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Invisible Companies

colossus.com

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31–40 of 68 posts

Re: Invisible Companies

#31

Post by grim_io »

skywal_l wrote: post #28
bensyverson wrote: post #27

> Economists aren’t naive, so they don’t really believe these things entirely. But they assume they are mostly correct over the medium to long term. Spoiler alert from the article: turns out economists are wrong. This will sound inflammatory, but has the field of Economics produced anything of value to society? It seems to be a social "science" based on incorrect generalizations about human psychology and studies tha…

Economy is at the stage where medecine was in the 18th century. It's more of an alchemy than a science.

Insert "always was" meme here.

Re: Invisible Companies

#32

Post by [deleted] »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #3

I have thought about this a lot over the years and tried to spot these companies - many of them are the type of business that Berkshire Hathaway would love to find. Some of them are a little more visible simply because they’ve scaled and developed a moat - logistics, particularly trucking in the UK, and international cargo shipping, stand out here for me. But also social care, floristry and grocery wholesaling, weird…

[deleted]

Re: Invisible Companies

#33

Post by tao_oat »

bensyverson wrote: post #27

> Economists aren’t naive, so they don’t really believe these things entirely. But they assume they are mostly correct over the medium to long term. Spoiler alert from the article: turns out economists are wrong. This will sound inflammatory, but has the field of Economics produced anything of value to society? It seems to be a social "science" based on incorrect generalizations about human psychology and studies tha…

Do you think there's any value in trying to understand how human societies work at scale?

Re: Invisible Companies

#34

Post by bensyverson »

tao_oat wrote: post #33
bensyverson wrote: post #27

> Economists aren’t naive, so they don’t really believe these things entirely. But they assume they are mostly correct over the medium to long term. Spoiler alert from the article: turns out economists are wrong. This will sound inflammatory, but has the field of Economics produced anything of value to society? It seems to be a social "science" based on incorrect generalizations about human psychology and studies tha…

Do you think there's any value in trying to understand how human societies work at scale?

I do. Do we think economists are actually generating this understanding? I'd be curious to know about policy changes which have been the result of non-obvious insights from the field of economics.

Re: Invisible Companies

#35

Post by tptacek »

jtrn wrote: post #17

Here is the entire article compressed from 21k characters to 176: It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring. Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that fr…

I cofounded a company that ultimately got rolled up (Matasano, into NCC Group US) and think this is not a really good summary of the article. Rollup strategy is interesting!

Re: Invisible Companies

#36

Post by tao_oat »

bensyverson wrote: post #34
tao_oat wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think there's any value in trying to understand how human societies work at scale?

I do. Do we think economists are actually generating this understanding? I'd be curious to know about policy changes which have been the result of non-obvious insights from the field of economics.

I think it's one of our better attempts to understand a very large complex system! I think it's inherently very hard to do. I do think you can critique a lot of things about the field and ideology, and so on, but I don't think that's an inherent problem of economics.

> non-obvious

I'd maybe question this a bit. I suspect that many things we consider obvious are only so because of the field of economics -- but that's admittedly only an initial hunch.

Re: Invisible Companies

#37

Post by browningstreet »

PaulHoule wrote: post #30
jyounker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oriental carpet stores are interesting businesses. I always wondered how they stayed open until I met someone whose family has been in the business for several generations. Individual sales are in the thousands, so they operate more like high-end jewelry stores than a "normal" business. One sale a day is minimum 250K/year. The store itself seems to be more of just a show room. There are other sales routes too. Sellin…

I had a phase when we bought several rugs at the price point you're talking about and also found some "subprime" sources of rugs that were authentic but not so go good and much more affordable. Then I had a house full of oriental rugs and haven't needed a new one ever since.

Kinda like.. pianos?

Re: Invisible Companies

#39

Post by ElProlactin »

dude741 wrote: post #23

Anyone know how to find these invisible companies? The article mentioned adjusting your search filters? What search device are they using?

I run an invisible company that provides search for invisible companies. I would tell you more about it, but then...

Re: Invisible Companies

#40

Post by jtrn »

jstummbillig wrote: post #20
jtrn wrote: post #17

Here is the entire article compressed from 21k characters to 176: It’s easier to get away with large margins and not spawn competitors if nobody scrutinizes you, and it’s easier not to get scrutinized if you are small or the domain is boring. Not a knock on the article. It’s nice to double-click on a concept and explore it with examples and from many angles. But for me, it would have been easier to start with that fr…

As always the writing could be denser, but that is very lossy compression. I enjoyed the full read!

Yes, I did too, and I actually thought about "lossy vs. lossless compression" when I wrote the comment. That's why I said that I was not trying to denigrate the article, but when I understood that this was the gist of the article, it clicked better. So it was bad framing to call it "compressed to." I should have said, "I found this summary to be a helpful framing to read before the main article."
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