Welcome change. I studied engineering at a U.S. university, came here 10 years ago, and still did not make it through the lottery (while the ones gaming the system did).
Some thoughts as a strategy professional for a large tech co:
- Financial : DCFs, multiples, statements, esp what drives value of firms (Resource: Aswath Damodaran)
- Strategy: how firms create value (Resources: YC Startup School lectures esp Peter Theil’ lec on YouTube)
- Ops: YC lecture on metrics investors want (CAC, LTV, diff biz models like aaS, etc)
- most important would be to check out your co’s pitch decks, SEC filings (if public) to understand the core strategy, value prop, financial performance and most critical hypotheses
Yep, seems to be driven by 9.3B in purchases of property, plant and equipment in Q3 22 (up +116% from 4.3B in Q3 21). I think it's due to "investments in data centers, servers, and network infrastructure. An increase in AI capacity is driving substantially all of our capital expenditure growth in 2023."
Surprisingly applicable to modern problems, such as queuing within computer systems. I studied this for my industrial engineering degree and thought it was extremely elegant.
I'm a powerlifter, so I create a "macros outline" - x oz of rice, y oz of chicken breast, z grams of fiber to hit my nutrition and then fill it in with mood/cuisine.
There's a reason why there isn't a successful app out there, since this is 1) highly personalized and 2) very tedious (manually inputting ingredients, etc).
FB pushes you to Insta via its Reels preview videos right on top when you open the FB app.
Instagram Reels is more addicting - full screen videos that just show you more of what you watch most intently, doesn't care that you "liked" a page 5 years ago.
Reels is probably >90% recycled from TikTok, with the TikTok video waterwark still on it.
The original content that is there has nothing on TikTok, and the Reels recommendation algorithm is crap - feels like a bunch of if-then statements and you have to make a massive effort to get yourself out of having a particular category in your feed (constantly swipe away as fast as possible if a video of that category comes up; but watch a single video all the way through in that category and it becomes half of your feed)
I joined TikTok recently after watching Reels for a few months (I figured it's probably just as good, right and why have yet another app tracking me), and I was blown away by how much better TikTok content & algorithm is.
Part of it is the user base. TikTok has truly some cool content for every niche you could imagine, and by and large comments are positive and funny.
It's relatively easy to boost such numbers - just keep bugging people with a notification here or a sudden important event. And a user is not the same as a person.
I've noticed previously I've suddenly been spammed via email by Facebook at the end of the month, presumably to boost their MAU.
Much more meaningful would be a distribution of the number of minutes spent by individuals on the mobile app, and details of the click-through rate of adverts.
Summary statistics - if chosen properly - of both could avoid abuse.
I think at some point Wall St will be called out as having been very naive to pay attention to such stats.
The obvious Zuckerbergian next vertical to exploit when you've run out of people on the planet to addict is to funnel those DAUs toward a dating service to birth future demand.
