MBI Deep Dives (Page 10)

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Airbnb's Evolution

How does Airbnb make money? Let’s go through an illustrative example first assuming an individual host lists their home at $100 per night. If a host lists their home at $100/night, Airbnb charges the host ~$3 to cover the payment processing costs; hence, the host receives $97 for

The resilience of consumer spending in the US

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston had an interesting piece last month about the resilience of consumer spending which is ~70% of GDP in the US. They looked at credit card spending data for low, middle, and high-income group (representing first, third, and fifth quintiles in their dataset respectively) in the

My Experience on Airbnb Experience

A few months ago, Airbnb has made a big splash about re-launching “Airbnb Experience”. While I stayed at 17 different Airbnb homes over the last 7 years, I have never booked an Airbnb Experience before. So a few days ago, I went to the Airbnb app and looked for experiences

The Data Center Story: Part 2, Portfolio Change

So I finished the Data Center episode by stepchange yesterday. But let me offer a correction from yesterday’s piece first. I quoted “stepchange” saying, “Many enterprises had PUE numbers around 2, meaning twice as much power went to lights, cooling, and everything else compared to the amount of power

The Data Center Story: Part 1

I came across this recently launched podcast named “stepchange”. The podcast is basically Acquired-style story telling of “human progress through the lens of transformative technologies, systems, and infrastructure”. They have covered two topics so far: Coal, and Data Center. Naturally, I started with their Data Center episode. Since I grew

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