Afternoon Delight: Love Abbey and Malibu, Thread the Needle

Sweet Music Man—Facebook has a double-mock-mission team building the goods to let users find and book services, a move that will position the company as a beast competitor to gig economy marketplaces like TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Angie’s List, Craigslist and is tip of the iceberg. Zuckerberg wants 10% right off the top. Dental appts through FB and 10% right off the top. That’s next. 

Here is what I see—40-plus states suing him? Small potatoes compared to  Facebook’s innovation pipeline in adjacent and incremental revenue opportunities such as commerce, payments, virtual reality, and cryptocurrency will enable it to have durable growth (>20%) for next 10 years. Forget the moonshot—do you have innovation pipeline. It’s not just for strategy—sells real well in exit.  

Daily Deal—By the way, over at NY Times building, FB has 30 employees working “in the building” on a “copublishing project” and guess who is footing the bill. So he has them bought off and explains why they are not grinding him daily like they did Travis K at Uber. Smart.

I called my “financial advisor” Char first thing this morning and said I wanted 20% of my portfolio in FB. She said no but I am telling you to load up. His e-commerce ambitions are larger than his margins where he makes money like a music man—out of thin air and all the gold in California. 

Side Deal. If we make it through December—I want to say this just right—running the infection rate numbers and hospital capacity utilization, we are going to thread the needle in staying afloat. With a big disclaimer.¹  

Medical word is vaccinations will not impact numbers. Mathematically correct but they do help—it gives the front line momentum to juggle the load between hospitals. Heroes. Why aren’t we paying $10,000 per day? Combat pay. 

Got my negative drive-thru COVID test this morning since I have been in Denver, Seattle Portland, Santa Barbara, and LA. I can tell you who is best handling the mask mandate: Venice Beach with surfer dudes,  ole hippies, and local businesses filed an injunction against their governor for the ban on outdoor dining and according to mask rules would need on to surf. 

We all knew California was going to be la-di-da on masks but can someone tell me what happened to Denver and Frontier: mask Nazis.

By the way if you go to LA, stay with Abbey at Venice Suites, but only in one room—top floor, right-hand corner, oceanfront. When the wind blows, the pot smoke clears, and you can see mountains and all the way to Malibu. Country boy not blue. 

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Entries/Exits—Bat Out of Hell. Just a note to let you know Meat Loaf’s going rate to sing one hour at private birthday party is 100 grand or 80 grand to sing one song. Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad. Glad to see he adopted Ugo Bitussi pricing model but did I miss some recent hits? Response from Michael²—still sells 200,000 albums per year and 43M worldwide to date. 

IPO Glow—IPO for 2021 backed up like railcars in a hump yard. Big one—Robinhood will be a whale, the free stock is fine but what we need to see is how a modern company communicates.

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