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Founder Mode

paulgraham.com

771–772 of 772 posts

Re: Founder Mode

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not ignore the fact that you call GameStop a meme-stock. Please explain how it is a meme-stock in 2024 and what that even means? What's the definition? Like how is GameStop not a "real" stock or "real" company? It has 4 billion cash on hand (for 10B market cap company), no debt and is profitable. It had NONE of that before RC bought himself in. How is that a declining company? Or how does this fall under "not m…

The long short of it is that revenue keeps falling, they're barely making a profit, and at best, they're just inching toward a net positive. They've been losing money for the past 6 years, and this year they're looking to make a small profit. They have little debt, and lots of cash at hand, but seemingly no good core business model. If they can convert this, great - but they're not much more worth than the cash they…

1. They went from 400 million in losses to profitable.

2. Went from 0 cash + debt, to 4 billion cash and no debt.

Within 3 years.

So what do you expect from new CEO's and BoD who jump into a "dying brick & mortar" and turn it around like that? Like if the above is "nothing", "not good enough" and "declining", what does "good enough" look like to you?

IMO this is nothing short of a leadership miracle. The company would not have existed by now if it wasn't for Ryan Cohen. Who by the way has a salary of 0 USD. For the past 3 years.

Like why is he doing this for no salary? hmm?

Re: Founder Mode

#772
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate? Most things boil down to client side features like streaming the video with HLS or DASH, even if it's not live just to get the encoding benefits. DRM is its own thing. I think it's important to have the distinction between delivering video content and the in-app experience. I do think streaming VOD is way easier than live content.

You also need a CDN. NetFlix deploys boxes all over the place to cache the content. I agree there's nothing in there that's not understood from an engineering/technology perspective. It's not fusion or curing cancer. But scale and complexity compound simple engineering problems. There monitoring, there's billing, there's machine learning, there's software lifecycle, multitude of different devices types and networks,…

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