@LionnetPierre Starlink LEO satellites don't cost $15-$40 million each to manufacture.

I have an appetite for waffles for breakfast tomorrow. Not the same tho. "There was 'appetite' within the investment team to take the private equity allocation above its current 13 per cent target of the overall portfolio. 'This is being discussed.'"

"A dependable savings And you'll retire with money in your account" Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar, "Currently just 1% of CalPERS's PE portfolio is allocated to VC, with buyout and growth equity investments accounting for – 73% and 20% respectively."

You can't fix this with more volume tho. "From 2000 to 2020, Calpers venture performance was a dismal 0.49%."

You are now General Catalyst instead of being a founder. Would you act as a factor to finance SaaS growth for only a 5% return? 10%? 15%

Not diluting shareholder equity worked out well in this case:

Giggle. "For a sense of how much the goalposts have moved: the Microsoft founders owned almost four-fifths of their company at IPO." Microsoft was ~ financially bootstrapped. It didn't sell subscriptions before the IPO in 1986. Marketing costs were low.

Is GC essentially acting as a factor? "Factoring helps businesses get working capital by selling future cash flow supported by a contract or invoice" Borrow $100,000 with a factor rate of 1.5 ($100,000 x 1.5): $150,000 is the fixed amount you must repay to the factor.

You are the founder. The business has product market fit and is scaling. The financier (eg, GC) knows your CLV. What would you, as a founder, be willing to incur as a cost of money given your alternatives? No need to be precise in this hypothetical. Rough estimate acceptable.

"Customer value created by [CAC] " is a key variable. Assumptions must be made about factors like churn, COGS, ARPU and cost of money. What that company gets for this $$ is the ability to not repay a fixed amount for debt if the CLV doesn't hit the goal. Those $$ ain't free tho.

General Catalyst pre-funds a company’s S&M budget. GC is entitled only to the customer value created by that spend and capped at a fixed amount. After GC reaches that fixed amount, the remaining lifetime value of the customers is the company’s to keep.

Amy Hood: "Where does revenue show up It really comes from two places. There's the tools and services that customers will use to build AI apps and services. They'll run the Azure OpenAI APIs, they'll run on our Azure infrastructure."

"When you are prompting an LLM, you're programming it. You don't have to write a formula or learn the syntax or algebra. If you say prompting is just development, the learning curves are going to get better."

"There are currently a whopping 133 small satellite launch start-ups vying for venture capital according to Tracxn. They are not built equally." That seems like, well, a lot.

"The majority of the launch demand is induced demand: from SpaceX, for SpaceX. The remainder, highlighted in red in the graph below, shows more modest growth."

@mjmauboussin @kouroshshafi ATH

Here's Bill Gates joking about the Windows delay. He called the 286 chip "brain dead" at one point. People take videos like this and put them in the wrong context (eg, NFW was that dimly lit video taken in a hotel ballroom the Windows 95 release).

IBM considered Motorola 68000 for the first IBM PC. Bill Gates argued in favor of the 68000. IBM chose Intel X86 since the Motorola chip was too expensive and really ready. Windows needed the 386 chip to run well. That's why Excel was first released on a Mac. Compaq 386 was key!

Bill Gates: "Windows announced in 1983 and didn't ship for a couple of years after that. Windows 1.0 actually used a combination of Window capabilities that had tiling and overlapping."

@MarceloPLima I'm not aware that Enron ever build any fiber optic infrastructure. Enron may have leased some fiber, but I'm not even sure that happened at any scale, if at all. Enron's thesis that it would own a toll both on the Internet was as dumb as rocks.

Asparouhov added: “You’re not going to see Varda do anything other than pharmaceuticals for the next minimum of six, seven years.”

“The demonstration we were shown was impressive, and the pricing strategy very aggressive.  We knew that the Mac was going to have immense mass appeal.” FT, February 28, 1984 “We picked the Mac and they didn’t." Infoworld. August 7, 1989

August 1981: Steve Jobs meets with Bill Gates in Seattle to demonstrate a Mac for the first time.  January 1984: The article below appears the month the Mac was launched. Fall 1984: Mac sales were a disappointing 10K/month. September 16, 1985: Steve Jobs leaves Apple.

@LionnetPierre @TMFAssociates @thatbergness The MSRP is on the web site. Actual prices may vary based on volume and not just weight. Check with the launch provider for details.

@LionnetPierre @TMFAssociates @thatbergness Prices for satellite ride share are low enough that Spaceflight was just sold for an "undisclosed price." Separately companies are walking away from small launchers they developed and built to make medium and heavy launchers.