Topic

GOOG

A collection of 72 issues

Alphabet 1Q'26: Stratospheric Heights in Performance and Expectations

Alphabet’s revenue growth has accelerated for five consecutive quarters. Except for Google Network business which is increasingly irrelevant, every part of the Alphabet business is humming right now. As mentioned yesterday, despite growing at an incredible ~19% in 1Q’26, Google Search still continued to lose share in digital

Man and Machine

For a typical company, analysts and investors evaluate a company’s capital allocation by looking at how the company allocates the cash it generates. Ultimately, there are only five things you can do with your cash flow from operations: a) invest in your own business to grow more in the

"Founder Mode" Complacency

Colossus recently published a chapter from Sebastian Mallaby’s new book on Demis Hassabis titled “The Infinity Machine”. I haven’t read the book, but did read this chapter. It was a riveting read. While I knew DeepMind had second thoughts about staying within Alphabet’s umbrella, I didn’t

Thoughts on Last Week

Programming Note: I will take tomorrow off as I have some family commitment. I will be back on Monday. Ouch! Last week was quite terrible for MBI portfolio. I will share some thoughts on how I am thinking through the portfolio behind the paywall. In addition to “Daily Dose” (yes,

OpenAI's Dilemma

WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece: “OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”

Nvidia's Burgeoning Moats, Pichai's Comp

Jensen Huang mentioned at Morgan Stanley (MS) TMT Conference last week that Nvidia just reported “the single best print in the history of humanity”. While such glib comments attracted a lot of attention, I thought Huang’s session was quite instructive in explaining to investors how Huang is busy at

Hardcoding Habits

In early 2025, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that he estimates EU fined the US tech companies more than $30 Billion over the last decade or so. He went onto lament that instead of US government defending their tech companies from this indirect form of “tariff”, US government itself often led such

Alphabet: From Search to AI to "AGI"

Google is perhaps one of the most recognized brand in the world. I wouldn’t, however, confuse familiarity with understanding of Alphabet’s business. By the end of this piece, it will likely be clear how complex this business has become over time. It is perhaps not a stretch to

The Long-term Reality of Hyperscalers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Scenarios

In my “Lipstick on Frontier AI Pigs” piece, I wrote the following: Apart from ignoring the cost of training, another deeply questionable assumption Amodei makes in his argument is the gross margin for inference. In his “stylized” example, he assumes gross margin to be 67% which is directly responsible for

Alphabet 4Q'25 Update

Alphabet came to this earnings with elevated expectations from investors. It delivered. The stock is down a bit post-earnings despite that, but it’s hard to imagine Alphabet shareholders not having a good sleep last night. Here are my highlights from the earnings. Revenue Who amongst us really thought search