Drivers of Value, Masterclass from Bezos, and more!

Hi everyone!

I’ve finally concluded the revamp of my blog after three months worth of work. Couldn’t have done it without the help of Tapan from tapandesai.com and the talented developers from Upwork.

WARNING. Today’s article is slightly technical. It is about what affects subscription-based business valuations and what are the levers these businesses can pull to create shareholder value. These are my notes from Michael Mauboussin’s latest paper: The Economics of Customer Business.

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I. The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox

If you’re operating at scale, the cost of the cloud can at least double your infrastructure bill. Cloud services such as AWS enabled many companies to have a digital infrastructure without a huge outlay.

But once these companies hit scale, it might make sense for them to adopt a mixture of an on-premise and cloud strategy to save on cost. But moving off the cloud is not an easy feat, an extremely strong infrastructure team is needed for this herculean task.

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II. A Masterclass from Jeff Bezos

This article does a great job distilling the best of Jeff Bezos’s writing! Here are my favorites:

• Missionary or Mercenary?

• The Amazon Hiring Criteria

• Corporate Culture

• The Amazon Decision-Making Mechanism

• Regret Minimization Framework

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III. How to Read Better

It’s not the number of books you read, nor is it about how fast you read.

Read good, timeless books!

Seek out timeless information.

And ultimately, retention is key. This article by Farnam Street shows a great way to read and retain!

P.S., If you have any great book recommendations, on any topics, let me know by replying directly to this email.