A really insightful and bearish essay on Nintendo.
“However, the “Nintendo is Disney” thesis is deeply flawed. It feels more like a desire to apply a pattern than to find a real analogue. Elements of Nintendo certainly represent Disney, but they represent Disney insofar as both companies are best in class creators of four-quadrant, multi-generational content. Otherwise the businesses are fundamentally different, their management styles fundamentally different, and their approaches to content itself are fundamentally different, too.”
Their rise had a lot to do with a huge advertising campaign in the US
This stat is staggering – for a period in 2018 “nearly 22% of all ads seen by U.S. Apple device users on Facebook ad network came from TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin”
As the article points out this actually provides more evidence of Facebooks dominance.
On culture – “part of daily life at Netflix with a daily Circle of Feedback and annual written and live 360 Assessments, in which you meet with the team to get ripped apart.“
Bessemer Venture Partners are famous for publishing their anti-portfolio.
Recently they took to learning from their success and published a series of memos from some of their most successful venture investments.
“One pattern that consistently emerges is that Bessemer’s best investment decisions centered on people. In retrospect, the early products themselves are barely recognizable today. Rather, passionate, analytical and relentless founders zigged and zagged their way to that elusive “product-market fit”, and these memos provide a glimpse of those winning entrepreneurs before they were famous.“
“It took nearly a century for the flush toilet to approach 80% household penetration. Electricity took 30 years to get to 80%; Refrigerators 20 years; cell phones 15 years; Social media 12 years.“
Brilliant article on the monopolistic power of food delivery businesses especially as they begin to vertically integrate and merge around the world.
“Losing money to acquire market power, or to steal from investors, is a form of counterfeiting, because it drives honest competitors that have to generate a profit out of the market“.
A great presentation and separate post about a huge eCommerce business you probably haven’t heard of, founded only in 2015.
Its success is down to a team buying feature, social integration, gamification and live streaming.
These features have led to a daily active user (DAU) to monthly active user (MAU) ratio, a measure of engagement, of almost 50% – the highest, by some margin, among peers.
An interactive table of the tech world’s most valuable patent portfolios.
This chart shows the top 20 companies overall. Clicking through it’s possible to rank by industry.
Usual suspects at the top but interesting to see companies like Cirrus Logic and Sonos making it.
For an explanation of how the Pipeline Power score – which takes into account the value rather than the raw quantity of patents in a portfolio – is derived click here.
NB Sadly the data is slightly dated (from 2017) but likely still very relevant.
