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Invisible Companies

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Re: Invisible Companies

#41

Post by a34729t »

jyounker wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that all those Persian carpet stores on University Avenue in Palo Alto were a way to get immigrants jobs in the US. But no. Turns out the carpet store guy had been renting upstairs office space to startups in exchange for an equity stake. That worked out very, very well for him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/165_University_Avenue

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…

Just buy them direct in Kabul, and get the guy to age it for you by driving his truck over it until you have the desired "weathering".

Re: Invisible Companies

#42

Post by PaulHoule »

browningstreet wrote: post #37
PaulHoule wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Guitars don't seem to be like that. Like sometimes my son is talking with my son about his latest guitar with my wife and that guitar is newer than the guitar that my wife thinks is his latest guitar. If he hasn't bought a new guitar he just made a new one.

Re: Invisible Companies

#43

Post by blfr »

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?

The value is mostly in succeeding and communicating the mechanism. There's very little value in merely trying to understand.

But I think economists did pretty well: supply and demand, marginalism, opportunity cost, Coase theorem... Not physics-level well but well.

Re: Invisible Companies

#44

Post by dude741 »

ElProlactin wrote: post #39
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...

Yes, I've heard of your search engine : Alta-No-Vista.

Re: Invisible Companies

#46

Post by alexpotato »

There is a bit of a trap for smart people with high agency where they assume "well, someone else will just go do ". They assume this b/c they probably have multiple examples in their own life of being the only person to do when no one else was.

That being said, if I've learned anything during 20 years in various industries ranging from publishing to hedge funds:

1. People have very different brains

e.g. quants can't do sales and vice versa.

2. People don't have infinite time and money

Even billionaires have items on their "want to do" list that don't get done b/c it's either too complex, would require too many people, too much time etc

3. Some people are great at systems building and other are terrible

This could really be downstream of item 1 but it's worth pointing out that building a system of people and processes is it's own specific skill. If you live in an organization where specialization is rewarded, you'll find that there are fewer and fewer people who have this skill.

4. People underestimate what it takes to do

The classic case is the HN "Oh you want to start a software consulting company b/c you like programming? That's like saying you want to start a pizza parlor b/c you like making pizza. Making the pizza is only 10% of the job."

Re: Invisible Companies

#47

Post by pixl97 »

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 mean, economics is a study in self modifying systems that change based upon what you learn about them. Much like chaos theory wasn't something we innately understand, the same is true for economics.

Hence economics is a probabilistic field. The things that occur have a probability behind them. Instead of a policy that needs X to happen the policy can be adapted to "If A then B, if X then Y".

Re: Invisible Companies

#48

Post by OkayPhysicist »

jyounker wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that all those Persian carpet stores on University Avenue in Palo Alto were a way to get immigrants jobs in the US. But no. Turns out the carpet store guy had been renting upstairs office space to startups in exchange for an equity stake. That worked out very, very well for him. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/165_University_Avenue

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 recall going to a carpet/tapestry shop in Turkey where, as we enjoyed the ever-present sales-pitch tea, the owner showed us his wares. After the 5 grand mark, he just stopped listing prices. For the final assortment, he brought out some exquisite silk tapestries about the size of welcome mats. He joking clarified that these were tapestries, to be hung on walls. If you bought one without having a wall to hang one on, he'd be happy to fly out and build you one.

Re: Invisible Companies

#49

Post by nonameiguess »

It makes me think of my college girlfriend. Her dad owned a bar, only one, that he eventually expanded to several, but even with only one, they had a home address on a canal on a small island south of Long Beach, vacationed all over the world for weeks at a time, owned a boat, dude bought his daughter a slightly less than million dollar Victorian in San Francisco in 2007 that is probably worth $10 million by now.

He'd started in his 20s as an industrial process engineer and eventually opened a string of carpet stores, then got into restaurants, earned a commercial real estate license and started buying his own stores instead of leasing, then had the opportunity to buy this bar, a rundown, tiny, poorly lit dive in Belmont Shore, a terrible place in a great location, and it eventually became the number one seller of Jameson on the entire west coast. What made owning a bar so profitable? No food, which is low margin, expensive and difficult to get approval for, requires more skill on the part of your labor to make well and handle. Low labor costs because they earn tips and don't need a real salary. Fixed space cost since he owned the building. But more than anything, sheer luck. At some point in the late 90s, his bar acquired a reputation as an easy place to get laid and it's had lines a hundred feet out the front door every night of the week ever since. Neither he nor his staff played any role in this. It's random rumors from college students creating a trend and he's the benefactor. Ended up with a cash business that 20 years ago was earning revenue in excess of a million dollars a month.

How is a competitor supposed to enter the market and replicate that? Land is scarce, so you can't just pop up into the same location if there isn't an empty building already. You can't replicate a multi-decade earned reputation except by waiting decades and earning it yourself. You can't magically become the place young people want to be even if you serve exactly the same drinks with roughly identical looking bartenders in a roughly identical looking interior. More succinctly said, you can't copy the intangibles.

Re: Invisible Companies

#50

Post by pinkmuffinere »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #48
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 recall going to a carpet/tapestry shop in Turkey where, as we enjoyed the ever-present sales-pitch tea, the owner showed us his wares. After the 5 grand mark, he just stopped listing prices. For the final assortment, he brought out some exquisite silk tapestries about the size of welcome mats. He joking clarified that these were tapestries, to be hung on walls. If you bought one without having a wall to hang one on…

My family is Persian and I grew up in Turkey. You definitely develop an appreciation for carpets, and it's sooooooo heartbreaking to see people use art as an entryway rug, simply because they don't know :(
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