Twitter’s Ban, Hybrid Software Engineers, and the Historical Context of Decision Making

11/03/2019

I had to take a few weeks off from this newsletter for various reasons (to include the theft of my laptop…) but…I’m back!

Thank you! Thank you! You’re too kind!

Without further ado, back to business.

This would be my dream job. I never applied to JPMorgan back when I was looking for a job, but I should have. At the time I was only looking at tech companies and not well run businesses, but I should have been doing both. Luckily I ended up somewhere that’s both.

Mark my words, Google will release a smart watch to compete with the Apple watch soon. They did the same thing with iOS and the iPhone and they’ll do the same thing here.

I was this close to buying Twitter shares when the stock dropped by 27% after last week’s earnings miss (Twitter’s DAU are still going up and the book value was increasing, as were earnings). I was looking to buy because the Twitter management is making solid long term decisions that are only effecting short term profit. In the case of the bug that effected Q3 earnings, I felt it wasn’t as bad as the market had reacted and that the business was continuing to grow.

It will be interesting to see how the business grows next year during the 2020 presidential election without the political ad revenue. Twitter could still be a good buy at that time, but it remains to be seen what the business looks like without political advertisement. There is a lot of talk that political advertising is a fraction of revenue, but I don’t invest on talk.

Since I work for one of the companies bidding for this contract, I’ll leave this here without commentary in case you missed it.

Medium made a few changes to their partner program this week. Now writers are paid for reading time of Medium members rather than their claps. This new approach works in my favor, although I wasn’t counting on much revenue from Medium with this newsletter. I did receive 20 cents for this post due to the new change, so I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

Historical Context In Decision Making

Many people already make effort and understand the necessity to remove ego when making decisions. Lately, I’ve been considering not only the need to remove ego when making decisions, but also examining the historical context of the present and its relation to decision making. Similar to the idea of removing ego, considering historical contexts seems obvious theoretically, but in practice may be non-trivial at times.