Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should read Matt Levine, he covers all these questions in depth. The answer to your question is that the board can hold the meeting on Twitter and pass the issuance of new shares that way if they wish. The problem is shareholders suing for securities fraud. That the people who bought at the top are now shareholders. The company has a fiduciary duty to them. If they issue new shares and sell them, that lowers the…
Turns out the board doesn't even have to meet in this case. Levine wrote Jan 25: > Happily, GameStop does have an ATM offering going. It put it in place on Dec. 8, 2020, when the stock was at about $16.35. The way these things work is that GameStop disclosed that its bank could sell stock—up to $100 million worth—“from time to time” at GameStop’s request “consistent with its normal trading and sales practices”; it di…
GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
181–190 of 199 posts
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really: * CEO gets a golden parachute and finds a new job. A competent CEO will always find a job. A turn-around is risky, and a failed turn-around will have exposes and will ruin a career. Easier to stay-the-course. * Workforce is laid off, struggles for a few weeks, and usually finds new jobs. The layoff sucks, but turn-arounds involve equal layoffs (and indeed can be harder to find jobs after; my employer went…
If your goal is to keep the company going, you have to adapt to survive. Yes it's tricky, and you can simply jump off the bridge if you want, or you can actually try. Vultures might want to pick the bones, and many owners might not care, but some do. Of course if you think it's hard you're free not to bother.
What a concept.
The owners are the shareholders.
GameStop was started as a side gig by Riggio, who was also the founder of Barnes and Noble. He has bigger things to worry about, like his retirement. It's been run by professional executives for the most part.
DeMatteo is still around, but I think that's it for the founding team. If you can call a series of merges a founding.
Yeah, if I own a company, I'll sweat and bleed to make it successful. That's the #1 founder / startup advantage.
That's not true for publicly-traded companies. Those are an abstraction. If a CEO is making $35 mil and someone offers them $50 mil, guess where they're going?
A lot of startups don't realize that as a source of advantage, but it's a big one. It's a lot of where the agility comes from too. A professional CEO need to first worry about keeping their job, then about their next job, and finally, the organization. For a founder, for the most part, those are one and the same.
If you gave me a failing public business as an owner -- with no accountability, no board to please, no existing executive team to back stab me, and all the upside -- I'd do better than most CEOs in turning it around. That's not because I'm more qualified or competent, but because I'd have the freedom of being an owner. The original CEO, if properly incentived, would usually do a better job than I would, in turn.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say otherwise on their blog[1]: " Clearinghouses are SEC-registered organizations that act as the central depository for securities. They keep a record of the stocks owned through a brokerage. Clearing brokerages, like Robinhood Securities, are members of clearinghouses. " " The amount required by clearinghouses to cover the settlement period of some securities rose tremendously this week. How much? To put it in…
https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/whats-clearing-...
i have no idea why people think robinhood is a clearinghouse, that doesn’t make sense. they don’t want to do that! they want to do PFOF with execution or make settlement take 0 days so they can further take advantage of retail or whatever. being a clearinghouse sucks. no one likes you. banks don’t want to do your job.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#184I'm curious if the HFs that shorted Gamestop, are also profiting off of the wild swings by Redditors who have now lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They could easily swing-trade this stock all the way down, using massive buy/sell orders to drive the price. If Melvin Capital isn't bankrupt after all of this, there might just be A LOT of broke redditors who cashed in their lifesavings on this gamble.
The HFs that shorted Gamestop specifically? I'd guess not. But others? Most certainly yes there are institutional players in this one.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that Robinhood had to emergency-raise $3billion to be able to put up the collateral with their clearing houses should be enough indication that a lot of retail traders were engaged in these highly volatile stocks. See e.g. https://fortune.com/2021/02/02/robinhood-gamestop-restricted...
Robinhood uses its own, internal, clearinghouse.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#186Is this the first actual corporate news from GameStop itself during the frenzy of the last several weeks? I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in one of their boardrooms during the maelstrom, when they were a front page story for basically every news site on the planet.
https://news.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-release-details...
I share your sentiments.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear ya. I have a bit of nostalgia for the brand, myself, though did not participate in any of the stock situation. It's a tough spot. (1) 3D Printing -- really good idea; I'm rehabbing my 3D printer for my kids, this evening, so they can print Among Us characters. If I didn't have a 3D printer, I might consider that sort of option, but I'd probably go online first. And that's kind of the problem they need to find…
For 3D printing, see this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26018507 I really like the idea of a "Teen Dance Club". There is honestly no place for young people to hang out. We used to go to the skating rink or walk around the local shopping mall, but the rinks are almost all gone and malls have made being a teenager illegal.
This club did not serve alcohol, but from personal experience, alcohol/weed were not hard to come by. People would throw shots of hard liquor into the $5.00 cokes, there were regular "fights" usually originating from some barely-past-puberty-knob deciding some other kid was looking in the general direction of the female to which said knob was attracted.
This is a problem at most businesses catering to teenagers, unfortunately. But it's more of a problem at certain kinds of businesses. We have three skating rinks within about 20 miles (all were closed and not sure all survived). One of them was around when I was a kid and there were occasional problems, then, but really nothing compared to what I saw at one of the two "Teen Clubs" I visited. I think part of it is that rinks (roller/ice) cater to families and teenagers. I have 4 kids. If we're out and some teenager is misbehaving, the words "knock it off" have been known to fly out of my mouth with immediate effect. It doesn't matter that there's a large number of unsupervised teenagers, the number of parents -- especially ones that aren't uncomfortable stepping into things -- offsets the grief the "bad teens" can create for everyone else.
I hear ya, though. We used to hang out at malls, rinks, hell we had a whole abandoned stadium that we could roller blade on for $5 on the weekends[0]. Now the few malls that remain are outdoors, which is awesome when it's 16 outside... it's as if they're trying to get me to buy everything online. We have a laser-tag place that feeds you and let you play unlimited from 8:00-midnight for $20[1] and a few others, but they're all closed for the moment. It is awful for kids right now.
[0] The Pontiac SilverDome actually rented out skates/inlines and let you roller blade around the interior walkway. Even when it was busy it was hard to tell because of the wide walkways designed to serve depressed Lion's fans.
[1] Oddly it was owned by a local (Christian) cult run by a chiropractor; I took my kids there nearly every weekend of the winter for two years and everyone who patronized the place, teenagers, kids and adults, all enjoying themselves and never an issue. The only hint about the religion of the owners was that they played Christian Pop/Rock over the speakers -- makes me wonder if blasting Jesus music calms teenagers? :)
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought was to partner with game companies and get access to the users avatar(s) [Halo, CoD, Cyberpunk 2077, PubG, TF2, etc.] This way you already have access to the 3D model and can just print them all day long. Even better, hook into the console's "store" and make it an option to buy online. Then when they come into the store to pick up their 3D printed key-chain, bobble head, belt-buckle, doo-dad you can upsell…
To be fair, neither do I, but that's not the biggest problem I see. If it took 15 seconds, or even five minutes, to 3d-print a model like that on a desktop machine, then sure, there might be something here. But the Stratasys J750 production printer that Shapeways uses for multicolor prints [0] requires, per its user manual [1], "between several hours to several days" to complete a print, depending on size. It also we…
You can only slightly "buy your way out of the speed problem", which is as much dependent on the material as it is the capabilities of the machine. An 18 hour print for a small item is not unusual at all, for me, but I'm on a pretty simple printer.
A stratasys-style machine wouldn't make sense for this application. I think "high-end desktop quality" FDM would suffice for accessories/GameStop (with, perhaps, an option to get items printed in aluminum/other exotic materials shipped -- partner with someone), so the aim would be to find a reliable, enclosed (with appropriate filtration[0]), FDM (or similar price/quality), pick up 3-5 of them per store -- different sizes -- and spend a mint building software for your customers to use to interface with the printers[1] and automate the hell out of the ugly parts of the printing process (print-bed surface prep/part removal, maintenance and cleaning). And make absolutely sure the model has every convenience feature (like bed leveling, temperature controlled build chamber)
I'd probably limit material types to one (production) and one (support, when necessary). Optimize all of the hardware for the printers to the specific characteristics of that material and choose a material that prints easily/quickly -- PLA is a reasonable choice, prints pretty quickly but is brittle/fails over time and has a low melting point, ABS has several toxicity concerns and is finicky as hell to print with, but it's cheap and when it prints "right", it's durable.
It sounds crazy to do something like this with desktop 3D printers, but it makes the most sense. $1000 will get you one hell of a box with the ability to print in multiple colors and with more than one hot-end. It's probably, as you mention, not quite there yet -- I know from personal experience, messing around with the slicer software can take some time. There'd be a lot of software to be written and probably some additional hardware to design to fit the purposes of the stores printing needs. But, I guess you'd give the staff something to do while waiting for customers to not come in and buy games. /s :)
While they're at it, throw in a large CNC/laser cutter, re-tool to sell dev boards/robotics equipment, replace "Game" with "Hacker" and open up several hundred hacker-spaces around the country. Perhaps that would have worked better for Radio Shack. But I'm only half-joking -- every time I walk into small-time game/hobby/computer shops I find that the (often young) staff there are makers and would fit right in with a little training.
[0] This, too, depends on the material. And you might need to call in the lawyers/etc to figure out how things are going to have to be designed to avoid a future class-action from your employees/customers due to exposure to fumes. ABS is known to be problematic; it's also cheap and has many other desirable properties.
[1] The good news is that there is a ton of open-source pieces to start with.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's still a way with video game streaming.
So they are going to compete with Stadia? Google Stadia? Actually Stadia will be dead in a year, judging by what has happened with it. Still, what does gamestop have in terms of software? A webdev team? Creating a games streaming platform is an enormous project.
Re: GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the fact that lawmakers had zero reason to crack down on it. Only the wise and specially educated could comprehend how any of the market works. The poors are incapable of understanding charts and positions because it's so difficult. Only us in the ivory tower can keep the market stable and understand what companies actually deserve investment. Part 2, again, you've never been on WSB for even 1 minute. At e…
A lot of people want GameStop to succeed and join the ranks of Netflix and Amazon. Retail investors that bought a few shares now have a tremendous amount of goodwill and loyalty towards the company.
And is 'loyalty towards a company' for having few shares a good thing? loyalty towards what ends? towards massive financial damage?