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Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

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Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#51

Post by indigochill »

adrianomartins wrote: post #13
rjtavares wrote: post #6

> Q: Is there anything about being CEO that you don’t like, that you like to delegate? > A: Finance. Our CFO does 99% of finance. I engage because I want to know how we’re doing. But to say I don’t add value to her operation is an understatement. You can also say the same with technology. Our CTO doesn’t get any help from me. I’ll go sometimes months without talking to our CTO, which as a CEO of a technology company,…

One might ask, if the CEO does 1% of finance, and 0% of technology, what does a CEO do? Office, HR, comms management?

In the startup I worked at in college, one of the most visible jobs our CEO did was talking with investors to get the next round of funding. He was also the top-level business strategy guy (for an example in a more mature company, look at the difference Nadella made to Microsoft's strategy relative to Ballmer), although implementation details were delegated to other roles (that he was responsible for hiring).

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#52

Post by johannes1234321 »

skrebbel wrote: post #16
adrianomartins wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One might ask, if the CEO does 1% of finance, and 0% of technology, what does a CEO do? Office, HR, comms management?

Marketing and sales

How can you do Marketing without looking at the curre t development to Merker the new features?

How can you do sales without feeding customer feedback back into development?

How can you do all that without looking at the numbers to see what you can afford?

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#53

Post by sideshowb »

mschuster91 wrote: post #37
adrianomartins wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A treadmill maker trying to get users to pay monthly subscription to use it...

The subscribers aren't subscribing for using the treadmill, they are subscribing for fitness courses and the likes. Which... isn't a bad business model per se IMO. With the current trend of "self improvement", there are enough people willing to pay lots of money, for everything from gym memberships to individual personal trainers. The issue is: this is not going to be an exponential-stock-growth-style business model,…

Aren't gyms generally famous for cashing in on people who sign up for memberships they never actually use? Seems like a genius plan to disrupt that tried and tested business model with a more efficient alternative where users buy the gyms for you so you don't need to maintain them.

(unless you want your job to be meaningful or something)

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#56

Post by celticninja »

sails wrote: post #7
lelandfe wrote: post #4

While a brutal dressing down of the company, I have to admit that this is one of the most nicely made decks I’ve ever seen. What is the reasoning behind them sharing this publicly, I wonder?

Increase short interest I guess? Presume they have a massive short position.

They want to improve the price as they hold the stock, probably want to offload it and are hoping a CEO change will lead to a price bump.

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#57

Post by celticninja »

aljarry wrote: post #50

Do I read the decks properly, or do they have only 2331 subscribers for Q4 2021? This looks like a super low for such big valuations of their disruptive product.

I'm assuming that is wrong. They laid of 2800 staff in Q1 and they all had subscriptions which were continued for 12 months as part of their severance.

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#58

Post by kristopolous »

sksksk wrote: post #46
olliej wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of people who argue about whether Netflix is a tech company - certainly their infrastructure is non-trivial but are they meaningfully different from HBO? For Amazon though, it's incorrect to refer to them as a bookstore - AWS is a huge portion of their revenue. On the other hand you have Google and Facebook that people call technology companies, but their core business is advertising. I think at this po…

I think of "tech" companies as companies where you've got large fixed costs to build out and maintain the product, but the marginal cost of your product is very close to zero. So Facebook and JCDecaux are both advertising companies, but only Facebook is a "tech" company. Lockheed Martin is a tech company, but Google is a "tech" company. I don't think it's a great term for that kind of company.

In spirit it's to take big bets on things that may not work; the transistor radio, the microprocessor. The eventual goal is to push forward something potentially for the social welfare such as say a logarithm table or star catalog in an earlier time.

Companies like Uber or Netflix don't do this. They're platform for rent-seeking of services or durable goods (or perhaps call it "assisted living for people under 60")

Tech investing (big bets in say, a new solar panel manufacturing technique) has really been replaced with very conventional investing that uses technology (a platform to say rent panels out and have the rental fees paid by the power sold back to the utility company).

Sand Hill Road has lost its mojo. I'm part of the problem. The rentier multisource funding model sounds way more attractive to me then some technical way to reduce manufacturing costs by say 80%.

Our minds have been polluted. We need to get back to the fundamentals and avoid the lemon squeezing extractive stuff. That's not how we move things forward and it's part of the reason many people have lost faith in capitalism; it's become too much a siphoning of the commons instead of a servicing to it. It needs a reorientation.

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#59

Post by brailsafe »

auggierose wrote: post #17
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #10

So many words trying to obfuscate the simple fact that “We are a treadmill maker trying to masquerade as a tech company.”

Is that similar to a video store masquerading as a tech company? Or a book store masquerading as a tech company? Or an apple masquerading ... Oh wait, that actually IS a tech company.

Treadmills are a uniquely obtrusive, pointless, and expensive product

Re: Peloton – A call for action [pdf]

#60

Post by pmontra »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #52
skrebbel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing and sales

How can you do Marketing without looking at the curre t development to Merker the new features? How can you do sales without feeding customer feedback back into development? How can you do all that without looking at the numbers to see what you can afford?

I've seen many times sellers selling things that didn't exist yet. Maybe a term describing that is Market Development. It doesn't end well every time but there is usually time to cope with customers after they signed a contract.
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