Prado

[Prado @prado5083]

Tengo que mejorar
Tengo que mejorar
Tengo que mejorar

[Prado @prado5083]

@Anomaly_Invest @DrewCohenMoney I second this! But is it really a moat to be the only real competitive option for your customers in the market when everybody hates their CoStar product?

[Prado @prado5083]

@fivepointscap Totally agreed. And especially this is such a great move considering that LATAM is significantly underdigitized compared to other regions. Therefore physical space for advertising the brand is much more important than it would be elsewhere.

[Prado @prado5083]

@SamirKhazaka The recent increase may have overextended a bit and that’s okay, but it is clear that a Qualcomm did not deserve to be near those levels.

[Prado @prado5083]

@SamirKhazaka A company clearly diversifying away from handsets towards Auto and IoT. Even a conservative valuation assuming Apple revenues to 0 and share loss with Samsung yielded an attractive return.

[Drew Cohen @DrewCohenMoney]

I think a lot about these two facts when wondering how long can you hold a great company for:

1) Bessembinder’s research showing only ~4% of stocks beat treasuries on a 100 year time frame

2) The average life of an S&P 500 company is now just 15 years

Everyone thinks their businesses are the exception...

But you have to be open-minded and humble as to how much history is against you here.

It is very rare that holding a company for it's lifetime is a wise decision...

And yet we also know most money is made from letting a great company compound for a long period of time and not touching it.

[Prado @prado5083]

@kylewhitegoat How to dislike a post? @elonmusk

[Prado @prado5083]

@DrewCohenMoney I would love to see $SAP to complete the discussion on SaaS. Deeply entrenched in the global economy, just not really sure if we should be considering that fact as a moat.

[Drew Cohen @DrewCohenMoney]

Capital is a moat has never held up for any industry

Eventually it gets cheaper to enter or someone else pony ups the money.

(Memory is by and large a commodity industry but that doesn't mean their isn't a high cost to enter and compete.)

You only need a handful of companies willing to spend to ruin the economics for everyone and let the customers play the AI suppliers off of each other.

The specialization of frontier models could present a different competitive advantage, but we haven't really seen that yet and I would be careful extrapolating out any 6 month or so lead far into the future

(it is also possible one is the best and the other are good enough and the use cases for the best are few)

[Timothy Sweeney @Tim_Sweeney_TAR]

$sofi

A LITTLE WISDOM

When I taught accounting at University of Michigan, I asked everybody the first day the following question:

Which student taking identical classes would you hire for your company.

Student A
Frosh yr-- all As
Soph yr -- all As
Junior yr -- all As
Senior yr -- all As

Student B
Frosh yr-- all Ds
Soph yr -- all Cs
Junior yr -- all Bs
Senior yr -- all As

Almost everyone said of course student A

But I said, stop and think about that because I know what Student B will do when he encounters a problem, he's going to keep at it with a great work ethic and a will to learn.

Sure Student A may be smarter and he also many times may have a great work ethic.

But some of you may not be Student A, but you all can be Student B.

Remember that and dont underestimate people because you think you're smarter than them.

[The Hill & Valley Forum @HillValleyForum]

"We're not in business so my employee is happy. I'm in business so my customer is happy."

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon just ended the remote work debate in 45 seconds.

"People on Zoom — they're texting each other. That's not full attention."

"They learn by going on a sales call with you. They learn by seeing you make a mistake. They learn by how you deal with the mistake.”

“If you go to a meeting with me, you've got my full friggin attention the whole time."

The Hill & Valley Forum 2026

@HillValleyForum @jpmorgan

[Tannor Manson @Futurenvesting]

I received some questions on what information institutions have that we don't. It's ALOT!

Institutions pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for alternative data sources.

i.e, Website traffic, Satellite and aerial imagery, App Downloads, corporate aviation intelligence, Credit card transaction data, email receipt data, supply chain and logistics data, web scraping, workforce analytics. The list goes on and on.

We are not on an even playing field today, and moving required SEC reporting to twice a year only furthers that information gap.

[Damian Player @damianplayer]

this is the stuff every 20 year old needs to hear. not bullshit career advice from people who never took risk to build something real.

game from a guy who got pushed out of his own company, cashed out billions, and started building again like nothing happened.

different breed.

[Anthony Noto @anthonynoto]

.You are guessing. You don't know because you haven't asked. No need to guess you can ask me. There is only one reason I buy SoFi it's because I think it's a great risk reward DESPITE the concentration. I am a blue color kid from Poughkeepsie and no matter how much money I have $1 million is a ton of money and I have a thousand other ways to spend it or use it that would be meaningful and impactful to people and organizations that are near and dear to me and my family. BTW a prepaid forward is not a sale it's a way to finance liquidity. I can roll it forward each time before expiration if i want (many times) and keep participating in the upside and not resulting in a sale and tax event. Look at the price point of the ceiling and that might make you more informed about how I think about value in a given time period. No need to guess it's all researchable and when you can't find the answers just ask me. And Going forward I will correct your mistakes. This time I will give you the benefit of the doubt. WDW

[Tevis @FunOfInvesting]

We sat down with $SOFI CEO @anthonynoto to cover all of retail's questions, from the recent capital raise to the valuation and future growth drivers...

Full timestamp breakdown in the reply 👇

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left.

I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up.

I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet.

But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting.

I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn.

It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team.

This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time.

In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back.

After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization.

Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses.

During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived.

Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well.

The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails.

On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else.

The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature.

The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails.

More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it.

Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype.

None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions.

The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct.

But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure.

In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year.

This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years.

I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company.

The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction.

I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability.

Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.

That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

[Prado @prado5083]

@GeneInvesting Why just US? 👀

[Anthony Noto @anthonynoto]

.👇Yes, sir. If this is enacted—and that’s a big if, though part of me hopes it is—we would likely see a significant contraction in industry credit card lending. Credit card issuers simply won’t be able to sustain profitability at a 10% rate cap.

Consumers, however, will still need access to credit. That creates a large void—one that @SoFi personal loans are well positioned to fill. I’ve long believed many consumers are disadvantaged by high-reward credit cards (they know who they are), only to end up carrying tens of thousands of dollars in balances at 20–30% APRs. In many cases, those balances are effectively interest-only and can persist indefinitely.

By contrast, a SoFi personal loan at 9–13% offers a lower rate with a fully amortizing structure that actually pays the balance down. If credit card lending contracts, SoFi can step in to offer borrowers a more transparent, lower-cost alternative to revolving debt. We could also expand to a larger target market & appropriate rates with still great returns.

This dynamic would also materially simplify marketing. Today, credit cards win the acquisition battle because consumers don’t realize they’re signing up for high-interest, long-duration debt—until they’re already deep in it. Only then do many borrowers find @SoFi as a solution to an existing problem. If credit card lending contracts, SoFi personal loans become the solution before the problem exists, not after. SoFi marketing shifts from debt consolidation to smart upfront financing.

Bottom line: less credit card lending could translate directly into more personal loan demand for SoFi. Giddy up!!

Also if this scenario plays out, underwriting discipline and borrower education become even more important—SoFi’s advantage isn’t just price, it’s helping customers exit debt, not revolve in it. GYMR!!

[Prado @prado5083]

@weary_centurion Great. Keep neglecting the dozens of communications that they have given us throughout the year by saying that there haven’t been “proper communication”. These have been public initiatives that the market has disregarded.

Just focus on fundamentals and have patience.

[Timothy Sweeney @Tim_Sweeney_TAR]

$sofi

A LESSON FOR SOFI SHAREHOLDER ON DILUTION

People learn through experience. I often give examples from my experience to make a point, simply because examples are the fastest way to understanding.

I was a senior partner at Deloitte and I had a lot of people who worked for me. At that time, I had handled and manged over a thousand cases or projects successfully.

I had a group working on a large project and I was laying out our strategy and asked if anyone had any questions or suggestions.

There were some question's and I explained why we were going to do X or Y.

Then a person who was maybe a year out of college said, I think you're wrong, we need to do a,b and c. I explained why that wouldn't work and person said why do you get to decide.

I said how many of these projects have you worked. The person said this is the first. I said I've done over 100 almost identical projects, so why don't you just rely on my experience and let's see how it goes.

I ultimately found that person a job that was better for them.

I'm feeling a lot like that with some Sofi shareholders.

I particularly like hearing and discussing people's opinions, primarily because I loved sharing my experiences and sharing them to help educate the Sofi community.

But I want to point out why experience matters.

For the last 3 years, Sofi has faced innumerable headwinds. The small Sofi community battled a lot of bears who spread Fud based on everything from captal ratios to fair values to discount rates to dilution.

They were wrong!

Now that there's finally tailwinds for a management who's has guided the company to high growth and profitability in the worst of times, some shareholders are now second guessing everything management does.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying don't be critical and have differing opinions. But also don't be like the colleague I mentioned and think opinion trumps experience.

I'm going to write other posts on this.

But this one is about dilution.

I made a small investment in NVIDIA in about 2005. Since then it had 600x returns.

More importantly, it had 9 funding rounds and capital raises and SBC that diluted shareholders.

I've made this point before, but dilution in shares doesn't mean dilution in shareholder value. It depends what you do with the money to grow the company.

Sofi diluted shareholders with the 2026 convertibles. Sofi diluted shareholders with the 2029 convertibles; Sofi diluted shareholders with the July capital raise; Sofi diluted shareholders with this latest capital raise; And they diluted shareholders with stock based compensation.

Each time the stock price fell. From the March 5, 2024 issuance of the 2029 convertibles, with the worst of headwinds, they diluted you to a 4x return.

Do you get my point? Because over that time, which is less than 2 years, I saw a lot of people on X sell their stock, simply because they didn't understand dilution.

You can't grow without capital and you can't obtain capital without share dilution.

So it's a question, do you trust management?

Amit @amitisinvesting correctly researched and educated himself about Robinhood and Palantir. He didn't guess. He spent the time researching and diving deep into those companies.

But that wasn't his strong point as an investor. He asked questions and often times said he didn't know. But his strong point was that he trusted management... and when you trust management, it's OK to question them and have opinions but many times people on X just bitch about management without any experience or understanding of the business. Imo they just want money faster.

So, do you trust management? If you don't, sell the stock and move on. The people that complain the loudest on X have virtually no relevant business experience.

When management makes decisions for the long term good of the company, and it costs them millions personally, perhaps you should trust them or just sell your stock and move on. Just like people in 2024