Followup: takers and makers

October 9, 2010

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures has a recent short post on two kinds of people: takers and makers. Takers make their money by taking from others. They are usually bad business people and their careers often end in failure. Makers build things. They create value for society, their employees, their shareholders, and themselves. This [...]

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Performance management is risk management

October 7, 2010

Where TSC has become involved in the detailed analysis of investment portfolios, we’ve chosen to focus on the massive amount of data that is in fact sitting on the books of financial advisors, rather than on broad market segments standing alone. In working with a high-net-worth family, we sought to track not just overall performance [...]

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Harvesting net operating losses avoids double losses

October 7, 2010

The NYT displayed some confusion about finance realities in this older column about net operating losses, a perennial “favorite” topic of ours. We’ve done some complex planning (aka invent new deal structures) for a corporation and its shareholders that held as an unfortunate asset a vast amount of net operating losses (NOLs). We reviewed a [...]

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How much does revenue matter?

September 23, 2010

This finance link post from the team at 37Signals briefly compares Apple’s share of the mobile phone market (apparently by volume) with its share of the profits in that market: Market share is irrelevant if you can’t turn it into a dominant profit share. That’s their quote. Here’s ours: “it’s all about revenue” #famouslastwords There [...]

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What kind of valuation do you need?

September 5, 2010

Someone recently asked about the cost for a valuation. As with many questions we hear, this one also has to be answered with a question: why do you need a valuation? And that, in turn, is really better framed as this question: what are you trying to do, and let us give you some guidance [...]

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What do I “do” with due diligence?

August 9, 2010

Here’s a recent post by Rick Colosimo in the Five-Minute General Counsel series on due diligence, with an even shorter short form due diligence request list than our own investor-based due diligence list. One question we haven’t answered here yet is: what is the point of all this? Well, investors/acquirors have three main risks to [...]

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Which kind of business are you building?

August 8, 2010

I’ve often thought that there are two kinds of businesses: those that make money from providing more value to customers, and those that make money from providing less value to their customers. This brief article describes 5 grocery store ripoffs. I’d add Trop50 to the list, as noted also in the comments here. Trop50 is [...]

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Why do you need a Ranger Buddy?

May 6, 2010

My pal Rex [video link] just posted about teamwork, in the literal sense, over at Grootship. This struck me because the notion of having a ranger buddy was drilled into us in countless ways during Ranger School, not the least of which was doing lots and lots of pushups if you strayed too far from [...]

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Einstein on simplifying

April 12, 2010

Here is another quote that has often been paraphrased, and the recursive nature of that concept is particularly appealing in this context: It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation [...]

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To seek alpha, analyze managers, not funds

December 5, 2009

This WSJ article on identifying and analyzing mutual funds is interesting because of what’s not there. The article describes a new study by Fama and French, the prolific finance authors who continue to study the efficient market hypothesis and the effects of pretending it doesn’t exist. In short, the study tracked yet another big collection [...]

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