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Who in PE world decides when a certain kind of business is 'good' for PE firms to invest in? Whenever I talk to a PE person, I pitch types of businesses that fit their constraints and they seem genuinely interested. But they just continue to compete with other PE ppl for the same types of businesses (dentists' offices, car washes, etc.) What needs to happen beyond the financials to decide that like barbershops or jiu-jitsu gyms are the next big thing?
I'm not insulted they don't take my specific advice. What I'm shocked at is how fad prone the industry seems to be and how they seem to go around buying up similar businesses in waves I don't get the sense they're taking anyone's tips on businesses they personally know about
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The PE firm's LPs have opinions on market segments, which the PE firms have to respect. The biggest LPs are often pension funds and endowments, which decide things in committees and don't like to take chances.
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PE, and its "cousin" venture capital, very much follow herd dynamics. Many espouse contrarianism, but relatively few actually ascribe to it.
I think the traditional answer to "what needs to happen" is you start your own PE firm and eat their lunch
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What if it's not an accident, and the real strategy people are following is to buy exactly what everyone else is also buying, so that prices of comps rise collectively? IIUC boiler rooms / pump and dump schemes work like this?
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Couldn’t agree more with this piece When I pick stories for FreakTakes (whether it’s the early era MIT crew or Edison’s ‘boys’) I’m often trying to communicate just how small group an endeavor much of the science that drove this country was It still can be
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"When all you have is a Manhattan Project, everything looks like a bomb." @timhwang on the siren song of BIG SCIENCE macroscience.org/p/the-seductio
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Are there any areas of science where the best memorizers/finders of information have an extreme leg up in doing research? For example, I don't get the sense this means much in algorithms research, but it seems at least moderately important in certain areas of bio Thanks!
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Maybe just sell it based on outcomes Delian: Our state-of-the-art manufacturing process can carry out crystallization with negligible effects from microgravity on the mesoscopic scale Customer: oh wow! How do you manage that? Delian: That’s uh…that’s IP sorry.
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Other VC firms: We have a really great internal recruiting and sales team you can use to get you going Me: I've got a uh... space factory?
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Pic from reminded me of an excerpt from FreakTakes MIT series A big sticking point that prevented an MIT/Harvard merger in the 1920s is MIT wanted its students to be useful to industry above all else. coddled its students at the expense of their learning
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The excellent safety record of commercial aviation was only achieved incrementally, iteratively, over decades:
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