Charlie Munger: “It’s hard for us not to love brands, since we were lucky enough to buy See’s candy for $20 million as our first acquisition. We found out fairly quickly that we could raise the price every year 10%, and nobody cared. We didn’t make the volumes go up or anything like that. Just made the profits go up. We’ve been raising the price by 10% a year for all these 40 years or so. It’s been a very satisfactory company. It didn’t require any new capital. That’s what was good about it: very little new capital. It had two big kitchens and a bunch of rental stores when we bought it, and now it’s got two big kitchens and a bunch of rental stores.” WSJ: “I like stock picking because it kind of reminds me of hunting and fishing. Any day you can have a new thing that might be interesting…. But I think fewer and fewer people are really needed in stock picking. Mostly it’s charlatanism to charge 3 percentage points per year or something like that to manage somebody else’s money. Most people probably shouldn’t do anything other than have index funds…. That is a perfectly rational thing to do for somebody who just doesn’t want to think much about it and has no reason to think he has any advantage as a stock picker. Why should he try and pick his own stocks? He doesn’t design his own electric motors and his egg beater. ”
NYTimes: “WhatsApp has become increasingly crucial to Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and other apps. More than half of Americans ages 18 to 35 who own a cellphone have installed WhatsApp, according to the company’s studies, making it one of Meta’s fastest-growing services in its most mature market. Ads on Facebook and Instagram that push users to WhatsApp and its sister messaging service, Messenger, are also growing so rapidly that they may reach $10 billion in revenue this year, the company recently said. “If you’re envisioning what will be the private social platform of the future, starting from scratch, I think it would basically look like WhatsApp,” Mr. Zuckerberg, 39, said. WhatsApp’s momentum is a reminder that Meta remains at heart a business powered by its family of social apps.”
WSJ: “The gap between CEO and CMO isn’t new, but it has widened in recent years as more C-suite leaders, with scant to no experience in marketing, reach out to the department hoping to find growth drivers in a very mixed economy, said Robert Tas, a partner at McKinsey and a co-author of the report. Only 10% of CEOs at Fortune 250 companies have ever worked in marketing, he noted. CEOs today are expected “to understand the impact of things like content and TikTok and data-driven marketing,” said Tas. In the past, they were “used to seeing television commercials in boardrooms.” In some ways, marketers have undercut themselves by adopting esoteric terminology and data points that mean little or nothing to other C-suite executives, said Nicholas Caffentzis, senior fellow and adjunct professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.” More from McKinsey: “CEOs who place marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have greater than 5 percent annual growth compared with their peers.”
FT: “Christian Ward, the chief data officer of Yext, the digital experience platform, says the fact that generative AI can understand human language has helped. He says that when internet search evolved, users learnt to “speak keywords . . . bending their behaviour to computers”. With generative AI people no longer have to be tech-savvy despite its advanced technology. AI is “human-savvy” and allows us to communicate with it naturally, making it more accessible. “It used to be that computer-savvy humans had an advantage,” Ward says. “Now that computers are human-savvy, that advantage is being democratised. That is absolutely one of the biggest breakthroughs we have seen in technology in a very long time.””
WSJ: “A recent study looking at sleep and longevity found that sleep “regularity”—going to bed and waking up at consistent times with few mid-slumber interruptions—matters more than how long you sleep. Sleeping six hours every night on a consistent schedule was associated with a lower risk of early death than sleeping eight hours with very irregular habits. The study adds to a growing understanding of the links between sleep and longevity. Research in recent years has shown not only how important sleep is for health and lifespan, but also that the duration of sleep isn’t the only thing that matters. “We’ve been missing maybe half of the story,” says Matt Walker, a neuroscientist and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved with the recent study. “Not just how much you sleep but the regularity with which you sleep has now come onto the map and exploded as perhaps the more important thing.””
