Ajay

Product Management, Oculus @ Facebook

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@ShamsCharania And

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Re. Appel and Goldman. The main loss factor was delinquencies. Apple apparently wanted to approve everyone who applied for the card. Goldman took the delinquency loss. This is the primary reason and not cashback AFAIK

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life So in effect , if the goal is to break even with the card in an effort to get more gold subscriptions from affluent users (like chase sapphire users) , with the aim to make money elsewhere , they might be able to make the numbers work.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life You are missing a few important points specifically joining bonus and impact of churners on classic high cashback cards. .

I don’t know if fidelity is a good comparison. Chase sapphire preferred is a good comparison.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life And there in lies the other play - if you assume they are trying to mix shift affluent chase sapphire users, you can assume that their play would be upsell gold features to these customers. And monetize through means like margin , investment advice etc.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Robinhood can use this delta to make it work. And they might actually get customers who are no churn risks - and even if they just break even, they can sign up people to gold accounts

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life That is 33000 of spend for robinhood to get to the same level. And chase has a big churning impact - many just sign up for cards , spend to get the bonus and churn to lower fee cards. So their cashback 3% dining and 2% travel has to account for this.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Chase gives you 60000 - 75000 bonus points. Each points is roughly worth 1.5 cents (based on high transfer value of chase ). So about 900-1100$ in value right there in 4 months which robinhood doesn’t need to spend.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life lol. 330M! It’s maybe worth 15-30M. It’s gonna get bough by some private equity firm for about that money and they are gonna gut it !

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@GergelyOrosz Uber kinda rebounded a bit post Covid. And they barely hired since their massive layoffs. So not a good comparison.

If their business comes under more of a threat, they’d layoff in a heartbeat.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@GREENBLOODED4L @retrojeffhoops Yes. But i bet it will be on 15-20 shots including 4 turn overs

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@ianbremmer Maybe they funded the acquisition to do exactly that ;)

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Her secondary intent seems like she wants to evaluate whether big companies have a better solution at scale, when things are not going good. Unless there is an alternative that has been successfully implemented at scale, we are all left with subjective opinions.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Her primary intent seems to be to tell everyone that lines of code is the metric used by big companies - this is pretty true, including ours. So not sure what your disagreeing there.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life I mean, it does give the wrong impression of what working as a PM in Meta feels like. Also, PM by definition is a hated trade from our SWE counterparts, who don't understand what we do and why we get paid so much usually - so I definitely understand where they are coming from.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Maybe you should say that you cannot buy it for cheap lol.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life Meta did. With Instagram ;) A

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life I do wonder if they are taking a hit in engagement. .I refuse to believe that YouTube premium subscription will grow by so much more to offset drop in engagement potentially caused by the increased ad load.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life @SmockMoland Remember the days when google was about “don’t be evil” ? Lollll. All corporations are the same.

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life And in this case they did not (though they did for a while with the acquisition of yammer and Skype etc)

[Ajay @Ajay_Anandan]

@Carnage4Life @Carnage4Life MSFT is one of the best b2b sales companies - especially because they are entrenched with CIOs already. Startups cannot compete directly against this - so you go direct to users like Slack and hope MSFT mess up due to bureaucracy