MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Meta's monetization game

Back in 2022, Meta was facing onslaught from multiple directions: a) Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT), b) regulatory threats from Europe (and sometimes even the US), c) competition from TikTok, d) rising capex with uncertain pay-off, and e) persistently rising operating losses in Reality Labs with even more uncertain

Airbnb's mix shift

One of the more interesting, gradual shifts that have happened over the last five years in Airbnb is their geographic mix shift. The impact of geographic mix itself is often an underappreciated factor among investors for Airbnb’s recent operating performance. I will share some thoughts on this topic behind

GDP's absurdity

When I read the following excerpt from the book “Poor numbers” last year, it was a stark reminder of lack of state capacity in many parts of the world even for collecting some routine data: In 2010, I returned to Zambia and found that the national accounts now were prepared

Thoughts on Alpha School

It’s Sunday, so I thought about sharing some thoughts on a non-investing topic: schools for our kids. Before we had our first kid in December last year, I was pretty firm on sending my kid to public school. However, since both my wife and I grew up in Bangladesh

OpenAI's admirable pace of iterations

I often see people admonishing Google for literally inventing the transformer architecture and yet not being able to productize it before OpenAI launched ChatGPT. We may not have to wonder about the hypothetical scenario where Google would be today if they were the ones who launched “ChatGPT” first. Exactly a

First impression of Meta Ray-Ban Display, Taking a big swing at Airbnb

Yesterday, I drove for 40 minutes to go to a Best Buy store where I scheduled my demo for Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. When I reached there, I could see that Best Buy had a prominently displayed corner for Meta Ray-Ban. I saw a guy who missed their demo on

Constellation's Succession

A programming note: I am currently working on a Deep Dive on Instacart which I expect to publish by 25th of this month. I have recently spent some time in understanding Amazon’s ambition in groceries (see part 1 and part 2); given Instacart’s success in grocery delivery, I

Airbnb Model Update

I first published my Deep Dive on Airbnb three years ago. The stock has been largely flat since then whereas its closest peer Booking’s stock price tripled during the same time. Now that I have started buying Airbnb stock this year, I thought about updating the model and then

Expanding the scope of digital advertising

Every once in a while, you may have heard (or wondered it yourself) that Meta must be listening to us given how well targeted its ads are compared to almost any other platform. Indeed, compared to most other platforms (other websites, apps, or TV, radio, podcast ads), Meta’s ads

Never Sell: Episode 10-Lululemon, Align, LLMs and Newsletters, Portfolio Holdings, Right for the Right Reasons

For the “Never Sell” podcast, Scuttleblurb and I published a new episode. You can listen to it here: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, RSS feed As the title suggests, we tried to cover a bunch of topics, but I wanted to highlight our discussion on Lululemon. Lululemon has been a big loser