“Assign yourself the right story.”

Gucci’s 2 great eras in the last 30 yrs are the byproduct of internally-hired creative directors who are capable of shaping fashion cycles. They now have a new CEO+creative director (1st time they’ve hired external) tasked to become less vulnerable to the fashion cycle. $KER.PA

McNealy's Law (from 2006) - 'technology has the shelf life of a banana'

Thomson Reuters on incumbent advantage re: AI. Quality of content point is fair and well trodden. Think their second point on prompt engineering advantage falls flat. It's exactly something a new entrant can suddenly re-imagine.

CELH on c-store runway: 'Red Bull and Monster, about 70% of their tracked sales are coming through convenience, whereas for us, it's around 58%. And that's not because of the lack of performance...convenience was really our last channel that we went into.'

FIVN on barriers to scale in CCaaS: 'There's been no new entrant of scale into the industry in the last 15, 20 years. And that's one reason. It requires a very, very challenging development, both on the voice side and the data side and on the software side.'

This was a great read:

Aswath Damodaran: ‘Investing is an act of faith’ ft.com/content/6b9537… via @ft

Satya on the lack of franchise value in tech nbim.no/en/publication…

Game of chicken

Copart on total loss frequency: 'can it exceed 30%, I think the answer is affirmatively yes'

WST CapEx

Pre-Covid: 6-7% of sales, 50-60/50-40 growth/maintenance

Today: 10-12% of sales, 70/30 growth/maintenance

“So what explains the contrast between celebrations in Kumamoto and headaches in Arizona?”

- labor relations
- helpful local partners
- subsidies

'no one cared about holding working capital over the previous 3 to 4 years, right? Now all of a sudden, everybody cares about working capital because the cost of carry on working capital has gone up significantly' $DOV

Re-reading

AutoStore guidance (or lack thereof) rationale