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

The Appeal of Cash

Last month, Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan published a report on history and implications of cash holdings among publicly listed companies in the US. Excluding financial firms, US companies had $2.5 Trillion cash at the end of 2024 (4.7% of total market cap). From 1970 to 2000, the

Google's evolving TPU strategy

Google built the first Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) because general‑purpose chips were too slow and too power‑hungry for the surge of machine‑learning inference inside Google Search, Ads, Photos, speech etc. As Moore's Law, the long-standing observation of exponential growth in transistor density, began to falter,

Texas Instruments and Analog Devices at Citi TMT Conference

Both Texas Instruments (TXN) and Analog Devices (ADI) attended Citi TMT Conference last week. Let me share some of my notes from these calls. TXN stock reacted negatively a bit after management highlighted they are not seeing a “snapback” in the current recovery: …it's not quite happening a

Lululemon 2Q'25 Update

Over the last few quarters, there have been a murmur around Lululemon potentially needing a new management to right their ship. Given that they tripled their revenue in the last six years under Calvin McDonald’s leadership, I was reluctant to join this chorus. However, after yesterday’s call, admittedly

Technology vs Platform Shift, Portfolio Change

Is the current AI phenomenon a technology or a platform shift? Or is it both? I read couple of pieces yesterday that makes a pretty convincing case that it is only a technology shift so far. Casey Winters made this point almost a couple of years ago which I think