If you were looking at Chegg in 2014, you’d have found plenty of valid reasons to pass on, or even short, its stock. The company was plowing more than all its operating cash flow into textbooks and renting them out to students at increasingly discounted prices as it braved intensifying competition from Barnes and Noble, […]
Related Post: Discount Brokers: Disruption, Bundling, and the Battle for the Mass Affluent; Part 1 Interactive Brokers Sustainably profiting from a commodity service like trade execution requires, at the very least, a low cost advantage, which in the brokerage space belongs to Interactive Brokers. Despite realizing ~half the commission dollars per trade, Interactive generates the highest […]
I define culture as the set of unspoken assumptions that guides behavior. Whether it intends to or not, every company has a culture. However, not every culture, even ones underpinned by values that make the world a better place, confers competitive advantage. From the perspective of value creation, the question is not so much is […]
Less than four years after the its founding and two years after the nationwide launch of its lending exchange, LendingTree raised its first round of capital in the public markets. A month later, in March 2000, the market began its brutal slide, creating two favorable conditions, collapsing advertising rates and declining mortgage rates, that LendingTree, […]
Related Post: [V – Visa; MA – Mastercard] Expanding the Rails, Part 1 The most enduring companies, as the old bit goes, obsess over timeless universals: “paying for stuff should be easy, fast, and safe”. Sizing a market helps to scope the problem that a product is meant to attack, but fixating on any given […]
Atlassian’s birth and rise coincided with the adoption of the Agile software development framework in the early 2000s and the DevOps movement that grew out of Agile a decade later(1). In a non-DevOps environment, software development and IT operations function as two segregated departments responding to local incentives: simplistically, developers attempt to release features into […]
For real estate markets to properly function, the buyer of a property and the lender financing its purchase must be assured that the person selling it actually has the right to do so and that the delinquencies of any prior owner have not lingered in the form of present day ownership conflicts. In the US, […]