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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Google would’ve been better off just not spending all that money and returning a bunch of cash as dividends. But P-A problem leads to empire building.

But P-A problem leads to empire building.

In the case of a well-regarded tech company like Google, I don't think it is necessarily a P-A problem. It is hard to talk about the usual metrics like PE vs index because so much of the S&P 500 is tech megacaps nowadays, but I think for most of the last 10 years stock market investors valued $1 of cash in Larry Page's pocket higher than $1 cash in their own pocket because they thought Larry was able to buy companies like Waymo and Deepmind and they couldn't.

Notoriously, growth investors hate dividends.

I understand the argument. It just turned out not to be true. Has Google really created anything super successful outside of Google and gmail

I think there is a common mistake among tech investors of overestimating the chance that a successful founder/CEO will do it again. There was something similar going on with Tesla - if you asked Tesla bulls what the trillion dollar company Tesla would grow into looked like (it is hard to justify a valuation of more than about $300 billion for a pure-play car company), they would generally was lyrical about some non-automotive business (energy and AI being the main ones) that Musk was going to expand into.

Musk does seem like a bit of an outlier. He was pretty important in PayPal. Then SpaceX and Tesla. That’s three very different companies but all really successful.

Tesla battery tech is actually pretty advanced. I could see a non car use case, but to me to really accomplish that you need to spin it out for fit and focus reasons.

Same with SpaceX and Starlink. Starlink seems to have a clear use case of internet provider (Elon didn’t reinvent this but basically improved on historic DSL). To really harness this, need to focus on Starlink qua telecom.

With all of that said, the company on most bullish on is SpaceX. Asteroid mining could be incredibly valuable.

I'm bullish on SpaceX too - so is Musk given that he doesn't let peasants invest in it. I suspect if there was a SpaceX IPO the fanbois would drive up the stock price to the point where I ceased to be bullish.

Musk is clearly more likely than the latest Y Combinator wunderkind to build another $300 billion company. But I still think the overall chance of him doing so is <50% (particularly given that he is suffering from the great fame->loss of focus->loss of productivity problem that ends Nobel laureates research careers). And the chance of him doing so in a way which generates value for non-Musk SpaceX or Tesla shareholders is even lower because he has demonstrated a willingness to found new companies while remaining CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the Tesla and SpaceX boards have demonstrated a willingness to let him do it.

Agreed that musk is probably “done” founding new companies. But basically founding two 300b+ companies + playing a large role in a third is already almost unprecedented.

The closest I can think of is Jobs (Pixar and Apple—and with Apple he basically reinvented it)

Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.

Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).

Android

Chrome

I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.

Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.

I felt that was true pre-pandemic (and I used it, and wrote reviews), but Trip Advisor's coverage seems crap now, and it's scores not really to be trusted.

That hasn't been my experience.

Just now I randomly picked a restaurant in Rome and it has 1300 reviews on Google maps and 800 on trip advisor.

I’m not talking about useful; I’m talking about profitable. Android I’ll concede.

I’m in a very large professional service firm and we exclusively use office products along with everyone I know. I think it’s quite rare to use Google Drive.

  • The free DNS server 8.8.8.8 and other Internet backend services which feed their ad servers

  • Android mobile OS (though “created” might be too strong a term

  • Chromebooks for schoolkids

  • Chrome browser is now the guts of MS Edge after Windows deprecated IE

  • Google Play successfully monetized the YouTube infrastructure they bought

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