Miguel Dysenhaus's Profile

This is a really interesting business! However, I wonder, with the low margins that most of their products already possess, on top of the price pressure that will come in the future from a potential recession, how much they’re gonna struggle. To sustain the fixed costs associated with their own delivery structure, which are likely to be high, they are going to need a significant volume, which usually involved an investment in marketing and advertisement. I wonder how liquid markets will be to provide the injection of capital the company will need to scale.

Great post! I agree that Airbnb should leverage the longer stays segment of travelers both now and in the medium term. As leisure short-term vacations may wind down in the foreseeable future, the rise of the home office trend that will surely come from Covid might encourage people to decide to work remotely from different locations and move around more often, instead of being located constantly in the same place. This is something that Airbnb could accommodate given the vast array of properties they have amassed.
I can’t think of any other company that can provide the value that Airbnb can with such a global footprint, so hopefully they can leverage their skills to stay afloat.

Great post! My main concerns at the launch of Disney+ was how long the company would be willing to invest in what was likely to be a cash negative and capital inventive business for many years to come given how many profitable business segments Disney already had. I agree that the halt of operations in their parks and cruise lines may give them no choice but to double down on their streaming capabilities.
I think your suggestions of introducing a layer of AR and VR are really interesting! I wonder how well Disney is set up to do this. Their RPPs have traditionally been much more skewed towards the creative and story telling than to technology, hopefully they can pivot their capabilities to add and retain the talent required for these innovations.

Great post! I didn’t know that there was a human component to their recommendation process, and i might be what helps them have a better retention rate than their competitors’. However, the fact that they own their own inventory might be a source of concern. I wonder if they’ll fall into the trap other companies that also own inventory have fallen into and start using their recommendations as a way to get rid of their excess inventory artificially pushing particular items. This may impact the quality of their recommendation and their customer satisfaction.

Great post! Spotify has definitely built a competitive advantage over other players in the music streaming space with the amount of data they have collected from their strong market share position. You raise an interesting point with the way they can use this data not only to improve their recommendation engine but also to use it as input in the creative process. I agree that they risk alienating artists if they decide to deep dive into AI generated music, and I also think they risk alienating consumers if they monetize it by selling it to artists as input in their creative process. However, their incentive is to limit the amount of revenues they share with artists and record labels, their biggest expense items. so they might have the incentive to follow one of these strategies. It’s going to be interesting to see how that trade off plays out.

Great article! I wonder if as the industry becomes more and more consolidated, and the ability to accurately forecasts demand becomes a more important competitive advantage, if Zoba’s customers start demanding any sort of exclusivity. Specially considering there might be questions as to the ownership of the data Zoba is using, companies may choose to use this to prevent its usage in services provided to competitors.

Great article! As most of the other comments, as I was reading your article my main thoughts were that this is more akin to entertainment than to an actual educational experience, and that more than competing against companies in the Ed Tech space, Masterclass competes against companies in the media space. Specially since they are expanding more horizontally by developing content in such a broad spectrum of spaces, I wonder about the retention ability given that customers may not share similar interests and may not choose to watch more than a few of their classes.

Great read! And cool find, didn’t even know this existed. It’s interesting that they’re top-line growth has come mostly from M&A, I’d be interested to know more about their unit economics, because this seems to be a platform business in which the CAC could potentially be extremely high on both sides of the platform.

Great read! When I first heard of Turo I was excited about what they were doing, but after trying to use it I just found it to be more complicated than going to a traditional car rental. Each car has its own pricing structure in terms of fee + mileage drive, on top of different options for insurance, so the final value proposition was not clear, as opposed to Airbnb which has the same structure for all their listings. I think this would be a hurdle to overcome to get more users onto the platform.

Great analysis! I agree with you on the diagnosis and how wrong strategic decisions led Mattress Firm to file for Chapter 11. And I also agree that a multichannel approach is the way to go to try to catch up to their competitors value proposition. I wonder if they have the operational capabilities to pull this off, or if they should just focus on potentially acquiring one of these DTC companies and try to merge both value propositions into one shopping experience.

Great article! I agree with you, Mercado Libre is one of the biggest success stories in Latam and it is exciting to see how much they’ve diversified over the years.

However, I wonder how they’ll evolve as they have been investing a lot in their logistics arm as a way to fend off a potential entry from Amazon into the region, while also having to focus on their fintech products which is where most of the growth is going to come from in the future. I’m curious to see if they can succeed in two such operationally complex objectives at the same time.

Great post! As you point out, Amazon has done a great job at targeting millennial consumers in more affluent urban centers. I think it complements their value proposition very well and allows them to leverage the data they already have in many useful ways.

However, in curious to see how they will scale this. Given how unstable the unit economics in this segment have proven to be, in curious to see how they would do in targeting more price sensitive users, who wouldn’t shop originally from Whole Foods, as well as less urban areas en finally international markets. Even though they are dominating the space at the moment, I would be curious to see if a player starting from any of those segments could disrupt them in urban centers where Amazon is already established as the leader in grocery delivery.