Ha! Yes sure, but it does make sense that they’d keep something like this to themselves.
Creating massive amounts of high quality content efficiently, on a global scale, with seamless global distribution is an incredible competitive advantage.
I don’t see why they would provide it to anyone outside of their ecosystem.
It’ll be interesting to see if they translate this to games as well.
They've been pretty great about pushing for open standards. In the last article their argument to provide these tools for free was along the lines of "A rising tide lifts all boats".
To add to this, while this approach may work for long tail, transactional sales with low ACVs, and work very well, it will not work for larger strategic/enterprise deals.
Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
As a career proposal specialist, I’m in complete agreement with you. Large deals take significant pursuit and documentation…at the Fortune level enterprise or for regional / state-level agreements in the US, it’s a highly competitive process. I’ve seen this first hand in SaaS sales for municipal clients and it’s simply a cost of doing business for certain markets. AI can’t be trusted with proposal responses that may be catastrophic in the contract phase.
Relationship may be secondary in a large SaaS company (you may see new key account once a year or two), but 6 figures mean paying by invoice, custom discounts and there will be inevitably some KYC process. CEO or CCO can do it and in boutique business they do it, but you probably cannot have lots of customers AND such deals at the same time.
“ Federal workers at the Social Security Administration (SSA) learned Wednesday that a plan was in motion to cut 50% of staff. Tuesday evening an anonymous comment on a well-known industry blog caught the attention of many workers already on high alert about their jobs. The comment said that on a 3pm call, Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek told SSA leadership that, “he wanted a plan to cut 50% of ALL staff, including frontline staff, to him by tomorrow afternoon.”
By early Wednesday afternoon, The American Prospect confirmed the rumor. Dudek, the Elon Musk loyalist I wrote about last week who went from administrative leave to leading the agency after helping the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), planned to cut the workforce in half. The move could affect tens of thousands of employees across the country, and far more people who rely on the agency for monthly checks that keep them afloat.
"Can say unequivocally that such deep cuts to SSA, which is already at historically low staffing, will cause significant to extreme degradation of services,” an SSA employee texted me Wednesday afternoon, “very likely including checks missed and individuals dying before their claims can be processed.” ”
Seems pretty grim. Do all these cuts aim towards essentially moving the work that still needs to be done to the private sector? Or is there something else I’ve missed that will help to keep the work going?
In short, tesla is not viewed as favorably as other car companies. And in the end, what they offer isn’t much differentiated from competitors that offer similar products.
One other differentiation that Vanguard has is that it is owned by the fund holders
“Vanguard set out in 1975 under a radical ownership structure. Our company is owned by its funds, which in turn are owned by Vanguard’s fund shareholders. We focus on meeting the investment needs of our clients.”
So in short, vanguard is customer-owned, where fidelity is owned by mostly the founding family (the Johnson’s).
Even so, I think the incentives are still for the Vanguard management to make as little profit as possible so that they can compete and have more funds under management. Controlling more billions of dollars of stock shares is kind of its own reward and brings many opportunities for enrichment, and if they don't have to worry about making money for shareholders, they can pretty much always engineer the lowest fees.
Yes, in theory the fund-owned structure should mean they can charge lower fees than profit driven competitors. However, if competitors are doing things like zero fee funds as loss leaders, or have a banking side to diffuse costs, then it gets less clear.
Even if you don't touch a dime of it, "had $X million in funds under management" is good for your next job. In business better to be the CEO of an ailing billion dollar business and drive it into the ground than actually do a good job managing a firm 1/10th the size.
Starting end of Nov 2024, Vanguard is actually beginning to roll out proxy voting capabilities to fund holders (in the US). This looks to be the beginning of deeper proxy voting capabilities, but not much information out there yet.
Would you rather be a dairy cow on a farm owned collectively by the dairy cows, or owned by one billionaire family? Is it that hard to see how that's immediately a huge positive even if you can't identify individual instances of the billionaire abusing their position?
Having seen companies go bust and then the employees discovered their pension was invested in now worthless company stock I oppose all schemes to get people to invest in their own company without having significant control over the direction. (I didn't directly see this - it was before I was born but I meet a relative who worked there for 20 years) Pension laws now do not allow pensions to invest in company stock like that. Everyone I know who has worked for an employee owned company talks about how much $$$ they have in the company now - none have any other retirement plan and I can't help but think how bad they would be hurt if things went wrong.
If you are not Cxx level at a company or at least in a high role with a reasonable shot of getting to a Cxx position in the near future don't put your money in the company you work for. Diversity is important in investing and the company you work for is the least diverse of all investment options since you could lose both your savings and your paycheck at the same time.
Agreed. If you feel that your company is a good forward-looking investment for whatever reason (appreciation/dividends), it doesn't hurt to keep some holdings--from RSUs or otherwise. Though with transaction costs what they are somewhat per this article/discussion, the right question should probably be "If I had the money in cash, would I buy these shares." Employee stock purchase makes things a bit more complicated depending on the exact terms. Post dot-bomb I got a lot more conservative in terms of holding company stock from RSU/ESPP after a decade with a couple of private firms which doubtless cost me some money but I think I took a reasonable approach overall.
Bad analogy. There are many dimensions in which my experience as a dairy cow may be affected by ownership.
In the case of an investment fund, there's really just customer service and rate of return. If I have a good experience in those dimensions, why should I be concerned with ownership structure?
This is academic. I have equal control over both, which is to say none whatsoever. Capacity to influence a company falls to the following (in order)
1. Executives
2. Large shareholders (usually institutional and rarely individuals)
3. Customers
4. Employee unions (if present)
The tech industry is an anomaly where 1 and 2 largely overlap, but this is not true in most industries. Unless you are super rich, you will never be able to have more influence over a large company than you do in the role of a pissed off customer ready to take his money elsewhere.
Looks really cool with a lot of information. Can someone who knows more than I detail out what the practical use cases of something like this would be?
