A profile of morningstar CEO:
"Kunal is very open-minded, and he demands feedback, absolutely demands it,” said Catherine Odelbo, AB ’85, MBA ’00 (XP-69), who retired in 2018 as Morningstar’s executive vice president of corporate strategy. “It’s not just inviting it and hoping you don’t give it. He wants the team to be collaborative, but at the same time, he wants the team to air their issues.”
Source: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/winter-2019/features/all-in-for-investors-kunal-kapoor-morningstar
Waymo and Xerox parallels:
"Some of the parallels between Waymo and Xerox are obvious. Like Xerox PARC, Google's self-driving car project created technology that was years ahead of its time. Like the Alto, Google's early self-driving cars were extremely expensive, with rumored costs as high as $250,000 per vehicle.
And like Xerox, Waymo has struggled to commercialize its technology. In November 2017, Waymo announced it had begun testing fully driverless cars on public roads, with plans for a commercial launch in 2018.
But Waymo failed to live up to its own hype. When Waymo launched its "commercial" service called Waymo One in December 2018, every car had a safety driver behind the wheel. That almost certainly means the company is losing money on every ride—which is probably why Waymo has only invited a few hundred people to use it."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/
The rise of US beef:
"Beef was a paradigmatic industry for the rise of modern industrial agriculture, or agribusiness. As much as a story of science or technology, modern agriculture is a compromise between the unpredictability of nature and the rationality of capital. This was a lurching, violent process that sawmeatpackers displace the risks of blizzards, drought, disease and overproduction on to cattle ranchers. Today’s agricultural system works similarly. In poultry, processors like Perdue and Tyson use an elaborate system of contracts and required equipment and feed purchases to maximise their own profits while displacing risk on to contract farmers. This is true with crop production as well. As with 19th-century meatpacking, relatively small actors conduct the actual growing and production, while companies like Monsanto and Cargill control agricultural inputs and market access."Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/07/the-price-of-plenty-how-beef-changed-america
Data does not equal network effects:
"Systems with network effects generally have the property of direct interactions between the nodes over a defined interface or protocol. Joining the network requires conforming to some standard, which increases direct interaction for all nodes and makes those interactions increasingly stickier. But when it comes to the popular narrative around data network effects, we don’t often see the same sticky, direct interaction play out (let alone mechanical interdependencies between nodes due to protocols or interfaces)."
"Kunal is very open-minded, and he demands feedback, absolutely demands it,” said Catherine Odelbo, AB ’85, MBA ’00 (XP-69), who retired in 2018 as Morningstar’s executive vice president of corporate strategy. “It’s not just inviting it and hoping you don’t give it. He wants the team to be collaborative, but at the same time, he wants the team to air their issues.”
Source: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/winter-2019/features/all-in-for-investors-kunal-kapoor-morningstar
Waymo and Xerox parallels:
"Some of the parallels between Waymo and Xerox are obvious. Like Xerox PARC, Google's self-driving car project created technology that was years ahead of its time. Like the Alto, Google's early self-driving cars were extremely expensive, with rumored costs as high as $250,000 per vehicle.
And like Xerox, Waymo has struggled to commercialize its technology. In November 2017, Waymo announced it had begun testing fully driverless cars on public roads, with plans for a commercial launch in 2018.
But Waymo failed to live up to its own hype. When Waymo launched its "commercial" service called Waymo One in December 2018, every car had a safety driver behind the wheel. That almost certainly means the company is losing money on every ride—which is probably why Waymo has only invited a few hundred people to use it."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/
The rise of US beef:
"Beef was a paradigmatic industry for the rise of modern industrial agriculture, or agribusiness. As much as a story of science or technology, modern agriculture is a compromise between the unpredictability of nature and the rationality of capital. This was a lurching, violent process that sawmeatpackers displace the risks of blizzards, drought, disease and overproduction on to cattle ranchers. Today’s agricultural system works similarly. In poultry, processors like Perdue and Tyson use an elaborate system of contracts and required equipment and feed purchases to maximise their own profits while displacing risk on to contract farmers. This is true with crop production as well. As with 19th-century meatpacking, relatively small actors conduct the actual growing and production, while companies like Monsanto and Cargill control agricultural inputs and market access."Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/07/the-price-of-plenty-how-beef-changed-america
Data does not equal network effects:
"Systems with network effects generally have the property of direct interactions between the nodes over a defined interface or protocol. Joining the network requires conforming to some standard, which increases direct interaction for all nodes and makes those interactions increasingly stickier. But when it comes to the popular narrative around data network effects, we don’t often see the same sticky, direct interaction play out (let alone mechanical interdependencies between nodes due to protocols or interfaces)."
"...we encourage startups to think more holistically about defensibility. Greater long-term defensibility is more likely to come from packaging differentiated technology; understanding the domain and reflecting that in your product as you verticalize across industries; dominating the go-to-market race; and winning the talent war to build a world-class team. These efforts will pay off in defending and winning in the markets far more than data alone."
Source: https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/
Source: https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/
