ANALYZE AI

“Revenue did grow 45 percent year over year. Items sold were up over 40 percent too, and the credit portfolio actually almost doubled. That means Melly has now extended its record for the longest ever streak of quarters with over 30 percent year over year revenue growth to 28 consecutive quarters. At Melly's size, that's an insane number, and Melly is actually the only company ever to achieve that.”

“The stock still reacted negatively because Melly's margins were down. It's mostly because they invested heavily in the credit card portfolio. They lowered free shipping thresholds in Brazil, and also they scaled its cross border and especially the first party businesses. Combined management said that those investments cost five to six percentage point headwind for operating margins.”

“To me, investing is mainly about understanding businesses and to some extent, how actually the world around me works. So the great thing at TIP or working for TIP is that you can really just let your curiosity guide you. And of course, that mostly means businesses. But honestly, it's so much more than that. I've learned so much about building a business in the last year that it has just been an amazing journey.”

“On today's episode, I'm joined by Daniel Mahncke to discuss the companies we find most interesting in today's market. We cover Mercado Libre's long-term growth potential, Amazon's expanding earnings power driven by AI and robotics, and how AI could impact Constellation Software and other related companies.”

“We wrap up the discussion by touching on a company that AI is very unlikely to disrupt, and that is Hermès. Daniel's thoughts on Hermès after the recent 40% pullback in the stock highlight why this specific luxury brand remains a durable investment despite market volatility and broader technological shifts.”

“Revenue did grow 45 percent year over year. Items sold were up over 40 percent too, and the credit portfolio actually almost doubled. That means Melly has now extended its record for the longest ever streak of quarters with over 30 percent year over year revenue growth to 28 consecutive quarters. At Melly's size, that's an insane number, and Melly is actually the only company ever to achieve that.”

“The stock still reacted negatively because Melly's margins were down. It's mostly because they invested heavily in the credit card portfolio. They lowered free shipping thresholds in Brazil, and also they scaled its cross border and especially the first party businesses. Combined management said that those investments cost five to six percentage point headwind for operating margins.”

“To me, investing is mainly about understanding businesses and to some extent, how actually the world around me works. So the great thing at TIP or working for TIP is that you can really just let your curiosity guide you. And of course, that mostly means businesses. But honestly, it's so much more than that. I've learned so much about building a business in the last year that it has just been an amazing journey.”

“On today's episode, I'm joined by Daniel Mahncke to discuss the companies we find most interesting in today's market. We cover Mercado Libre's long-term growth potential, Amazon's expanding earnings power driven by AI and robotics, and how AI could impact Constellation Software and other related companies.”

“We wrap up the discussion by touching on a company that AI is very unlikely to disrupt, and that is Hermès. Daniel's thoughts on Hermès after the recent 40% pullback in the stock highlight why this specific luxury brand remains a durable investment despite market volatility and broader technological shifts.”

“The bottom line is that we end up significantly setting ourselves up for better returns or results when we use data science. There's so much room for analysis, data analysis, for comparisons of various cities and how they're doing in terms of job growth, population growth, income growth, home price growth. You don't always get things right, but we end up significantly setting ourselves up for better returns beyond what typical Excel spreadsheet analysis can do.”

“Each employee in our company is required to be highly competent in the use of AI. There is a minimum of one AI training per week that 100 percent of employees must attend, and you have to provide proof that you use AI for one hour a day. We have currently over 400 documented helpers or tools that we have built for AI, and it allows us to do things that human beings simply cannot do by themselves.”

“What we found was there was strong correlation between job growth, income growth, home price growth, and crime reduction, and population growth. These five areas seem highly correlated to real estate profits. All of them make sense initially, but the devil is in the details, because the question is which one's better and how much better? How do you quantify something like this?”

“We need more than 1% annualized population growth for rents to increase aggressively. 3% job growth in a certain market can lead to very aggressive rent growths; 4% is phenomenal and 5% is rarely achieved, but it's absolutely incredible because if a city has 5% job growth, everyone at that point is employed and everyone is very aggressively looking to rent or buy.”

“I became obsessed in 2008 and 2009 with the idea of ranking cities for real estate investments. How about bringing that level of clarity, that level of objectivity to ranking cities for real estate, which cities are likely to be more profitable? You can never say it with any level of certainty, but you can certainly improve your chances pretty substantially of making money if you are data driven.”

“OpenAI has just acquired the popular tech show TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network. This is OpenAI's first big move into owning a media company, but this isn't a classic media company, right? They're not buying the New York Times, or, you know, the Wall Street Journal or something. They're buying kind of one of these up-and-coming tech shows that has only been around for 18 months.”

“They said that their team is still going to have quote, run their program, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions. So even if OpenAI owns them, they're allowed to say whatever they want. I was actually reading some tweets by the founders, and they were like, look, sometimes we've been critical of OpenAI, and we hope to still be critical of them and other people in the future.”

“OpenAI right now is planning to kind of go beyond just owning the show. They're also going to tap the founders, what they said, they're, quote, amazing comms and marketing instincts. So I think beyond just like, hey, we want to get like this kind of YouTube channel that does AI news, they want to grab those founders and they want to get their communications and their communications instincts.”

“I think once all this is finalized, TBPN is going to sit under OpenAI's strategy team. They're going to report to Leon, who's a long time political strategist. He's often described as a practitioner of the quote, political dark arts. Lehman also played a big role in shaping a lot of the different political narratives inside of Washington, including the crypto industry SuperPAC, FairShake.”

“She basically pointed out that TBPN's style is really uniquely suited for a company like OpenAI, where quote, the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply. So I think like if you kind of read between the lines there, basically they're saying traditional PR isn't enough for OpenAI. It's one of these really consequential technologies shaping what's happening.”

“Irony is what separates serious philosophy from the rest.”

“Irony is what separates serious philosophy from the rest.”