[CPRT – Copart; KAR – KAR Auction Services] Copart is a Beast + Impending IAA Spin-Off from KAR

Beneath the bustle of a used car lot lies a swarm of activity that few of us have ever seen, a thriving ecosystem of wholesalers, rebuilders, parts recyclers, insurers, and intermediators whose trading activities usher some vehicles to dealer lots for resale and others to repair shops or salvage auctions.  Roughly 45mn used cars are […]

[GDDY – GoDaddy; VRSN – Verisign; EIGI – Endurance International] Value Migration in Web Services

When you type “scuttleblurb.com” into your browser, that domain name is translated into a unique series of numbers called an IP address, which corresponds to a particular computer that all other networked computers comprising the internet reference in order to find and deliver my website to you.  A non-profit entity called the Internet Corporation for […]

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[ZO1 – Zooplus] Competing with Amazon

The demand side of this story is easy.  As a former dog owner, I can assure you that there is nothing “experiential” about driving to Safeway and lugging 30lb bags of kibble back to the parking lot.  Having it delivered to your front door is obviously the way to go.  The supply side is more […]

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[LYV – Live Nation] On Flywheels and Bundles

Related Post: [LYV – Live Nation Entertainment] Some of It’s Magic, Some of It’s Tragic In my last blurb on Live Nation, I fussed over impending competition from Amazon, which was populating its US site with “Amazon Tickets” job listings that included the following salvo: “The ticketing business is ripe for innovation and improvement, as much […]

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[WK – Workiva] From Point Solution to Platform

Pat Dorsey, founder of Dorsey Asset Management and formerly Director of Equity Research at Morningstar, recently pitched Workiva on the Invest Like the Best podcast (I have transcribed Dorsey’s remarks about WK in today’s Podcast Blurbs).  At a high level: “And what they did is create a product that lets companies do SEC filings much […]

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[KMX – CarMax; CVNA – Carvana] Moat, Growth, and Competition

When I Google “used car salesman”, here are the first images that appear. ‘nuff said. It required an electronics and appliance retailer with no car selling experience to be the change that consumers wanted to see in the car buying experience.  In 1993, the now defunct Circuit City launched the first CarMax store, leveraging its […]

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Quick Blurbs [Ryanair, Equinix, Interxion, Amerco]

[RYAAY – Ryanair] Anchor Post: [RYAAY – Ryanair] Low Cost Flywheel In mid-September last year, Ryanair announced that it would be cancelling 2% of its daily flights over the subsequent 6 weeks to free up aircraft and ensure punctual departure times for the other 98%.  The press attributed this snafu, which inconvenienced 0.5% of Ryanair’s […]
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[RHT – Red Hat] On A Bridge Between Clouds

Let’s take it back to ’69.  The Unix operating system was just conceived under Bell Laboratories, the vaunted research joint venture of AT&T and Western Electric.  Protected by the strictures of a consent decree from 1956, which prevented its parent AT&T from commercializing technology that wasn’t related to telephony, Unix thrived as an open research […]

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