mckenna's comments

mckenna | 6 years ago | on: Cisco Nexus 9000 Switches Allow SSH As Root

This is a nasty one! Sloppy in hindsight.

There is one bright side to otherwise disgraceful incidents: All the customers running older versions are now forced to upgrade to the latest versions. The burden of supporting really old versions suddenly vanishes.

Box vendors should really stop selling unmanaged boxes/solutions. In reality, customers end up buying service contracts anyway along with boxes. Instead, sell usage/service/connectivity and manage the hardware. A critical patch like this one could then be applied before a PSIRT is released. Frequent upgrades(security patches or feature/bug fix patches) are now commonplace. The user experience would be so much better if the solution were managed by the vendor (cloud managed).

mckenna | 6 years ago | on: Is Amazon Violating U.S. Antitrust Laws?

Am I missing something below?

Equity = Sigma(Free-cash-flow) summed over time. In the case of AMZN, equity is about 43B. 18B of this amount is goodwill(intangible vaporware). That leaves with about 25B real equity. And surprisingly, this 25B matches with FCF over the last 2 years(2017-2018). Which essentially means, cumulative FCF until 2017 was indeed 0. Numbers do seem to support the claim that AMZN was running on 0(averaged over time) FCF. Showing 1B in one quarter, -1B in another. But overall 0.

Whether 0 cumulative FCF means predatory pricing is a different question altogether. I'm not so sure about that. How would visionaries build big things, that need, and money? If AMZN loses it and acts monopolistic, I think people will respond by migrating en-masse. No one likes too much inequality. Jeff should do something about that image.

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

Thanks for that link. FB has a dual-class structure, but its owned by all major ETFs: https://www.etfchannel.com/etfs/?symbol=FB

If UBER gets into indices, that would be scamming hard earned 401k dollars of unsuspecting ordinary folks. Sigh... More hate for Silicon Valley when folks figure out

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

Really? Silicon Valley is churning out trashy IPOs of late, and so it becomes the standard?

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

Love it. That's how it should be. Drivers should get max possible cut of the fares while the network operator works as a non-profit.

100B pump/dump is a scam. Think about all the indices-tracking-ETFs/Funds that will pick up this overpriced stock(our hard earned 401ks). Sigh. Silicon Valley should not have pumped up what was originally a good idea. This has a high chance of ending badly

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

They exited some markets and sold their business. "Other" refers to that, I think. So it's a one-time revenue.

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

Really? The numbers look horrible to me. Both LYFT/UBER have horrible numbers. I would prefer LYFT(@80% discount to IPO price) than UBER(@80% discount to IPO price).

Both of these stock valuations are being pumped and dumped onto public markets with clever tricks. Funny thing is, many of us won't even realize that some of our money will be invested in these stocks without our knowledge(ETFs/Funds tracking indices). Most 401ks market tracking Funds/ETFs will pick up these horrible stocks in time.

Tech wizards of silicon valley have managed to one-up wall street this time, by creating a 100B taxi app. With the 10B they raise from IPO, they will try more desperate measures to try and close the gap in price($100B-$120B) and value($25B-$35B).

mckenna | 7 years ago | on: Uber S-1

Horrible numbers! They cannot get the unit economics to work. In order to make up for that fundamental flaw, they are trying to throw a number of things at the wall(UberEats/UberFrieght/SD/Bikes/etc) and see if something sticks. Each of those other bets seems poor, thus far.

They better focus on getting their original business in shape(call a cab via an app). I would be curious to know if they tried to raise prices in any markets and what the results were. I'm sure they want to know this for themselves and their investors thus far. Has anyone seen data/insights into such experiments by Uber/Lyft/Ola/X/Y/Z?

Given that none of the ride-sharing companies are sharing insights on such experiments, I am going to conservatively assume that these companies have low/no confidence that they can raise prices. Network effects make a good moat. But demand elasticity, substitute products, and competition seem to be dominating over the network effects.

Their original business is a good one. Price and value are way out of sync. UBER at $100-120B is way overvalued. Not touching UBER/LYFT stocks with a long pole at these valuations. Overpriced by 3-4x in my view. When they fall by 70-80%, will buy some.

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