A deep local presence can confer competitive advantages in industries with low entry barriers.  Rollins typically commands the largest share in its markets, allowing it to service more houses per technician outing than competitors, resulting in greater labor productivity and scale economies on marketing and branch overhead.  Fastenal clusters its stores near customers, permitting steady […]

Autodesk, Dassault, and PTC were all founded as CAD companies in the ‘80s but have since become much more than that.  PTC first integrated PLM and is now branching off into industrial IoT and augmented reality.  Dassault (which also moved into PLM and simulation) and Autodesk are no longer just supplying software tools to solve […]

CarMax sells more cars in a single year than Carvana has sold in its entire existence and yet has half the latter’s enterprise value as the market has come to appreciate that buying cars online is becoming a real thing and Carvana is best positioned to profit from this channel shift. CarMax was version 1.0 […]

Many of the complex objects and structures around you were conceived as virtual objects modeled in computer-aided design (CAD) software.  Those CAD objects may have been converted into millions of small polygons (pre-processing), each one bombarded with advanced calculus to help engineers visualize the polygonal mesh’s response to different simulated physical conditions (post-processing) Source: YouTube: Abaqus CAE: […]

Over the last 5 years, Google has increasingly been crowding out organic results with paid ads and preferencing its own properties in search results, frustrating online businesses that feed under its canopy.  TripAdvisor and Angie’s List used to brag that most of their traffic came from unpaid organic search while competitors with weaker brands were […]

“I have always been attracted to the low cost operator in any business and, when you can find a combination of (i) an extremely large business, (ii) a more or less homogenous product, and (iii) a very large gap in operating costs between the low cost operator and all of the other companies in the […]

There are some smart people who think that our brains are wired to process the world hierarchically[1][2].  For instance, neurons in one part of the visual cortex fire when they detect lines tilted at particular angles, sending those patterns to a “higher” layer where certain other neurons are attuned to the detection of particular letters, […]

From the early 2000s to now, EET have evolved from credit reporting agencies selling indistinguishable datasets to information technology companies offering predictions[1].  Over time, all 3 bureaus have gotten bigger, their delivery mechanisms have changed (from phone calls and paper reports to software), their data sources have expanded – to encompass different kinds of data […]