The Razor’s Edge

We talk Netflix again this week. As you may recall, Akram published a lengthy report late last year on why Netflix was and would remain the king of streaming. The company reported earnings last week, and it was a bit of a royal flex, as they beat on subscriber numbers and boasted that they would not need to raise debt capital going forward. The stock popped 17% the next day. So what did the market miss going in, and what does that mean for Netflix and peers going forward? We break it down, answer a few listener questions, and try to figure out what Netflix’s story going forward will be.

• 2:30 minute mark - Quick quarter reaction

There's something about Twitter that leads to market knee-jerk reactions and, depending on how you look at it, opportunities for investors. After Twitter decided to permanently ban the sitting President from the platform, a lot of questions came up, and the market's immediate answer was to sell the stock off to the tune of a 6.5% drop.

Thus, we invited Rajiv Sud, a former Twitter employee and ad-tech veteran as well as a private investor and previous The Razor's Edge guest, on to break down the news. We also answer listener questions and call out the events Twitter shareholders should pay attention to (hint: think February, not January). It's a fun one, and while we don't have a contents list this week due to the short turnaround for recording, you can get a sense of the questions we answered here.

Happy new year! We kick 2021 off on the Razor's Edge by looking at a couple of the biggest trends from 2020 – COVID market distortions and SPACs. Our guest is George Arison, Co-CEO of Shift Technologies, an online used car seller. Used cars were a surprisingly hot market in 2020, in part spurring Shift to move up their calendar to go public by a year. They went public via a SPAC. So our conversation centers on the two topics; how wild was 2020 and how do you plan for the following year; and why go public with a SPAC and what was that like?

• 2:30 minute mark – Background on George and on Shift

Tesla entered the S&P 500 yesterday. What does that mean for the long-running bull vs. bear battle? A month after posting our interview with a bull - Rajiv Sud - we speak to Mark Spiegel, one of the longest-tenured, loudest, and most notorious members of TeslaQ, the short Tesla camp. The question, after a ruinous 1100% run over the past 14 months and a wild market in general, is whether there’s still electricity left in the bull case, or whether the bear case might finally bag its whale. Along with asking Mark about that and his portfolio management, we also touch on a few other topics ranging from micro-cap long ideas to inflation to Mark’s twitter presence, and I hope you’ll enjoy the conversation.

• 5:00 minute mark - The state of TSLAQ

Third time appears to be the charm. After seeing the football get pulled away from investors after Q1 and Q2 earnings, Slack and PagerDuty brought much cheer to shareholders, in the spirit of the holiday season. Slack has agreed to a deal with Salesforce.com and PagerDuty reported another solid quarter that finally woke the market up to its consistent growth opportunity.

We break down all that news. To do so, we bring on previous guests Jens Schumacher, CPO at Sajari, and Justen Stepka, co-founder of Enterprise Fund, both Atlassian alums, as well as Rich, a cloud CRM CEO.

• 3:00 minute mark - Initial reactions to the deal

Famed activist investor Daniel Loeb wrote a letter to Disney management arguing that the time to go all in on streaming is now. We've been following the streaming wars pretty closely, and we decided to break down the letter and then reconsider Disney and Netlfix's positions a year after Disney+'s launch, and 8 months into a pandemic that has accelerated the streaming game. The question came down to 'what battleground do these companies want to actually fight on'? 

• 2:15 minute mark – The need for capital and Disney’s studio business history |

Works cited or that are relevant:

• Daniel Loeb's letter to Disney - https://www.scribd.com/document/479149667/Third-Point-Letter-to-Disney-October-2020

We continue our conversation with Rajiv Sud, ad tech veteran and private and public markets investors. In this episode - essentially parts 2 and 3 of our conversation - we start with Slack and its challenges, as well as its surprising similarities to Twitter. We also quiz Rajiv on his time at AdMob and his outlook for the private tech sector, before concluding with a breakdown of his Tesla bull thesis.

• 3:00 minute mark – Slack’s position

Oops, it happened again. A company we follow closely on The Razor’s Edge reported earnings, met or beat expectations, and then sold off heavily along with a major market sell-off. Last time it was PagerDuty, this time it’s Twitter.

To work through the quarter and perhaps the angst and anxiety around it, we speak with Rajiv Sud. Rajiv is a Silicon Valley veteran, with time logged at Google, AdMob – which was bought out by Google while he was there, at TellApart, and then at Twitter after Twitter bought TellApart. He’s been out of Twitter for about two years but as a shareholder and a frequent tweeter, he still follows the company closely. We break down the company's ad server issues and why they may be in the past, the deliberate approach the company takes to product releases, and why Jack Dorsey is maybe fine as Twitter's CEO.

• 4:45 minute mark – Q3 Reaction

This week’s episode is a conversation with Jaime Lester. Jaime has been a professional investor for more than two decades, has a lot of experience with short selling, as evidenced from our conversation with him back on episode #3, on Invitae. We revisit Invitae during this conversation, but we're more focused on the overall macro picture. Whatever happens in the last 8 weeks of the year, it's been a wild ride, and it's worth taking a wider view to understand everything.

We cover SPACs, influencer investing, the manic element, the line between fraud and pivoting, and why this does not resemble the great financial crisis.

• 2:20 minute mark – high level take on what makes this market different