Anand C

Apple Homepage October 5, 2011

Gotta hand it to the Somalis in Minnesota. They executed the HBS grad playbook of rolling up mom & pop daycares and managed to operate at ~99% EBITDA margins that they largely passed through as special dividends to themselves

Iconic quote from Peter Thiel on Vertical Integration, Elon, SpaceX, & Tesla. YC 2014. (Lecture introduced by Sam Altman) “In my mind, there probably are only two broad categories in the entire history, the last 250 years, where people have actually come up with new things & made money doing so. One is these sort of vertically integrated, complex monopolies, which people did build in the second industrial revolution at the end of the 19th & start of the 20th century. And so this was like Ford. It was the vertically integrated oil companies, like Standard Oil. And what these vertically integrated monopolies typically required was this a very complex coordination. You've got a lot of pieces to fit together in just the right way. When you assembled it, you had a tremendous advantage. This is actually done surprisingly little today. So I think this is a business form that when people can pull it off is very valuable. It's typically fairly capital intensive. We live in a culture where it's very hard to get people to buy into anything that's super complicated and takes very long to build. When I sort of think about my colleague Elon Musk from PayPal, success with Tesla and SpaceX, I think the key to these companies was the complex, vertically integrated monopoly structure they had. So if you sort of look at Tesla or SpaceX, you know, was there sort of a single breakthrough? I mean, they certainly innovated on a lot of dimensions. I don't think it was a single 10x breakthrough & battery storage or, you know, maybe working on some things, on rocketry, but it hadn't. Was no sort of single, massive breakthrough. But what was really impressive was integrating all these pieces together & and doing it in a way that was more vertically integrated than most of their competitors.”

Swarna Jayanti Park, Rohini, is ablaze with Kusum- hundreds of them bursting with red that feels alive, the sunlight turning the park into a riot of copper-red. You haven’t truly seen red until you’ve seen in them, where every step feels like stepping into a living painting.

Software was eaten by AI.