It is a list of all the missed opportunities they had as VC Investors.
A gem – “David Cownan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
Biogen have just announced they will be going ahead and filing Aducanumab (their treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease).
Shares are +40% as a result.
This is extremely odd considering just in March the studies were discontinued due to futility (i.e. they didn’t show an effect).
The company is saying new analysis of a larger dataset has led to, in communication with the FDA, the filing decision (NB. approval is uncertain still).
There is a huge unmet need [100% of drugs have failed, the disease affects 5.8m people in America (50m worldwide) and costs $290bn per year in direct and care costs] so perhaps there was pressure for a win.
Adrian Lowcock, head of personal investing at Willis Owen, summed it up when he told the Financial Times: “We have seen the complete demise of the most famous fund manager the UK has seen for years… This collapse is on a par with the implosion of New Star at the height of the financial crisis, and it will shake the funds industry to its core.”
We think this article is unfair (1) It was not just a few lone journalists but many fund managers, often in private, voiced concerns about Woodford especially the use of a barbell approach, high % of illiquid (or private) investments, use of leverage, high % ownership in shares, complicated holding structures etc. (2) The industry has suffered because of Woodford and has not gained. In any way. (3) The pressures described are not new and regulation has relentlessly moved in the direction of reforming the industry. It is not flawless.
Try see if you can beat the market by buying and selling (once each) in any given randomly selected 10-year period from 1978.
A more sophisticated version, but with worse UI, covering 1950-2018 is found here. You can buy/sell several times and decide to use history or a random selection of daily historic returns (Monte-Carlo).
Worth reading – after all this is the man in charge of nearly 40% of US eCommerce as well as AWS (Amazon Web Services) – the infrastructure most start-ups run on.
A gem – Bezos has given $42m of funding for a clock – The Clock of the Long Now – on his ranch that will tell time accurately for 10,000 years.
“The upcoming arrival of services like Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and Peacock is increased competition, but they are still small compared to linear TV … In our view, the likely outcome from the launch of these new services will be to accelerate the shift from linear TV to on demand consumption of entertainment. Just like the evolution from broadcast TV to cable, these once-in-a-generation changes are very large and open up big, new opportunities for many players.”
Seriously interesting article on Calouste Gulbenkian and negotiating.
If you haven’t heard of him he was the richest man in the world in the 1950s by virtue of negotiating “5%” royalties on Middle Eastern (especially Iraqi) oil developed by western companies.
Lessons include never put all demands upfront but make demands step by step, often right at the last moment.
Make agreements so complex that non one will dispute them later.
“An S-1 is meant to be a bland financial document, but WeWork’s took a different direction. With Adam’s encouragement, Rebekah became unusually involved in the artistic presentation of the document. “The traditional approach to producing an S-1 is bankers and lawyers hashing this out, but the process was continually usurped by Rebekah’s involvement,” one executive said, echoing a sentiment expressed by multiple people who worked on the project. “She treated it like it was the September issue of Vogue.” “
