The article covers its tumultuous founding (YC start-up) and history.
The undervaluation vs peers – the latest round valued the company at $6bn or $115 per daily active user (DAU) vs. $400 for Facebook and $310 for Twitter.
And finally possible areas of improvement and expansion.
All interesting to read ahead of the speculated IPO.
They acquired social podcast tool Breaker, Substack competitor Revue (and cut take rates to 5%), and are developing Clubhouse competitor Twitter Spaces.
Financial twitter is alight with commentary on the change going on. This was a brilliant thread (liked by @Jack himself) sent to us (thanks Tom!) on the cultural change going on.
This is a nice (fun) write up on the stock – including the narrative change.
“In this market, value is dead (jk sorry value folks!), obvious growth is crowded, but finding that inflection point when the narrative around a company switches from dead to very much alive is like finding a magical money printer in a market fueled by a magical money printer. brrrrrr^2”
Thanks to commercial rocket development (SpaceX) space launch costs are falling again.
“The cost of space launch dropped from very high levels in the first decade of the space age but then remained high for decades and was especially high for the space shuttle. In the most recent decade, commercial rocket development has reduced the typical space launch cost by a factor of 20 while NASA’s launch cost to ISS has declined by a factor of 4.”
There is a lot being written about China’s push for self-reliance.
One of the biggest parts of this story over the next decade is likely to be the battle for semiconductor technology of all kind.
The electronic design automation (EDA) industry is controlled by three firms and are all US. China is now making first moves into this industry., crucial for semiconductors.
Europe is also getting involved and has just signed a €145bn declaration to develop a next generation processor and 2nm technology.
“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.
