We previously covered this brilliant list of 52 things learnt for 2019 and 2018.
Here is the 2020 edition – full of gems. A few choice examples:
Most cities plant only male trees because it’s expensive to clear up the fruit that falls from female trees. Male trees release pollen, and that’s one of the reasons your hay fever is getting worse.
For VC companies in 2004, the average time from first contact to funding was 90 days. Today, it’s just nine days
Car safety laws in the US make it more expensive to have three children — women in states with mandated car seats are 0.7% less likely to have a third child. The safety measures may have saved 57 car crash fatalities each year, but caused 145,000 fewer births since 1980.
Developing and launching the iPod in 2001 took just 41 weeks, from the very first meeting (no team, no prototype, no design) to iPods shipping to customers.
5.4% of households in the United States remain unbanked, meaning that no one in the household had a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union (i.e., bank), down from a peak of 8.2%.
Explains moves in the US to introduce the Public Banking Act.
“Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs, in his first year returning as CEO, laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization.“
Apple has retained this structure despite revenues being 40x larger. As the number of employees went from 17k to 137k the number of VPs only doubled from 50 to 96.
We covered the topic of the misuse of intangibles by some participants in our innugral blog post.
This is an interesting academic paper that corrects this by appreciating that the question is one of developing better valuation metrics.
The authors improve on the classic value factor by adding intangible assets (based on cumulative SG&A spending) – creating a new and better performing valuation measure.
The stories of the early days of Airbnb, who recently filed to go public, are the stuff of legend including how the founders turned to selling themed cereal to survive.
The cereals were called “Obama O’s, the Cereal of Change,” and “Cap’n McCain’s, a Maverick in Every Box.” – a throwback to their first success housing delegates of the Democratic National Convention in 2008. It was also what got them a spot on Y Combinator.
Although the events of 2020 are in many ways unprecedented one can look at the 2002 SARS outbreak in Asia as a possible analogy, after all it involved a lot of people in China staying at home.
Netease, a gaming company, was one of the few publicly listed stocks that reported financials at the time.
This table (h/t Selcouth Capital Management) shows what happened to quarterly financials at Netease at the time.
Netease saw a huge boost to revenue and a re-rating. Yet, eventually revenue slowed against tough comps and the stock deflated.
Will the same happen to the current crop of beneficiaries?
Armageddonists (“the market-watchers, forecasters and money managers whose apocalyptic comments spread like wildfire in print and online financial news”) haven’t been bailed out from underperformance by COVID in 2020.
