SOCIAL DYNAMICS
This month, we are taking a break from market data to bring you a highly depressing graph. The amount of time spent with friends had already declined prior to the pandemic and has fallen off a cliff in the post-COVID world. Friday night is the notable loser, with most people apparently treating it like just another weeknight.
The team at Gallant MacDonald is committed to doing our part to be outliers in this data set. Hopefully this can serve as a prompt for our readers to do the same!
TV’s Last Great Startup
The team at Acquired is known for its extremely deep dives into the history of some of the world’s best companies (Costco, Disney, etc.). They broke their usual mold this month and released an episode on the “business” of Seinfeld. And it is incredible.
Jerry brings Larry into this project with NBC. Larry did this and things like this during the one-year period where he was working at NBC. NBC hated this guy. To the extent he had any reputation, it was as somebody who could not function in any sort of corporate environment. And NBC wanted nothing to do with.
Anthropic Arrives
Anthropic is heading to the public markets in the coming weeks, and we finally got a full peek into the financials. Given that most people are sane and won’t have performed an in-depth review of the S-1, we thought a summary of potentially the biggest IPO in history would be helpful. In our opinion, the breakdown is straightforward—unprecedented growth (1000+%!) that needs to persist given the equally unprecedented, committed costs of compute.
The mismatch is built in: most of Anthropic’s revenue depends on customers’ use of Claude and is not tied to long-term contracts. Many of its biggest customers can cut back or stop spending at any time, while its compute bills are locked in for years. At the end of June, Anthropic had just $10.8bn in contracted future revenue, compared with hundreds of billions in compute commitments.
The Origin of Daylight Saving Time
Clocks have been topical the last few weeks. Our condolences to anyone who had meetings booked between Eastern and Western Canadians on November 2. We may or may not have fallen victim to some timing mishaps (Outlook’s fault!) as well.
At any rate, here is the supposed real reason we have been changing the clocks for all these years.
Despite popular perception, farmers actually hated Daylight Saving Time when it first came into practice. That was because it cut an hour of daylight in the morning, leaving them with an hour less to get goods to market…In reality, the extra hour of evening daylight was good for one thing: selling products.
K.C. Irving: Competing with Giants
This podcast is a condensed biography of one of Canada’s great entrepreneurs. There are many tidbits here on entrepreneurial spirit and the tenacity required to build a great and enduring business. There are also some truly excellent cheeky stories like when K.C. was negotiating with the railway on shipping rates:
KC offered them a fair deal and told them to take it or leave it. They left it, thinking he would come crawling back. Instead, he bought a coastal tanker and built his own wharf just 1 mile away from the railroad’s regional headquarters.
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