MBI Deep Dives

MBI Deep Dives

Digital Advertising's "Bitter Lesson" Moment

Eric Seufert recently had an interesting podcast with a couple of professors who authored the paper titled “The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness”. The authors pursued four specific lines of inquiry to understand how visual Generative AI (genAI) fits into the advertising landscape. Here are the four

The Reality of Meta's Reality Labs

You have all seen the chart of Meta’s Reality Labs (RL) losses. Just as a reminder, ever since Meta started reporting RL as a separate segment, it has reported a cumulative loss of $73 Billion in the last 20 quarters. Obviously, they were incurring losses even before reporting the

CoStar and Zillow's Google Risk

It seems Google’s masks are off now that the regulatory monkeys are increasingly off its back! Yesterday, Inman reported: “Real estate data and analytics firm HouseCanary shook up the industry over the weekend with its Google partnership, which prominently displays ComeHome listings at the top of search results for

Adobe and Airbnb

Yesterday, I stumbled onto this time-series chart of Adobe and Airbnb’s EV to LTM Gross Profit (GP) multiple. I thought it was quite interesting that they trade at almost the same LTM EV/GP multiple. While Adobe consistently grew gross profit at low double digit rate, Airbnb used to

Booking on the Offense

Last week, Booking’s CFO Ewout Steenbergen attended Nasdaq Morgan Stanley London TMT Conference. Booking’s CFO re-iterated their “8-8-15” algorithm for the “next few years”. For the uninitiated, “8-8-15” stands for 8% gross bookings growth, 8% revenue growth, and 15% EPS growth. I also really liked how the CFO

Synopsys' Pricing Evolution in Design IP

While design IP was as high as 39% of Synopsys total revenue back in 2022, it has come down to ~25% of revenue following Ansys acquisition. So, although this segment has somewhat declined in significance, the performance of this segment can still be needle mover for the company. It certainly

Lululemon's Succession

Regular readers are likely aware that I have lost my shirt by investing in Lululemon. To add further salt to my injury, the stock started going up a bit only after I sold it. Joking (or lamenting) aside, Lulu’s board came to the same conclusion I did three months

Adobe and Figma's Divergent Path

The last time I covered Adobe’s earnings was back in 2Q’23. In that update, I explained why I decided to sell the stock. In retrospect, that was perhaps one of my well-timed exits so far. But has the market been punishing Adobe too much? I wouldn’t focus

The "Edge AI" Bear Case

On “Invest Like The Best” podcast yesterday, Gavin Baker mentioned the following: “In three years, on a bigger phone, you’ll be able to run a pruned-down version of Gemini 5, Grok 4, or ChatGPT. And that’s free. This is clearly Apple’s strategy - we’re going to

Waymo's Surge

In May 2023, Waymo was doing just 10k commercial public rides per week. Then exactly a year ago, Sundar Pichai disclosed Waymo was doing 175k rides per week. Yesterday, this tweet indicated weekly number of rides has now shot to 450k, growing 157% YoY! Of course, Waymo is still only