ChatGPT doing a full deep dive of Nike working capital 1977 - 1981. Grew from $23.4M in 1978 to $165M in 1981. What insane growth.
chatgpt.com/share/6ad936d0-2…
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Sales is like Marketing. Half of it is a waste of money, but you don’t know which half.
These shitty sales processes are designed to capture the deals least likely to close, making the purchasing experience much worse for those who already want to buy.
I wanted to buy software today, and the only option to find out how much it cost was to take a call.
Begrudgingly and hating it, I scheduled the damn call.
After 15 minutes on the call, answering questions and explaining what I'm looking for, I asked about pricing. She said, "Let's schedule another 30-minute call."
Almost fell out of my chair. I couldn't believe how hard some companies make it to buy.
Someone at the company designed the process this way on purpose. No words.
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This is one of the simplest and most effective initiatives at addressing issues in government spending. Well done @albertdolan_
Over a year ago, @Ben_Scallan covered the launch of the first tracker.
Today, StateSpend.ie brings together more than €108bn in publicly reported spending, making it easier to see where public money is going and who is being paid.
Have a look for yourself at StateSpend.ie
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I invested £941 in the 2018 crowdfunding round.
If the acquisition rumours are true, then according to this, I will get £6,305, a £5,364 profit, 570% return and an annualised return of 27.6%.
I desperately tried to get into the 2017 crowdfunder at the time. If only!
I was a huge fan of early Monzo (Mondo), used to follow the early employees and used to watch all of their All Hands on YouTube.
Thanks @t_blom @jonas @obeattie @simonvc @mattheath - you all inspired me to get into fintech and that you really can just do things.
Nubank rumoured to acquire Monzo for ~$13b. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
Investors are likely to share a huge $9.3b of profits combined, on $1.9b invested. This represents a 5.8x blended, across 11 priced rounds. 🤑 The Founders & team will share about ~$2.0b.
This is a super win for a company that had to take a down round mid-2020. My takeaways below:
1) Passion Capital's absolute home run 👑
@eileentso and Passion led each of Monzo's first three rounds. They also kept following-on in almost every round after that. The Seed alone will return nearly 200x!
Across the three seed rounds they led, that's ~$1.6b of proceeds on ~$18m invested. Legendary.
2) Two huge absolute $ winners: Goodwater and Thrive 🏆
Goodwater led the Series C in Nov-17, at a $330m post. It will return over 20x the money. That round will generate the most absolute $ of all rounds at ~$2.0b. 📈
Thrive led the Jul-17 Series B round at $100m post money valuation, and is now looking at a cool~50x on its investment.
Two amazing good calls within a few months of each other.
3) The crowd did great 🙌
Monzo raised three crowdfunding rounds, including the famous "£1m on Crowdcube in 96 seconds" in 2016.
Those customers-turned-shareholders are sitting on ~35-80x of profits!
Probably the second best-performing retail investment in UK tech history, after Revolut's own crowdcube campaign (where investors are now sitting on 1,000x+ paper gains).
4) Buying the dip paid off 📈
The Jun-20 down round (Novator, Nikesh Arora) came in at a ~$1.7b post money valuation. Interestingly, this is below the 2019 price. Back then, everyone thought Monzo might not make it. That round will returns ~5.9x and about $1.6b.
5) The latest growth rounds: good, not great 😐
The Series H (ADQ, Tencent, Coatue) and Series I (CapitalG, GV, Hedosophia) make ~2.5x each.
For the Series H specifically, after almost five years: respectable, not spectacular.
6) Team & Founders 🧑🤝🧑🫂
Firstly: mega congrats to @tomblomfield, TS Anil and the whole team. This would be an incredibly outcome and it is definitely one to be celebrated.
The team here will do very well, despite Monzo raising eleven rounds and diluting meaningfully. I estimate that Founders & ESOP will get about 15% of the outcome, or ~$2.0bn.
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I’m reading The Man Who Solved the Market, about Jim Simons and RenTech. There’s a striking passage about the firm hiring Peter Brown and Robert Mercer from IBM’s speech-recognition group in the 1990s:
“Brown, Mercer and their fellow mathematicians and scientists… viewed language very differently from traditionalists. To them, language could be modelled like a game of chance. At any point in a sentence, there exists a certain probability of what might come next, based on past and common usage…
Their goal was to feed their computers enough recorded speech and written text to develop a probabilistic, statistical model capable of predicting likely word sequences based on sequences of sounds. Their code wouldn’t necessarily understand what it was transcribing, but it would learn to transcribe language nonetheless.”
If only they knew how far that idea of sequence prediction would go.
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Reading The Toyota Way has made me think Adam Smith was only partly right about why the pin factory was so productive.
Obviously specialisation of labour mattered, but so did the process itself. Continuous flow, minimised waiting around, smaller batches, fewer bottlenecks etc.
Why isn’t process improvement taught as a much bigger source of productivity in economics? It’s so concrete. University economics teaches about Technology and specialisation in such abstract terms.
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We held a small event in @wayflyerapp’s London office with short presentations of applications of AI in a lending business. Thankful to @ExploreOmni for sponsoring the event and Mikey O’Boyle from @intercom for his talk. It’s a crazy/exciting time to work in lending.
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Ireland is this times 100. Impossible for indigenous businesses to compete for knowledge workers against US multi-nationals, stifling their growth and success.
What you are actually doing here is to bribe nokia to put these jobs into Canada by paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per job from taxpayer money. What this does is to lower the cost basis of nokia per employee. This has been going on for decades, called FDI which all civil servants think is a good thing. I spent a lot of time explaining to civil servants in ottawa that its not good for our economy that American and Oversees branch offices can employ Canadians at half the cost to all the canadian companies around them due to these subsidies. We should not do them at all, they are toxic, at least in the tech sector.
It's never meat to be this way, but the situation that very often arises is: It's strictly worse inside of Canada to be a Canadian company compared to a company headquartered everywhere else.
This is a bad situation, because the fruits of the subsidized labor will accrue to the wealth of other countries and not Canada. It's tax payer money invested into locking up scarce high tech talent in jobs where they no longer contribute to the Canadian economy directly. Why
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Dan Jordan retweeted
what @realBobbyHealy has done with Manna is truly inspiring to a young irish person with aspirations of starting a company
and the main reason I went to intern @MannaAero
growing a company indigenously in Ireland without having to move ops to SF, employing Irish people and funding our economy is fantastic and sets the precedent Ireland needs. Not all of our talent needs to leave for the US.
to see our own government act against innovation solidifies the idea that anyone from Ireland aspiring to start a company must leave for America.
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Dan Jordan retweeted
Last night in Dublin City Council we started the process of zoning more land for housing.
The crazy thing: bad national policy means that there is an artificial max limit on how much land we can zone for housing.
If we tried to zone much more, we'd be legally prevented. Mad.
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Dan Jordan retweeted
the only things to look for when hiring AI/ML people is
- do they have a good sense of how to evaluate if something (model/system) works. can they go really deep into setting up evals, data, cohorts, etc.
- do they set up a high throughput experimentation harness
- do they keep up with research news
people think that good research is about getting good ideas, but ideas are really cheap and a good system for experimentation and actually, truly evaluating if your ideas are good or bad will already put you in the 90th percentile
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This is what my dad did for us when me and my brothers were children. He'd make up stories on the fly with a set of characters that were consistent across stories. We were absorbed. It was magical. I hope this provides more magic like that rather than taking it away.
Introducing Storybook in @GeminiApp today! Now you can create personalized, illustrated storybooks with read-aloud narration in 2 simple steps. It's free and available globally right now.
Here's how to make yours + a famous story from our house about "Teddy" …
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Dan Jordan retweeted
I like em dashes, and I hate that some people now take them as evidence of text being AI generated.
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Dan Jordan retweeted
Housing policy is doomed to fail if it's unpopular. Even policies that deliver lots of homes get repealed if they annoy people. The best solutions deliver homes AND win public support. 🧵 [link at the end]
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