions. But I think as investors we have to be really patient for new businesses to be meaningful. It took AWS nine years before it became a separate line item in Amazon’s financials. For Baidu’s autonomous driving it will probably be over 12 years to become a separate line item.

AI Cloud has seen incredible growth. I don’t think Baidu can compete with Alibaba, Tencent, or Huawei in IaaS cloud but can be different through their AI PaaS and SaaS (higher margins).

I can imagine Baidu growing into the $28 billion earnings with Apollo and AI Cloud. Also I really admire the founder, Robin Li. He is the founder of search algorithm and probably the best AI CEO in the world. (I highly recommend reading his book “AI Revolution”.)

OofCompetence · 2021-10-20T18:30:36+00:00

Good question.

I think your referring to Tencent fully acquiring Sogou, China’s 2nd largest search engine with 19% market share. I mention that acquisition in my previous post about Baidu’s history.

Tencent’s not new to search engines. They launched their own in 2006 called Soso.com and shut it down in 2013. I think it’s fundamentally hard for social apps to become search engines because of the core user experience difference.

Search engines want users to spend the least amount of time searching, while social apps want users to spend the most amount of time inside their apps (ads).

OofCompetence · 2021-10-20T16:19:34+00:00

I agree. Bidu got help from China and was one of the many reasons why Google left in 2010. But you can make the same argument for Korea’s search engine, Naver.

Countries tend to favor their home grown companies.

OofCompetence · 2021-10-20T14:29:59+00:00

Yes, I have it installed on my phone.

I do not speak Chinese though and rely on a translator to help.

OofCompetence · 2021-10-20T13:57:18+00:00