MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Thoughts on Meta Connect 2025

I bought my first Meta Ray-Ban Glasses back in 2023. After using it for a few days, I reviewed my initial thoughts here. For almost the last two years, I have been a Daily Active User (DAU) of these glasses. In fact, after losing a pair early this year, I

Amazon's "unfair" advantage in advertising

Amazon started disclosing their advertising revenue from 4Q’21. Before 4Q’21, their ad revenue was “hidden” in “other” segment. Everyone, of course, knew ads was ~80-90% of “other” revenue. Amazon’s other segment grew from quarterly revenue of $1.1 Billion in 3Q’17 to a whopping $8.1

How people use ChatGPT and its implications, Portfolio Change

There was a lot of chatter about an NBER working paper “How People Use ChatGPT” yesterday. Unlike most survey work or academic paper looking into this question, what differentiates this paper is it is written by people at OpenAI. As you can imagine, there is a treasure trove of interesting

Why we need Intel foundry spin-off, funded by a mag7 consortium

In July 2024, I appeared on Liberty’s podcast to discuss semiconductor industry. Near the end of the podcast (43 minute), I proposed an idea that I considered to be potentially a wild but reasonable idea. The global tech ecosystem is dangerously reliant on a single point of failure: TSMC.

Texas Instruments' data center and robotics opportunity

Texas Instruments (TXN) hardly ever breaks out “data center” or “robotics” opportunity in quarterly calls with hard numbers. “Data center” shows up intermittently under enterprise systems segment, and “robotics” is usually rolled into factory automation during quarterly calls. So, it did catch my attention when TXN CEO Haviv Ilan provided

Airbnb's untapped monetization lever(s)

Brian Chesky had an interesting session at GS Communicopia last week which made me think Airbnb has quite a few untapped levers of monetization. While it’s unlikely that they will tap all these levers anytime soon, I think it’s worth thinking through these potential monetization pathways which can

Notes and thoughts on Meta and Microsoft discussion at GS Communicopia

Correction: I would like to issue a correction from yesterday’s piece on Synopsys. I mentioned the company is trading at ~56x LTM EBITA. The problem is Synopsys’ LTM EBITA doesn’t incorporate Ansys’ EBITA which they just acquired. As a result, while the EV includes the impact of acquisition,

Why Synopsys Sank

First, let me follow-up on yesterday’s piece related to Oracle’s eye-popping quarter and what it may have implied for the broader ecosystem. Later yesterday, WSJ reported that it was OpenAI who signed a contract with Oracle to buy $300 Billion of compute in the next five years! It

More Alphabet!

“Eventually, AI will change everything…though not everyone fully grasp the extent of the tsunami that is approaching…Training AI models is a gigantic multitrillion-dollar market. It's hard to conceive of a technology market as large as that one. But if you look close, you can find one

"Innoveracy", Finding Awe

Innoveracy A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked for my opinion about Meta’s historical struggle of building “new products” (he sent me this tweet). I mostly explained to him that going from 0 to 1 repeatedly is a challenging task for any incumbent, and I also reminded him