[WK – Workiva] From Point Solution to Platform

Pat Dorsey, founder of Dorsey Asset Management and formerly Director of Equity Research at Morningstar, recently pitched Workiva on the Invest Like the Best podcast (I have transcribed Dorsey’s remarks about WK in today’s Podcast Blurbs).  At a high level: “And what they did is create a product that lets companies do SEC filings much […]

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[KMX – CarMax; CVNA – Carvana] Moat, Growth, and Competition

When I Google “used car salesman”, here are the first images that appear. ‘nuff said. It required an electronics and appliance retailer with no car selling experience to be the change that consumers wanted to see in the car buying experience.  In 1993, the now defunct Circuit City launched the first CarMax store, leveraging its […]

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Quick Blurbs [Ryanair, Equinix, Interxion, Amerco]

[RYAAY – Ryanair] Anchor Post: [RYAAY – Ryanair] Low Cost Flywheel In mid-September last year, Ryanair announced that it would be cancelling 2% of its daily flights over the subsequent 6 weeks to free up aircraft and ensure punctual departure times for the other 98%.  The press attributed this snafu, which inconvenienced 0.5% of Ryanair’s […]
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[RHT – Red Hat] On A Bridge Between Clouds

Let’s take it back to ’69.  The Unix operating system was just conceived under Bell Laboratories, the vaunted research joint venture of AT&T and Western Electric.  Protected by the strictures of a consent decree from 1956, which prevented its parent AT&T from commercializing technology that wasn’t related to telephony, Unix thrived as an open research […]

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Blurbs [Media trends, Enterprise blockchain]

Code Media (2/14/2018; Analyst Michael Nathanson on where media is headed) Michael Nathanson “Over the past 4 years [from 2013 to 2017], the FANG stocks have added $1.4tn of market cap.  At the same time, the media industry, the content network industry, the studio industry, has lost about $40bn of market cap. This is one […]

[CMPR – Cimpress NV] Scale Economies and Hard Realities, Pt. 3

Cimpress is a fine business that has been in search of strategic direction for the last 6-7 years, groping for the right balance between value-added customization and low-cost production.  These two sources of differentiation are often at odds because the scale economies required to claim a cost advantage depend on running lots and lots of […]

[RP] RealPage

In 1998 RealPage Communications, an internet hosting service for the commercial and residential real estate industry, merged with Rent Roll, a provider of property management software, giving birth a few years later to the company’s flagship property management SaaS, OneSite.  At a time when property managers were still awkwardly fusing disparate general purpose on-premise systems […]

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[IDXX – IDEXX Labs] Priced to Win

People love their pets.  That’s obvious not merely in our impulse to anthropomorphize them but to increasingly care for them the same way we do human members of our families.  American pet owners used to really only took their pets to clinics to treat obvious physical symptoms, but they’ve increasingly been hitting up the vet […]

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