MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Airbnb's Soul Search Beyond Homes

Programming Note: I am going to take a Summer Break for a couple of weeks. I am actually traveling to Bangladesh to spend some time with family after three and half years. I expect to start posting daily on June 8th onward. Yesterday, Booking CEO Glenn Fogel appeared on JP

FICO: Deconstructing the Monopoly Margins

Programming Note: This is part-2 of my FICO series. In Part 1, I covered FICO’s history through the 2018-2025 pricing-power era, where the score business finally started capturing the rents it had been giving away to the credit bureaus for three decades. In today’s post, my focus is

Floor & Decor's Cyclical Malaise vs Structural Moat

One of the ironies of operating in a cyclical end market is that management can sound like genius to somewhat hopeless depending on the stage of the cycle they are in. And if you are caught in the wrong side of the cycle for long enough, investors often start questioning

The Honeymoon Phase of Capacity

Although I am yet to write any Deep Dive on any neocloud, I still like to pay close attention to what they are saying during their earnings calls. Both CoreWeave and Nebius had some interesting nuggets in their 1Q’26 call. Let’s start with CoreWeave. Just like the hyperscalers,

The Best Yardstick

The Steady Eddie Paradox 30 pension funds. 14 years. Watch what happens to the one that's never above the 27th percentile or below the 47th in any single year. "In his 14 years in the job, the fund's equity return had never ranked above the

Figma 1Q'26: "Not Dead"

“Quick update: not dead”…that’s what Dylan Field tweeted after releasing Figma’s 1Q’26 earnings! For the second consecutive quarters, Figma’s growth re-accelerated, growing ~46% in 1Q’26. These sequential quarters of acceleration was due to multiple factors: the pricing tailwind from the March 2025 hikes layered

FICO: Pricing the Standard

Programming note: As I have mentioned earlier, I am making some changes in how I publish my Deep Dives. Instead of publishing one big Deep Dive, I will do a series of posts on a particular company over multiple weeks. Today I am publishing first of such multiple posts on

Constellation Software 1Q’26: Leaning In Amidst the SaaSpocalypse

During the current “SaaSpocalypse”, Constellation Software (CSU) delivered a slightly uneven but, in important ways, also encouraging quarter. Organic growth softened and margins took the usual Q1 hit (and a bit more), but capital deployment pace (which is why anyone really owns the stock) remains a key bright spot. Maintenance

Roblox 1Q'26: Age Check Hangover, But Aiming to Go Beyond the Blocks

Programming Note: In case you missed it yesterday, I have released "MBI" Skill for Claude and Codex. Back in 4Q’25 call, Roblox management announced that they will not provide any annual guidance from 2027 onwards: we've learned that it's difficult to predict exactly

"MBI" Skill for Claude and Codex

Today’s post is about how to get more out of MBI Deep Dives. When MBI Deep Dives was only about the monthly Deep Dives, it wasn’t very difficult to keep track of everything I was writing about. However, since I started publishing daily in July last year, it