Kevin Kelly, Arnold, and ASML | Colossus Weekly

Best of the Week

An NVIDIA Valuation, with the AI Boost (Article | 35 mins)

Nvidia’s soaring stock price amidst the AI boom has prompted Aswath Damodaran, the Dean of Valuation, to cut through the noise and estimate the company’s true worth.

Pair with: Our discussion with Jay Goldberg on chipmaking as a business and AMD’s competition with Nvidia and Intel.

The Concept That Explains Everything About Marketplaces (Article | 11 mins)

Transaction costs are a key determinant of how marketplaces evolve and monetize. This essay examines how and provides invaluable advice for aspiring marketplace builders.

Pair with: Our conversation with Bill Gurley about the business model behind marketplaces and user-generated content businesses.

Requiem for a Bank Loan (Article | 19 mins)

Patrick McKenzie’s latest piece on the regional banking crisis, covering how First Republic’s risky and unsecured personal line of credit products helped to precipitate their demise.

Pair with: Our breakdown of First Citizens Bank and the broader banking ecosystem.

 Invest Like the Best - Kevin Kelly

Guest: Kevin Kelly – co-founder of Wired and author of Excellent Advice for Living

Discover the importance of embracing your authentic self in this philosophical dialogue with renowned writer, futurist, and flaneur Kevin Kelly. This episode is packed with timeless lessons as he shares his unique perspective on life, technology, and the power of optimism.

Pair with: Kevin Kelly Tells Technology’s Epic Story (Video | 17 mins)

Embarking on a diverse and mind-stirring discussion, Kevin Kelly reflects on the significance of technology and its profound implications for our daily existence.

Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. Tired of running your own expert calls to get up to speed on a company? Tegus is the gold standard for research, delivering unmatched access to timely, qualitative insights through the largest and most differentiated expert call transcript database. With over 60,000 transcripts spanning 22,000 public and private companies, investors can accelerate their fundamental research process by discovering highly-differentiated and reliable insights that can’t be found anywhere else in the market. As a listener, drive your next investment thesis forward with Tegus for free at tegus.co/patrick.

Business Breakdowns - ASML

Guest: Tom Walsh - portfolio manager at Baillie Gifford

ASML is keeping Moore’s Law alive by enabling smaller, denser chips with billions of transistors. Their machines cost $150mn to buy and require four 747s to deliver. This is a company you need to know about.

Pair with: ASML’s Secret: An exclusive view from inside the global semiconductor giant (Video | 53 mins)

With this rare glimpse inside the walls of ASML, you’ll learn about the technological advancement underpinning ASML’s machines and the geopolitical tensions that characterize the semiconductor industry.

Business Breakdowns is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors, and provider of Canalyst. Tired of calculating fully-diluted shares outstanding? Access every publicly-reported datapoint and industry-specific KPI through their database of over 4,000 driveable global models handbuilt by a team of sector-focused analysts, 35+ industry comp sheets, and Excel add-ins that let you use their industry-leading data in your own spreadsheets. Tegus’ models automatically update each quarter, including hard-to-calculate KPIs like stock-based compensation and organic growth rates, empowering investors to bypass the friction of sourcing, building and updating models. As a listener, you can trial Canalyst by Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick.

Breakdowns Research

Read our research on ASML’s history, business model, and position in the semiconductor industry. Prepared by Jefferson Rumanyika ahead of Matt’s conversation with Tom.

Founders - Arnold Schwarzenegger

Episode 309: Arnold Schwarzenegger: Before He Was Successful

“Champions behave like champions before they are champions." David examines the mindset of a 26-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger through the eyes of his first love, to uncover how his unbelievable dedication, drive and charisma helped him conquer the world of films, business and politics.

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Making Media - Adam Ryan

Guest: Adam Ryan – Founder and CEO of Workweek

Learn about the outsized opportunity for B2B media, how flawed legacy business models have fuelled the growth of niche media, and why Workweek is on a mission to unleash the true potential of individual creators.

Pair with: Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism? (Podcast | 61 mins)

A thoughtful interview that breaks down the business model and economics behind Substack, and its disruptive effects on the wider media industry.

Making Media is brought to you by Scribe. Scribe is the magic behind Colossus transcripts. One of the best decisions we made at Colossus was transcribing all of our audio into a searchable transcript library. We had been using another provider up until the summer of 2022 but we were constantly having issues with accuracy if our audio was just the slightest bit impaired. Whether it's training sessions, internal Q&As, or for media purposes, the value of transcripts is huge. And we are not alone. Scribe is the transcription service that powers all of S&P Global - like CapIQ - and the client list includes our friends at Tegus. Go to joincolossus.com/scribe to unlock 150 minutes of free transcription and test their capabilities.

Web3 Breakdowns - Lubo Smid

Guest: Lubo Smid – co-founder and CEO of STRV

Lubo runs a successful design and engineering agency. Hear his lessons from delivering client projects in the Web3 space, the prospective downsides of blockchain gaming, and how NFT ticketing could become one of crypto’s best use cases. 

Pair with: The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis (Article | 4 mins)

A theory proclaiming that the key to Web 3 gaming innovation is embracing the unique benefits of native blockchain development.

Web3 Breakdowns is sponsored by OKX. OKX has over 730 spot trading pairs, 280 derivatives markets, and 1000 options markets. It processes 400,000 requests per second with 99.95% uptime. That’s why over 20 million day traders and institutional traders choose OKX when they want to trade. Discover the world’s most powerful crypto exchange today at okx.com.

Thanks to Erick Mokaya and Jefferson Rumanyika for their help and research this week.

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