Now is the perfect time to start your new business.
+ The technology is ripe. The Internet. New AI software. The digitization of corporations is making for opportunities everywhere.
+ The customer are ready for new.
+ Investors are keen to to give you money. They have lots of it. And I mean lots.
Scott Galloway writes:
Post-crisis periods are among history’s most productive eras. London rebuilt after the Great Fire with grand new architecture, and Europe after the worst of its plagues underwent a commercial revolution. The Marshall Plan turned enemies into allies, fomenting peace and prosperity for over half a century. Leaders also emerge from crises. Ulysses S. Grant was a washed-up soldier without prospects until war broke out, but that war created the opportunity for Grant to save the Union and advance the cause of freedom. This is all to say: In the next 36 months, I believe our economy will birth a new generation of web 3.0 firms and leaders. Why? …
+ Unprecedented stimulus and savings resulting in a Nazaré-like wave of consumer spending.
+ A gestalt among consumers and enterprises to question the status quo, and be open to new products and services.
+ The emergence of new fields and the capital to disrupt traditional industries as immunities kick in and monopoles are broken up.
Read more Galloway here.
There are five reasons, according to my thinking, why owning your own business is the best:
+ You’re boss. You make the decisions. There’s nothing worse than being what the Japanese call “a company man.”
+ You pay yourself what you need.
+ When you sell, you get paid again. A double whammy.
+ There is plenty of money and plenty of talent around to help you.
+ If you fail, you have a badge of honor. One fellow told me he’d failed three times. But now he knew how to succeed. Please invest, he said. It was a brilliant pitch. (I didn’t. But I did like the pitch.)
I’ve spent the last few days eyeing new opportunities. I found enough to fill a book. I’ll write more in the next few days.
Meantime, I’ll gloss over a few.
+ Puppies. There are now more dogs than children in American households. PuppySpot says the prices for puppies in the U.S. rose by 36% after the pandemic began.
+ Plexiglass. Every shop, business, office needs the stuff. Don’t laugh. Someone is getting rich on plexiglass.
+ The states need money, so they’re legalizing pot and gambling.
+ By next year, there’ll be 40 different electric vehicles. Hence the boom in charging stations, etc.
+ Pandemic technology: Zoom, Teladoc, DocuSign and others are not going away.
The stock market — “very difficult at present”
Our stocks are not doing well for these reasons:
+ The component shortage, which is impacting companies like Apple, which needs components to make iPhones, watches, laptops, etc.
+ The “stock glut” — as Cramer called it last night. It’s IPOs, SPACs, secondary offerings and insider selling. It’s been huge, a record.
+ The very very high price of “hot stocks,” many of which sell for over 20 times sales (not earnings — sales). And many of which don’t have earnings and are losing more and more money as their sales go up and up. Put another way, their losses go up and up as their sales go and up. Some don’t have early path to profitability. That hasn’t been their mantra, till now.
+ The rise in interest rates.
All of these factors should be solved by year-end.
We are in a boom. Try buying anything today — from a high-end refrigerator to an emergency generator. Don’t even think about buying lumber. Or finding a carpenter.
The stimulus is pumping more money in.
Some of our favorites have now fallen sufficiently to a point they should be a great investment between now and December. Apple is down from from $144 to $120. That’s a nearly 20% drop.
“Bitcoin is the currency of crooks”
My friend’s company got hacked. He paid in bitcoin. His comment to me “Bitcoin is the currency of crooks.”
On Saturday, the New York Times did a piece:
Coinbase Users Say Crypto Start-Up Ignored Their Pleas for Help
As Coinbase prepares to be the first major cryptocurrency company to go public, it is struggling with basic customer service, users said.
Michael Pierre was sitting in his Brooklyn apartment last summer when he received a text on his iPhone from an unknown number, then immediately lost service. Worried his phone was being hacked, he quickly checked his most valued app: Coinbase, a cryptocurrency company where he had stored digital coins worth $100,000.
Mr. Pierre couldn’t log in. Panicked, he emailed Coinbase for help. The company later told him that an “attacker” had reset his password and drained his account. Mr. Pierre said he was shocked because he had expected Coinbase’s security to detect suspicious activity and stop the theft.
“I was thinking about retirement, family, having money for those rainy days,” he said. “And within a couple of minutes, it was all taken away from me.”
Mr. Pierre, 47, a lawyer and onetime Coinbase employee, began urging his former colleagues to investigate the episode and to compensate him for the missing cryptocurrencies, which would be worth more than $400,000 today. He received little assistance, he said. So in January, he sued Coinbase, accusing the company of negligent security measures and failing to protect his money.
His cautionary tale is one of dozens from Coinbase customers around the world who say that their accounts were plundered by attackers or that they were locked out of their life savings without warning or reason — and that the company failed to detect the issues and did little to help. As Coinbase prepares to go public in the next few weeks, cementing its status as one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency enterprises, its users’ experiences show how the company sometimes still struggles to address basic customer service complaints.
Reads the full article here.
The dumbest investment decision.
This is the container ship blocking the Suez Canal. It’s called the Ever Given. (They just freed it.)
This is the canal.
What do you notice about the northern section versus the southern section, where the Ever Given got stuck?
The northern section was expanded into parallel canals. The bottom section wasn’t.
Why? Because the military dictator of Egypt, a fellow called, Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi, decided it wasn’t worth the investment. Think of the idiotic gamble he made.
Think of the concept of Single Point of Failure. Would you never back up your company’s files? Would you never buy an emergency generator? Would you build an airplane without an auxiliary fuel tank?
You get the message. Stupid. Think about your single point of failure at your house. It’s probably that your emergency generator’s fuel tank is empty.
How young people have been getting vaccinated
+ Their doctor gives them a certificate of existing condition, e.g. migraines.
+ They sign up as an Uber-Eats delivery person.
Funny old person jokes
My favorite word these days in “What?”
Here’s my favorite cartoon:
As an old editor, this really appeals:
Spring is coming. Here are our first daffodil shoots. Flowers soon.
Send me your three favorite stocks to buy now. — Harry Newton
