My issue with most PE deals is that the PE firm doesn’t have enough skin in the deal. Look at, say, the EA deal where almost all of the purchase price is coming from debt on EA. This to me is wrong because the new owners have almost no incentive to build the business for the long term—EA is a strong operator but face layoffs and LOB closures just to service the new debt.
>This to me is wrong because the new owners have almost no incentive to build the business for the long term—EA is a strong operator but face layoffs and LOB closures just to service the new debt.
They have very strong incentive because debt holders have first dibs on the assets if EA goes belly up. Equity owners (ie. PE) are the last to get paid, so it's very much in their best interest that EA doesn't even lose a tiny bit of money, because such losses are magnified through leverage.
And you're assuming, or insinuating that lenders don't care that the collateral for their loans are getting drained by the PE company. It's like saying buying a house is a free money machine because you can demolish it and strip out the copper.
I remember the ‘90s fondly in this regard. 1000 pages issue of Computer Shopper, the early days of Wired, and so much variety of publications. But especially because after work I wrote dozens of articles for Software Development Magazine and even judged the Jolt Awards a few years.
The Beach Boys, on a double bill with Chicago, Madison Square Garden Summer ‘75, were my first concert. No Brian, of course, but all the songs were his. So many amazing tunes! (Note: despite going with my dad, we got stoned out of our gourds from the pot those around us were smoking.)
We have one story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43175023 about a startup promising to identify factory workers giving, by management definition, less than 100% and yet CEOs can run multiple companies, take board seats, and oversee the American government. Of course the last one of those is so far adding huge value to all the others…
Yeah. They don't care what you do outside of work until you're salaried. But that goes away too once you're paid to "supervise" instead of work. It's a weird valley.
> yet CEOs can run multiple companies, take board seats, and oversee the American government
...don't forget also playing Path of Exile 2 80 hours a week...
kinda funny that even after that came out and everyone had a laugh nobody really asked if maybe his real contributions on the business side of things are just as illusionary as his gaming accomplishments.
He seems to have a default assumption himself that if left unchecked each IC in his companies and the federal government aren't providing value commiserate with their compensation... and these days when it comes to people involved in politics I just assume based on accumulated evidence that every accusation is a confession.
Can you give any more insight as to why? Designers always seem to want to build design libraries, I don't understand why they wouldn't want to use a common API as the basis for that so that there's a contract of sorts with developers.
I would assume their thought is, that it limits their creative spirit and in general is too technical. But they start (as 2 people teams) on figma a complete own design lib with a lot of variables and custom components which look the same like any other lib.
Things like Tailwind take the core concepts of bootstrap and build and improve on it on a grand scale. It is like comparing jQuery (bootstrap), to React (tailwind).
People really do sell Tailwind as if it’s a Bootstrap-like framework. I think that’s why so many sites (see: most startups) have a very similar “Tailwind look” now - everybody wants to use Tailwind because it’s hip, but nobody actually wants to write styles if they can help it, so they just copy-paste a very basic rounded-border-plus-shadow style onto all their components and call it a day. It’s a little better than the “Bootstrap look” because at least it doesn’t come with a default accent color that nobody will ever change, but man, it’s not that much better.
Thanks for the recommendation, however, I really disliked the presenters tone and language. I love the topic, but he came across as too bubbly and informal - "but anyways, whatever!", etc.
