William
7.4K posts
@bill_fw
Seeking operational excellence and reading about capital allocation.
@lehrjulian Great read! I recently switched from bookmarking tweets to retweeting them with a short comment so that future me knows *why* I thought it noteworthy.
Know your value proposition: Geffen was a tireless promoter and supporter of his artists (often with cash or by letting them live at his place). He negotiated fiercely for them, like when he disentangled label commitments to make CSNY possible. He was the shark in their corner.
If you're interested in the $IAC universe ("Baby Barrys"), check out this piece by @mariodgabriele and follow @modestproposal1, @AndrewRangeley and @borrowed_ideas (follow them either way) thegeneralist.substack.com/p/the-barry-di…
@_miasierra If you haven't read "The Force," by David Dorsey, from 1995, I highly recommend it. He embedded with a Xerox sales team in Cleveland for a year, and the result is one of the best books on business I've ever read, with *very* late '80s/early '90s vibes. amazon.com/Force-David-Do…
@ebitdaddy90 Jay was brilliant. He’s in the same league as Buffett. Perhaps even better with acquisitions because of tax and financing structures (TBF: Buffett had too high a profile to do this). Even Jay’s smaller deals (sub-$20M EVs at purchase) turned into $1B windfalls.
At this U.S. visit to China dinner banquet, the most eye-catching figure in the prime center seat between Musk and Cook was Lansi Technology founder Zhou Qunfei—from a rural factory girl to China's richest woman, with absolutely no background to rely on, building everything from scratch through her own grit. She was born in a small village in Hunan Province. At age 5, her mother passed away, and her father became disabled and blind from a work injury, leaving the family in dire poverty with nothing to their name. At 16, unable to afford school fees, she was forced to drop out and head to Guangdong to work in a factory, grinding glass on the assembly line—working days away during the day and furiously self-studying at night, earning certifications in accounting, computer operations, and other skills. That's how she spent a few years, until she scraped together 20,000 yuan from her wages, rallied eight relatives including her brother, sister, sister-in-law, and brother-in-law, and started a small workshop in Shenzhen doing watch glass processing. She handled machine repairs and sales runs single-handedly, grinding away like that for another four years. By the 2000s, the mobile phone industry began booming on a massive scale. By a stroke of luck, her watch glass factory landed an order for TCL phone screens. She spotted the huge potential in the phone glass market and quickly founded Lansi Technology, specializing in the production, R&D, and sales of phone glass. At first, they only handled domestic phones and knockoffs, but everything changed when she went after a Motorola order—foreign companies had insanely strict quality standards. She bet nearly all her resources to meet Motorola's demands and snagged the V3 order, which sold over 100 million units worldwide, catapulting Lansi Technology straight to industry leadership. From there, she smoothly secured deals with Nokia, Samsung, and other foreign giants. The pivotal turning point hit again in 2007, when Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, revolutionizing phones toward full-glass touchscreens. Jobs' obsessive craftsmanship demands left the whole world scrambling for a supplier that could meet them. Zhou Qunfei keenly sensed this was another massive opportunity, so she led her team in a three-month joint push with Apple engineers, breaking through key processes to mass-produce the first-generation iPhone glass panels. That locked in a long-term Apple contract, and soon after, nearly all Apple gear—from iPads to MacBooks—went to Lansi Technology for production. It also propelled Lansi to become the world's top player in touch glass panels. That's why she got to sit next to Cook. But why was Musk right there beside her too? After dominating global glass panels, Lansi Technology branched into more diverse smart devices, including car cockpits and robots. In autos, they've already locked in deals with 30 carmakers like Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, and Li Auto for windows, center consoles, and more. In robotics, they handle joints, sensors, and other components—areas with deep overlap in Musk's businesses. A girl who dropped out at 15 with just a junior high diploma, emerging from rural Hunan to build an empire from nothing and become China's richest woman—forty years later, stepping into U.S.-China talks, seated between Musk and Cook. That's Zhou Qunfei's story. - @hihongjie
