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, […]
Capital Allocators with Ted Seides, Ep. #32 (Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin – The Perfect Investment) “Fama says that an efficient stock is one where the market incorporates all available information. So, there are 3 major parts of that: the information has to be properly disseminated and the second is that it has to be […]
In nascent markets with winner-take-most dynamics, it’s particularly hard to know in the moment whether or not a company’s investments will ultimately add shareholder value. You’ll know when you get there but getting there means engaging in what looks like and very well may be, a reckless race to the bottom. But, to abstain while competitors spend gobs of […]
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 […]