I’ve followed Zillow on and off since its merger with Trulia and find myself more confused by it with every passing quarter. There is always so much going on at once and management has failed to concretely explain how its disparate assets all fit together. What Zillow has effectively demonstrated is that lead gen is […]
Earlier this month, Acxiom completed the sale of Acxiom Marketing Services (AMS), a segment that accounted for ~3/4 of its revenue and nearly all its segment profits, to Interpublic Group for $2.3bn. AMS partly helps manage the marketing operations of big brands – designing and maintaining customer databases, running custom performance analytics, aggregating third-party data(1) […]
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, […]
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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 […]