I have done some marketing outsourcing and after my experience i would not recommend it. Incentives are definitely not aligned. They charged fixed fees for services that i felt didn’t add any value but increased costs, they used up significant quantities of our time. One time while looking into why we weren’t seeing conversions i noticed there was some incorrect configs on some adgroups. A whole months budget blown in a few hours. No apologies, it was an accident. I still had a invoice from them at the end of that month. If I hadn’t dug in I don’t think they would have been forthcoming with it. Our CAC was impossibly high and in the end I struggled to see the value, i also had no control and was loosing trust. There is also the problem that marketers tend to be good talkers and they always had something to say about the results (agree they had to do this with the pandemic going on). Our budget was mid-level five figures which should have yielded some value but we have ditched all the services they setup for us (it was not done very well) and we’ve chosen new tools. For example they put us on Hubspot we have just shifted to a few replacement tools. If you do go ahead remember marketing effort is difficult to price you are paying todays income for future revenue. The results from your marketing outsourcing agency will only be known after 3-12 months. Marketing like DevOps should be a core capability of any business. You might be able to do it but it will be better via a consultant not an agency. You have more control then.
Bill Gates has a team of people in a ‘family office’ managing his money the reality he probably had a windfall last year and needed to do something with it. Usually when you have a windfall you buy treasuries because they can be liquidated easily when new opportunities are available. Buying treasuries is a bad idea at the moment, they have negative yields when you factor in inflation. He probably had no good stock opportunities and there may have been more opportunities in farm land. Would he have used a loan… maybe I don’t know the details but also maybe not his investment funds don’t need the loans. My point is he has a good team managing his wealth and it will most certainly grow as a result and this team will also find good opportunities for him to grow his wealth. This should not be surprising.
I wish I could put you in touch with my father. He grew up in the DRC he loves gardening and he lives here in the UK now. I grew up with very large vegetable gardens my whole life in Zimbabwe. He has loads of experience gardening in the tropics and I grew up with a healthy respect for this hobby he cultivated. I can offer a tiny bit of advice. Plants will grow in the most difficult of conditions, you probably won’t get it the first time just keep going. My father had chickens (100x better compost) in Zimbabwe we sometimes struggled for water, something that won’t be hard for you however good soil composition can help retain moisture and eek out time when you are water rationing and waiting for rain.
Thank you :) Has he ever talked about how well his gardening skills translated into a green thumb in the UK? It's sort of amazing how time becomes that much more important a factor when you consider frost.
Yes, we have a smaller growing window. My father has found it hard to figure growing conditions out, but his yields have improved year on year he has a nice backyard garden with all kinds of vegetables and fruit trees.
No chance with that comparison. Per unit economics are different, marginal utility is different. Total cost of ownership is different. Pandemic has wreaked havoc for automakers and... for WFH Tesla owners made the 1k monthly car payment look unnecessary while most iPhone users upgraded phones.
I agree with you, as a parent i witness how my child uses his technology. I did think to mention that we might have biases, as technologists our world view is dominated by technology. My child has a ipad and i have a few computers and game consoles in house. By observing me my child sees how i use technology.
I am hopeful we will see a creative renaissance in technology in our children. You can do more than consume with your phone today. Our children have ipads which are hybrid computers at a young age and are learning to access information more readily. They are general knowledge whizzes and learning to do more than just consuming. The software is better and with cloud services the average child will probably never see a data center or build a PC however they most definitely will use airtable and probably build an app in the cloud. The world for them will have opportunities at higher levels of abstraction. At least i hope that is the case.
Too high for me too. I’d consider the marginal utility of their self driving more at a price like that. The motor industry is in a interesting place with more of them considering subscriptions for feature unlocks. I think it’s a good thing if it means they can invest more to create better software. I don’t agree with it however and if i buy a car i want to know i own the car and won’t need a subscription to operate features. For example My Mercedes Me subscription lapsed a year or two ago i can’t be bothered to renew it… the features are just not that useful. Considering that many of the Mercedes Me features are free on a Tesla.
I don’t envy Elon having to forge a new business like SpaceX on public markets and dealing with the the court of public opinion in a new field with new business models, high capex, high risk. Bezos doesn’t have that and he has the capital to avoid it a bit longer.
