[ADSK, Dassault, PTC] Simulation, CAD, and PLM: Part 2

Autodesk, Dassault, and PTC were all founded as CAD companies in the ‘80s but have since become much more than that.  PTC first integrated PLM and is now branching off into industrial IoT and augmented reality.  Dassault (which also moved into PLM and simulation) and Autodesk are no longer just supplying software tools to solve […]

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[CVNA – Carvana] Fat tail investing

CarMax sells more cars in a single year than Carvana has sold in its entire existence and yet has half the latter’s enterprise value as the market has come to appreciate that buying cars online is becoming a real thing and Carvana is best positioned to profit from this channel shift.CarMax was version 1.0 of […]

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Simulation, CAD, and PLM: Part 1

Many of the complex objects and structures around you were conceived as virtual objects modeled in computer-aided design (CAD) software.  Those CAD objects may have been converted into millions of small polygons (pre-processing), each one bombarded with advanced calculus to help engineers visualize the polygonal mesh’s response to different simulated physical conditions (post-processing)Source: YouTube: Abaqus CAE: Hydro-static […]

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[Z – Zillow Group] On lead gen and iBuying

Over the last 5 years, Google has increasingly been crowding out organic results with paid ads and preferencing its own properties in search results, frustrating online businesses that feed under its canopy.  TripAdvisor and Angie’s List used to brag that most of their traffic came from unpaid organic search while competitors with weaker brands were […]

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[ADM.L – Admiral Group] Barriers to scale; moats vs. revenue models

“I have always been attracted to the low cost operator in any business and, when you can find a combination of (i) an extremely large business, (ii) a more or less homogenous product, and (iii) a very large gap in operating costs between the low cost operator and all of the other companies in the […]

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[APPN, PEGA, SMAR] No/low code evolution

There are some smart people who think that our brains are wired to process the world hierarchically[1][2].  For instance, neurons in one part of the visual cortex fire when they detect lines tilted at particular angles, sending those patterns to a “higher” layer where certain other neurons are attuned to the detection of particular letters, […]

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FICO and the Consumer Credit Bureaus: Part 2

From the early 2000s to now, EET have evolved from credit reporting agencies selling indistinguishable datasets to information technology companies offering predictions[1].  Over time, all 3 bureaus have gotten bigger, their delivery mechanisms have changed (from phone calls and paper reports to software), their data sources have expanded – to encompass different kinds of data […]

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FICO and the Consumer Credit Bureaus: Part 1

This circuitous 2-parter is going to open with the consumer credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion – EET), switch to FICO, and loop back to the bureaus…apologies in advance for the disorienting structure. Let’s start with Experian, which like many companies formed through motley acquisitions, wasn’t so much created as it was allowed to emerge. […]

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