There was a time, not too long ago, when an investor could treat IAC as a collection of binary early stage bets anchored by a few more mature and profitable entities. To most, IAC’s 12% passive minority stake in MGM, acquired near the COVID lows, was a weird one-off opportunistic gambit that could be marked [...]

I. United Rentals rents equipment that customers use to build and maintain commercial structures – office buildings, refineries, bridges, roads, etc. This includes general construction equipment, things like bulldozers, backhoes and excavators that dig and move dirt and rubble on construction sites… Source: Equipmentshare aerial work platforms – scissor and boom lifts – that carry [...]

I. I was first introduced to Texas Instruments by my dearest high school friend: Only years later would I learn that this wonder was but a thin product sliver within the TI complex, lumped in the stagnant “Other” catch-all segment that today accounts for just 5% of profits, with the other 95% coming from analog [...]

I. Every few years, this graphic from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), reproduced by Matthew Ball, makes the rounds: It shows how a 15-year decline in recorded music revenue, precipitated by the cannibalistic effect of free downloads, is being reversed by the rise of subscription fees from digital streaming providers (DSPs). As I [...]

Let’s say a parts supplier needs to get a full trailer of parts from its facility in Boston, MA to an OEM manufacturing plant in Los Angeles, CA. One way to do this would be to hire a full truckload (FTL or just TL) carrier, most of them owner-operators with 1 to 5 trucks in [...]

Customers are the lifeblood a business and Salesforce touches just about every nook of software that has anything to do with finding, acquiring, and supporting them.  The grandaddy of SaaS, Salesforce pioneered a cloud-hosted subscription model that altered not only when software vendors realize revenue but how they create value. With one-and-done license sales replaced [...]

(all $ is USD unless noted otherwise; CAD figures are converted to USD at $1 USD: $1.28 CAD) The waste management business isn’t hard to understand conceptually, though to get a felt sense of the territory probably requires a bunch ground level inside knowledge because the competitive dynamics differ so much by market. Still, the [...]

When a car gets into accident, an insurer must decide whether to repair it or cut a check to the claimant for the pre-accident value and recoup whatever it can by sending the car to a salvage auction. In the US, that salvage auction is most likely operated by Copart or IAA, who each handle [...]