Thoughts on finance and product management
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been a watershed moment in everything. Time for some guesses and predictions on what it means for fintech. I’m phrasing these as questions as none of these changes are a given 🙂
Continue reading “Is coronavirus fintech’s watershed moment?”
So you are a product person turned GM. What advantages do you bring to the table? What’s your edge in this role? Some of my thoughts below
Great product folks have a structured thinking approach to solving problems. Thinking in systems is a critical skill. This mode of thinking is immensely valuable and has broad applications in other areas like sales and marketing. As described in the last post, sales and marketing have a very quick rhythm, everything resets at the quota end period. This dynamic has a natural pull towards tactics that yield quick outcomes. You can easily slide into just executing on tactics without a reliable and predictable system of making Continue reading “GM Chronicles Part 2: Does a product background give you an edge?”
In the last post, I highlighted that SMB’s are mostly a long tail business with a majority of the market at the smaller end of the spectrum. An insight that I did not appreciate going into this market is the amount of sensitivity to price. The statement that “There are three things that are most important in SMB, price, price and price” is 100% true! With most small businesses being small and not really in it to grow this price sensitivity makes a ton of sense. So if you are a startup in this space you come across an interesting squeeze. Continue reading “Lessons learned in SMB fintech”
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more Successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing ? Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive
As we saw the last post, LiveNation can be thought of a vertically integrated full-service live entertainment company. A comparable public competitor is the Madison Square Garden Company (MSG). They also describe themselves as the premier live entertainment company. Via their 10k Continue reading “Compete or Die – LiveNation Part Deux”
In the last post, I talked about getting into the habit of reading 10k’s. Time to dogfood my own advice :), for this post, I wanted to look at a completely new industry than the usual fodder. LiveNation is my first pick (NYSE:LYV). Latest 10K for 2018.
So let us begin! Continue reading “Mo Concerts Mo Money – A look at Live Nation (NYSE: LYV)”
I’ve been deeply interested in understanding what actually makes a platform business a platform¹ business ?— are there any patterns? How do platform businesses actually win? Is there something unique about them or is it all just branding? This is a particularly insightful question to ponder on as, if you talk to any company today , you are certain to hear “ we are a platform”:). Everybody wants to be a platform or at least positions themselves as one. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff?