This is as misleading as those real estate shows that promise "no money down" or "other people's money" style financing. They bought 80% of a business at 0% APR for a set of 20 installment payments. They are funding the payments with the business' revenue--meaning they are not able to pocket that cash themselves, i.e., they're using their (business) income to pay the cost of the loan.
The title is clickbait, but the deal itself is also boring. Basically, they funded the capital for an acquisition, from debt representing the expected future cashflows of the acquired entity, with repayments timed similarly to match.
As M&A goes, that is ho-hum unremarkable. It's the most ordinary of all M&A business cases, or indeed any business case, viz. that the IRR exceeds the WACC.
The only aspect of this deal that looks even slightly uncommon - and then, only very slightly, depending on your locale - is that the original founder is the bond holder, and the capital thereby very cheap.
Being funded by privately issued debt means the glibness in the article's tone must be overshadowed by the unstated but strongly undesirable consequences of defaulting on the repayments. Yes you can "buy a company for $0", at least going by the amortized net values of future cashflows. But caveat emptor, if your eyes aren't wide open, you can also lose your shirt.
If it were so unremarkable, why isn't there a term for this sort of transaction and an I industry built around it? I suggest the transaction be called a leveraged buyout (we can shorten it to LBO) and call the industry private equity.
I avoided saying this is an LBO because persnickety finance folks may observe that the debt structure expected under the traditional definition of the term is quite particular, viz. that the acquired/merged entity ends up liable for the debt (either directly or as security), but there's language in the article strongly insinuating that the debt in this case was issued separately by the author's partnership, whose structure isn't apparent, but is evidently distinct.
But, otherwise, yes indeed, quite so, the category of acquisition funded by debt is very well understood, the varieties extensively studied and practiced. So much so as to be taught in M&A 101, and my expression that it is unremarkable arises from this utter lack of novelty.
This seems like a great deal for everyone involved!
I think the real takeaway here is that many entrepreneurs are not interested in running successful business. They'd rather be starting new things! So if you are good at running businesses there's a decent chance you can take over their business in return for letting them keep a lot of the profit. Everyone wins - the creator gets an income stream to support their future work and you get a business that's already working.
And people have different definitions of successful. Some might think a business is not worth bothering with if it's not going to make them rich, I'd consider it successful if it could pay my rent.
Yea, I was reading lean startup and it goes on about how just because the revenue and profits are going up doesn't mean you're doing well. It considered success as growth by other metrics.
What i don't understand is, if the seller is not in need for the whole selling price, and the MRR is covering his installment, why sell it? He will make $500K in 20 months and keep 100% ownership
Same energy as all someone saying he bought a home for $0 by buying it with a mortgage and renting it out such that the mortgage is paid by the tenant.
It's completely fine saying you bought a business with $0 downpayment. But saying you bought it for $0 is just silly, you didn't. If you did, you could close down the business the same day and walk away from it. But you can't, because in fact you signed a contract for half a million in instalments. The article is nice but there was no need for the clickbait title.
Article is great. I'm comfortable with the title, the meaning pretty evident in this case. IMO. or maybe I'm just used to clickbaits I already translate them in my mind...
He's paying in time and risk, rather than money. He has to run the company, which presumably is a full-time job, and there's a risk it implodes before he has fully paid for it (which it didn't, but it might have done).
His only risk is being unable to pay, the deal being canceled and ultimately losing payments (which according to him were paid for by the business generating a profit, so he never risked his own money). Since the seller lent the business to him he didn't even have to provide upfront capital.
I assume he hired one or two people from overseas and paid them the bare minimum to keep the business just operational so that he could pocket as much as possible.
I’m dating a non-native English speaker. This morning I was explaining clickbait to her. First I had to explain bait. Next I explained the title of “The Witcher Season 2 Netflix release date” [1] Finally I shared with her the content “Those looking for news of a final release date for The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix will be disappointed to learn that no date has been set just yet.”
There's not a good word (that I know of) for this in my language (Czech). People who can speak English use the English word. People who don't just say something along the lines of the article author being a bastard.
In French some say "putaclic". But it’s not widespread outside of the "old-ish" French tech sphere and, being composed of the word "pute", a slang for prostitute, quite vulgar...
Different for sure, but better or worse? Here in our culture we don't really do reframing and cutesy phrases. But the public discourse is very vulgar and pessimistic, and this is not a fad, it's like that for decades already.
The word didn't exist, but there were stories on the local news similar with teaser headlines like, "Your refrigerator is killing you! Watch at the bottom of the hour!"
Yes, but the point is that "clickbait" existed before people could click. The forms may have differed between geos, but I doubt you are disputing the existence.
And it's a way overused phrase. As if headline writers haven't tried to entice people to read articles for 100 years. Some people seem to want scientific paper titles for headlines. Basically not going to happen. (There are egregious examples of course but the idea that headlines shouldn't try to grab a reader is silly.)
I sold my last house for more than I purchased it. Next week I'll create an investor's newsletter about how to purchase a house and get paid to live in it!
Oh god, I’d wager you just described 1000 different real real estate newsletters:P
My biggest pet peeve is these “real estate investors” who don’t understand investing in any serious way and so falsely misrepresent renting out a property as “passive income” (how laughable) and list their “investment returns” without any noting of the massive leverage it took to get those returns.
If you buy a house with 5% down and the housing market goes up 50% in 5 years you’re not an investment genius, you just took a risky highly leveraged bet and it paid off (and housing bets at least in America do tend to pay off thanks to the insanity of central-bank-attributable rock bottom interest rates as well as the essentially propagandistic way that Americans are taught to think about real estate)
So not sure if I have a coherent point here but I wish people would (a) actually adjust for inflation when telling their “I bought at X and sold at the 1.5x 4 years later” stories and (b) would also show some awareness of how insanely leveraged people often are on their houses.
> If you buy a house with 5% down and the housing market goes up 50% in 5 years you’re not an investment genius, you just took a risky highly leveraged bet and it paid off (and housing bets at least in America do tend to pay off thanks to the insanity of central-bank-attributable rock bottom interest rates as well as the essentially propagandistic way that Americans are taught to think about real estate)
I agree with most of what you're saying, but if your mortgage is non-recorse (which is the case for purchase first-mortgages in CA at least), I wouldn't say it's a risky bet. If it goes poorly, you can walk away and the bank gets your house (and you get imputed income maybe). You only lose your down payment and any equity, which at 5% down is probably less than the loss the PMI took.
It's not the same riskyness as say buying stocks on margin, or selling short or writing uncovered options.
NOW, in my much-anticipated newsletter I will reveal all the tips and game-winning strategies I've discovered over the course of my high-powered investment career.
If you act today, I will include the secrets of how to get a 5%-down mortgage without any PMI!! This is a hidden method used exclusively by the super-rich to get even richer. Once you learn what I will teach, you will live worry-free, regardless of what pitfalls you encounter in life.
BONUS! The government doesn't want you to know this secret method to get a 15% piggyback loan, but I will show you this super-simple almost "devious" extra double-tranche, rolling mortgage financial instrument - and even more.
Why wait to order, when you could make them all wait on you?
The credit union I borrowed from says their first time [1] home buyer program will do 95% LTV to $1.5M. Depending on where you are in california, that's likely enough (97% LTV to $850,000, but that doesn't get you much in the Bay Area).
Of course, if you just bought your house, I don't think you'd be able to cash out refi down to 5%, and certainly not under a first time homebuyers program. Cash out refis may not be non-recourse in California either; I'm not sure.
[1] I can't see the requirements, but usually it doesn't actually mean first-time, just that you haven't been a homeowner recently.
The more accurate analogy is if you can charge rent to tenants in the property in a way that covers all expenses. Then other then the down payment the tenants are basically letting you leverage an appreciating asset at no cost to you.
I do this now in California and with the essentially 0% interest rate I refinanced the loan and now I generate a profit every month from leveraging an asset on top of the appreciating value.
Rent is the black hole people can use to leach resources away from productivity. Simply by taking a loan and redirecting the economic output of people who live on my property towards the loan I benefit without producing any utility for the economy at all. That is in a sense "Free." If the loan is paid off, that money gets redirected towards me again with minimal effort on my part.
I didn't own property, then I went to a bank to apply for a loan. Now my tenants pay for that loan with rent. They are paying the bank interest and money for my loan on a property I never lived in nor have the money to purchase without a loan.
You had the credit and financial resources to commit to that purchase.
Some reasons they may choose to rent instead:
- lack capital
- lack credit rating
- not willing to commit for the long-term
- not want to be responsible for maintenance
- not willing to assume risk in the real-estate market
I know people who are financially literate and have capital who choose to rent. I chose to purchase, but came to realize that “home ownership” is two-way — to some extent you’re also owned by the home.
I didn't say the transaction wasn't "fair." Fairness depends on your definition of fair and it's fine if you think this transaction is very fair.
What I am saying is that usually in an economic transaction somebody contributed something to the economy. A product was distributed or created. A service was offered or provided.
I offered nothing to the economy. I am simply gaining money by doing nothing.
Also I'm referring to my specific situation where the rental costs are covered fully by rent. If you take on the loan yourself with your own money.. well that's a different situation.
>I know people who are financially literate and have capital who choose to rent.
I also rent. I also never said there was anything wrong with renting. I'm just saying that rent is an economic black hole. No energy was expended to increase GDP in exchange for rent money. I benefit by doing nothing and so does the person who rents to me.
You’ve just stated that you choose to rent. Your landlord is thus providing a service you value (adding to the economy).
You are providing a service your tenants value. In your case, this may be mostly the assumption of risk - what if your tenants stop paying, and the government says you can’t evict? What if rental prices drop dramatically? Or real estate prices drop dramatically? What if your tenants move out and it takes X months to rent?
You are still on the hook for your payments to the bank, and your equity and credit rating are at risk.
The bank lending you capital in exchange for interest (rent) is also providing you a valuable service - and you are providing a valuable service to them, giving them a return on their capital (with an acceptable risk of default).
That’s the “invisible hand” of free market exchanges - each party gives what they value less to obtain what they value more, so both parties are better off (if they didn’t feel themselves to be better off, they would not make the exchange).
> You’ve just stated that you choose to rent. Your landlord is thus providing a service you value (adding to the economy).
The land existed before my landlord was alive. It's the equivalent of charging me to breath air because someone owns it.
>You are providing a service your tenants value. In your case, this may be mostly the assumption of risk - what if your tenants stop paying, and the government says you can’t evict? What if rental prices drop dramatically? Or real estate prices drop dramatically? What if your tenants move out and it takes X months to rent?
Sure you could say that I take on the risk, but that's also dependent on data. Historically for the last century the risk is highly minimal. I could also, If I wanted pay off the entire loan. Then there would be no risk. It would essentially become the economic equivalent of me charging people for breathing air that I own.
>You are still on the hook for your payments to the bank, and your equity and credit rating are at risk.
I can afford to pay on my own. Additionally I can sell the property at anytime as well. Of course there is still risk in depreciation but I already know the risk is minimal based off data.
>The bank lending you capital in exchange for interest (rent) is also providing you a valuable service - and you are providing a valuable service to them, giving them a return on their capital (with an acceptable risk of default).
Yeah, a service in exchange for what? For interest. Interest that I don't pay for. The exchange is more between the tenants and the bank and I function as a middle man leaching from the tenants. It is their blood sweat and tears that will be fronting the loan and the house that I will own.
>That’s the “invisible hand” of free market exchanges - each party gives what they value less to obtain what they value more, so both parties are better off (if they didn’t feel themselves to be better off, they would not make the exchange).
The invisible hand is an outdated concept. The world has moved beyond Adam Smith as the data shows that economic systems are far more complicated.
The current status quo belief argues that the average return on investment outpaces productivity-based income by a wide margin. So basically not only does owning property allow me to gain money from it without an ounce of work. But investments on all forms of capital from property to human capital is responsible for much of the wealth inequality that exists today.
Such capital ownership allows people to have incomes that far exceed what any one human individual is capable of generating through productive labor.
Middlemen get a bad rap, because people don't see that they are providing a valuable service.
Your financial resources make the risk acceptable to you. It's probably less acceptable to your tenants. In the same way, you choose to keep your capital and not commit it to your own housing, even though your landlord is also benefiting from that relationship.
If your landlord is not providing you a valuable service, cut him out. Vertical integration is a time-proven way to remove middlemen that don't add value. The fact you are aware of the alternatives and that they are easy and yet you choose to continue paying rent shows it is valuable to you.
We all have incomes that far exceed one person's labor, because of the
benefits of specialization and free exchange, which are still fundamental to economics. The stored surplus is capital, which further magnifies productivity, and is necessary for any modern lifestyle - without it, we'd be a lot more equal, but it would be the equality of hunter-gatherers.
Those middlemen and providers of capital are why you and your tenants can rent homes, in a city, working desk jobs, and eating turkey sandwiches on demand for $10 instead of $1500 and six months of labor. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLXfVEsLI-qSO5XzEa0pOJyXl...
>Your financial resources make the risk acceptable to you. It's probably less acceptable to your tenants. In the same way, you choose to keep your capital and not commit it to your own housing, even though your landlord is also benefiting from that relationship.
No I told you the risk is nothing. I just have capital to make a down payment that's it. Additionally risk isn't an economic product. How risky something is does not contribute extra GDP to the economy. Only productive work contributes to the economy.
>If your landlord is not providing you a valuable service, cut him out. Vertical integration is a time-proven way to remove middlemen that don't add value. The fact you are aware of the alternatives and that they are easy and yet you choose to continue paying rent shows it is valuable to you.
It is valuable to me. Your statement proves nothing. It's similar to how air is valuable to me. Take the concept of property ownership and place it on air. Now I have to pay some owner of air money because he is providing me a valuable service of letting me breath his air?
I'm not providing a "service" to anyone anymore than a hypothetical owner of oxygen is providing a "service" to let people breath.
>We all have incomes that far exceed one person's labor, because of the benefits of specialization and free exchange, which are still fundamental to economics. The stored surplus is capital, which further magnifies productivity, and is necessary for any modern lifestyle - without it, we'd be a lot more equal, but it would be the equality of hunter-gatherers.
No we don't. I'm not talking about income from manual labor of one hunter gatherer. I'm talking about the average possible income one man can make without hiring any employees or investing in capital in a modern economy. I thought this was obvious, guess not.
Many people make less than this, many people make significantly more. The people who make significantly more tend to have had hired human capital to produce output equivalent to multitudes of people.
>If your landlord is not providing you a valuable service, cut him out. Vertical integration is a time-proven way to remove middlemen that don't add value. The fact you are aware of the alternatives and that they are easy and yet you choose to continue paying rent shows it is valuable to you.
No it's not. Dude. By middleman I'm not talking about some hustler who connects two potential clients together or fronts some kind of risk. I'm talking about people who are sitting on tons of investment capital and just living off the growth of that capital by doing Zero work.
Warren Buffet invests in low low risk companies and profits off the growth of these investments by doing no work. Literally if warren buffet didn't exist the world wouldn't really change... If Elon Musk didn't exist on the other hand, the space industry and automobile industry would be very different.
Warren Buffet by owning a bunch of stock from a lot of companies isn't contributing anything to the economy. No services, no risk, no nothing. He's just benefiting from the growth of others peoples' work.
Both of these people benefit from human capital but warren is the more apt example because he doesn't even contribute anything to the investments he owns. He's just a stock picker.
Whatever you think about the economy this much is real: It's already officially known that the wealth inequality is the result of income from capital growing faster than income from productive labor.
It's free money in every sense of the word. And because productive capital is the basis of an economy what you get is wealth inequality.
Does air have economic value? Yes it does. Does that fact help your point in any way? No.
If I make a law to allow people to own air, then people start renting out the air and living off of the income of renting air. That's where your archaic Adam Smith model of the economy completely fails.
Under your idealistic model there's no concept of an unfair transaction because all parties benefited from the transaction. One person can breath so he's happy, another person got money from renting air so he's happy. Everyone is happy, so the concept of getting ripped off doesn't exist.
Markets for air already exist where scarcity prevails:
- scuba
- medical oxygen
- submarines
- space
- polluted areas (search for "beijing canned air")
The law privatizing air that you suggest would match rental housing only if you're renting a vacant lot w/o buildings in a place without land scarcity. It's actually most similar to copyright - inducing artificial scarcity to create a market.
I already described some criteria for unfair transactions: compulsion or deception. You could also make arguments that if one side captures nearly all the economic surplus, the transaction is unfair (generally maintained via government-enforced monopolies limiting competition).
Rather than trying to assert Adam Smith's obsolescence, you should probably try googling "Adam Smith landlord". I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet).
> Markets for air already exist where scarcity prevails:
Scarcity is not the issue here. Energy is the issue. This is where you lack intense knowledge.
In every scenario you describe energy was used to compress the air and place it into the canister. That it productive work.
For air and land in your typical scenario, there is zero productive work. This is what I'm referring too. Your scarcity argument is off topic. Nobody is talking about that scarcity in your sense. What we are talking about is artificially induced scarcity. By owning air, and owning more land that I need, I artificially induce scarcity and force people to pay me rent to live off of land I don't need and contributed nothing to the economy in exchange for economic gain.
The important factor here is that each instance of artificially induced scarcity sets up a scenario where the person who owns capital does not have to contribute to the GDP in order to benefit from the profits coming out of the asset. I'm not going to be paying a dime for the house I currently will own or sell. I am simply using a complex financial tool, to redirect wealth towards me.
>I already described some criteria for unfair transactions: compulsion or deception. You could also make arguments that if one side captures nearly all the economic surplus, the transaction is unfair (generally maintained via government-enforced monopolies limiting competition).
What do you think is going on when "one side" owns property that can house 400 people and just rents it all out? Also who do you think actually allows one person to own more property than they need or to even own air if such a concept existed? The Government.
>Rather than trying to assert Adam Smith's obsolescence, you should probably try googling "Adam Smith landlord". I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet).
What do you mean trying to assert? You're the one talking about an invisible hand in a world that is clearly not auto-magically heading towards equilibrium. Nobody and I mean basically nobody deciding economic policy and nobody in academia thinks this stuff is relevant in the discussion of a modern economy. If you knew what you were talking about you'd realize that I'm not asserting anything. I'm just restating the assertions of the rest of the world. https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand
Heck, why do you think the Fed exists if Adam Smith had any relevancy today? Why do you think bubbles and market crashes exist? Adam Smith is basically famous for being like Sigmund Freud. The Father of a modern academic field of study but still mostly wrong in the face of scientific evidence. By referencing him in a conversation about the modern economy makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
As for the quotes, it's not that I don't understand the context of "quotes" it's just that you're not quick enough to grasp the context of why I used the "quotes." See? I did again, let's see if you can kick that brain into gear and "grasp" why I chose to put the quotes around this "word."
Sorry you were offended - I was suggesting you would enjoy quotations from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" where he describes landlords as non-productive leeches. I was not commenting on the use of quotation marks.
My suggestion that you also pay attention to the context was that those quotations really do apply to unimproved land (though he notes that landlords will happily increase rents based on tenants'improvements).
No you are being deliberately offensive. It’s like me suggesting you go to school to take an economics course. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m just being nice and trying to help you not be stupid.
Too put it tersely some people on HN throw under the cover insults by being subtly condescending so as to not trip any red flags and get warned by the admin. For example, like suggesting I look up the purpose of quotations.
Don’t play games, I hate that stuff and while manipulative under the cover insults can get around Dang’s filter it really goes against the spirit of HN.
" I expect you'll like the quotes. (I'd recommend learning more about the context more than just the quotes, but hey, it's the internet). "
This is what you said about my penchant to use quotation marks. There's not a single person on the face of the earth who won't find that rude.
It's subtle but it's akin to saying "go learn English" or "go learn proper grammar" in the middle of a debate but disguised as a "suggestion." You can't even say that garbage to a person who speaks English as a second language.
It's a low blow and I'm calling you out for what you are. You did that on purpose and you are a rude person. Your initial apology is therefore not accepted because I know it's fake.
We're done. I have no interest in continuing a conversation with you.
>For air and land in your typical scenario, there is zero productive work.
Someone has to build the property.
Someone has to maintain the property.
Someone has to own the property and its associated risk.
Someone has to pay taxes on the property.
Someone has to find a tenant that lives in the property.
Someone has to be rich enough to do all of the above, lots of people aren't. So the work gets split over multiple people. For example, a developer wants to focus on building properties, this means he wants to sell the entire property as soon as possible so he can start building the next property instead of waiting for the first property to pay off. This requires a market for real estate. Someone who buffers the stock and makes it available to renters or future buyers.
>What we are talking about is artificially induced scarcity.
How is land artificially scarce? If anything, it is naturally scarce and landlords make it less scarce through vertical scaling of the land. Given enough landlords there will be more housing than people and tenants will have an upper hand during negotiations. How is that not to their benefit? Take any existing housing market and eliminate 50% of landlords. Will this benefit tenants? No, in fact you want more landlords so that they end up competing against each other.
>The important factor here is that each instance of artificially induced scarcity sets up a scenario where the person who owns capital does not have to contribute to the GDP in order to benefit from the profits coming out of the asset. I'm not going to be paying a dime for the house I currently will own or sell. I am simply using a complex financial tool, to redirect wealth towards me.
The fact that outsize returns exist is a price signal that not enough people are doing this. If the risk free return is really as great as you say then everyone should jump into this market and reduce the risk free return until it reaches 0.
>What do you think is going on when "one side" owns property that can house 400 people and just rents it all out? Also who do you think actually allows one person to own more property than they need or to even own air if such a concept existed? The Government.
That is just the consequence of having to build large scale 50 story properties. If such a massive building is needed then it's a necessary evil.
I honestly don't understand your point. Whether an economic system favors workers or capital owners is purely a function of unemployment. Once unemployment is low enough inflation will pick up and completely decimate the ability to have an easy return on capital through unproductive endeavors. You're confusing the current system being unfair with the system always being unfair which is absolutely untrue. There is absolutely no guarantee that it will stay like this forever, if there is enough will power.
EDIT: Bonus plot
Zimbabwe had a land reform around the 00s. Mugabe wanted to redistribute the land of current wealthy white land owners because they obtained this land through British colonialism and thus never paid anything to acquire it and black land owners only got the worst land available. At first the government simply purchased farm land and made an agreement with the UK that it should cover some of the costs. So far so good. 3 million hectares were handed over without any big problems. But for some reason this wasn't enough. The plan was to acquire 11 million hectares but it was impossible to finance so violent repossession started.
There are obvious problems with this. First of all, redistributing all land, all at once is a recipe for disaster. The new owners don't get enough time to learn the ropes of farming. Some of them just become absentee farmers and fail to produce any food whatsoever. Others didn't get loans/financing from banks to start their own farm. So they could never buy the necessary equipment to actually run a productive farm. Worst of all, some people merely joined the program for personal enrichment without caring at all about how their farms are doing.
The government conveniently forgot that although the farms were owned by "rich evil" white land owners, the vast majority of the work was done by black people and they were reasonably compensated for their work. Maybe they deserved more money but they did have a job that paid the bills and let them live an average life in Zimbabwe. The land owner might have been a parasite but he was a parasite that cared about its host (the land).
The new black land owners didn't, because they felt entitled to their new possession. After all they fought long and hard for this, they spent a lot of time protesting, suffering from colonialism and so on. In their mind they already put in the hard work that made them worthy of owning the land which is perfectly fine but the way the land had been redistributed caused massive external damage. There are plenty of ways of making it fair for everyone involved, for the new black owners, for the new white owners but nobody cared. They just rallied for a populist political cause.
Remember all the black farm hands? Underutilized farms mean they end up unemployed. The average Zimbabwean consumer? Without food because production crashed. The government? With a huge deficit because the cash crop export industries collapsed and an obligation to import food from foreign countries. People's wealth? Gone because food imports have to be funded through printing money.
Your primary goal as a nation should be to take advantage of these "suckers" (the white land owners/investors) until you are strong enough to stand on your own feet, not kick them out.
I don’t pay a dime for for the property. I don’t pay taxes, I don’t pay for maintenance, I didn’t pay for the cost of building the property, I don’t even pay interest for the loan. I just applied for the loan and my tenants pay for the rest.
Land is made more scarce then it actually is. We all live on land so there is plenty to go around. The artificially induced scarcity comes from the fact that people live on land they don’t own. For this to happen it means Certain people own more land then they need. The extra land is not owned for personal utility, it is bought so that another person has no choice but to pay you money to use the land.
Everyone would jump into the market if they could. The reason why they don’t is because you need to front a lot of money to buy property. So if a house costs a million I can just buy the house and rent it out. I didn’t lose the million because I can always resell the house and I gained rental income on top of that. What prevents people from executing this strategy is that they don’t have 1 million dollars. For a loan, barrier to entry is lowered to the down payment.
It’s not a necessary evil. The most successful economies today involve a combination of capitalism and socialism. An aspect of the economy, like property can be enforced to be made fair. It’s never been tried but in no way would I call it a necessary evil. Either way I benefit from this evil so I’m against it.
You don’t understand because your reasoning is off. Owners of capital are protected from inflation because most owners of capital don’t own cash. Inflation is a phenomenon related to cash lowering in value. Owning assets that are not cash tends to make inflation not apply. Poor people tend to own cash and rich people tend to own assets, hence during inflation poor people tend to lose. Poor people continue working hard while their salaries stay the same and get inflated. The work that they do improves the worth of the company they work for. Who owns that company? The owners of capital. In short the owners of companies pay people less for productive labor.
Then a feedback loop occurs where laborers can no longer purchase as much from a company and the companies begin to lose as well. Overall the feedback loop hits companies later. Inflation hits the workers first during inflation.
But this is besides the point. My point is capital grows faster then productive labor. The main reason why this happens is because capital represents the output of productive labor in aggregate. This output in wealth allows owners of capital to easily climb over barriers for entry and purchase more capital. It’s like playing Texas Holdem, the more chips you have the more power you have.
I read your example, transfer of knowledge is a separate issue. The shock to immediately changing a system also can have bad side effects. I’m not suggesting that the current status quo should be fixed either, nor am I suggesting there is a easy solution. I am saying that in the status quo I benefit from money gifted to me by my tenants while contributing nothing to the economy.
> The monthly instalments were less than the monthly profits.
From my reading of the article, it wasn’t monthly profit but rather monthly revenue.
From the article
> Because the business was already doing more than our monthly payments to the seller, as long as the business didn’t implode (it didn’t ), we’d be able to buy the business with its own revenue.
Right, when put that way it does not make sense (even if the original owner had to put time and effort into it) - but the original owner got to keep a fat chunk of equity + monthly payments so it's somewhat of a fair deal.
One area I have wanted to play in, and started looking at before I ended up in my current job, was to seek out businesses where the owner wanted to sell because they struggled with the costs of scaling.
When I was running my consulting business, I can across several where the path to fixing this was obvious for me, and I offered people to fix their scaling challenge for a percentage of savings or a percentage of the business, but I was starting to look for businesses like this to outright purchase, as there were a number of owners who when faced with this just saw it as too complicated for them to want to deal with.
If I find myself back doing consulting again at some point, I'll likely revisit that, as so many people don't understand how to cut their hosting costs.
This is interesting to me. So would video sites be be a good candidate? High hosting bills leading to low profit margins leading to low valuations. How much can you realistically cut them by?
Potentially. It really depends how well they've done it so far. One site I looked at was an image hosting site, where they unfortunately ended up selling for a pittance because they just didn't have patience to have the work done, but they were at a scale where setting up their own simplistic CDN would have allowed them to cut bandwidth bills by about 70%-90% (ideal thing to look for: anything with huge AWS bandwidth bills, as AWS bandwidth egress is extortionate).
Storage as well was an issue there in that their storage backend was expensively redundant without adding much security. E.g. they could have reduced their number of copies substantially by using a backend using erasure coding. They also could have cut a substantial amount off their hosting bill simply by running an image optimiser on upload.
Overall reduction looked like it would have been ~50%-60% at least. It was also under-monetised in all kinds of ways, but cutting even 30% without any improvement in monetisation would have made that example profitable.
There are a lot of companies out there where hassle causes businesses to get sold for a pittance or even shut down because the owners doesn't have the patience to see a process like that through. I talked to another one - actually an image hoster that would have made a perfect complement to merge into the one I mentioned above - that just shut down while I was talking to the others because he didn't even want to go through the hassle. In the end he just refused to even try selling anything but the domain names.
Figuring out a process to get people like that to sell while still a going concern has lots of potential. Of course there are risks there in terms of guarding against people who are in a rush to sell because they're trying scam you. But also a lot of people who are just burned out or feel they have run out of options and want out and who are grateful for any option that lets them recoup something. For a decent person there's a lot of opportunity to both make a good profit and help people out there. Of course there's also plenty of opportunity to be an asshole and profit even more.
> we stumbled across Notify: a simple Shopify plugin that would pop up at the bottom of a website, displaying a purchase another customer had recently made.
Not only are these kind of pop ups incredibly annoying and an invasion of the purchaser’s privacy, they are also considered to be dark pattern.
I've seen similar Shopify apps that exposed other customers entire order information publicly. Don't trust that every developer implements apps in a perfectly private way.
I don't know if this qualifies as a "dark pattern", but this kind of "social proof" feature that the article is about buying really is hostile to consumers and is nothing to be proud about buying.
This doesn't seem so bad to me. I've enjoyed seeing it at the bottom of sites.
The upside is, it provides some evidence that the site is actually transacting business besides me (that could be fake). And I've clicked on the listings of things other people are buying-- e.g. what does this business mostly sell to people?
If it's a known social proof widget on a known e-commerce platform (for example, Fomo on BigCommerce or Shopify), the odds that it's dishonest are quite low. Shoppers have at least some vague idea that some stores have similar platforms and providers as others.
Do you have a source on that? (It's not exactly uncommon to be obviously fake, e.g. travel sites that show you they sold more rooms in a hotel in the past week than the hotel has)
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that straight out lying about having customers in order to make your product seem better than it is is actually illegal, it feels like it should be covered by the following law in Germany (German):
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__3.html
I would classify it as a dishonest practice, and it would be illegal.
Though they do suggest lying with {random_time_ago}...
Shopify will only approve social proof plugins that use real data.
edit: Indeed, I've confirmed that it doesn't even serve static images, but instead JavaScript injects dynamic HTML based on polled events-- https://imgur.com/a/2S1YHhG I suspect those images you have are samples in the user interface or documentation.
I always just assume it's fake. And if not, I'm pretty sure using my purchase data with my name for that would breach some GDPR or other privacy rules.
Am I the only one who finds the initial email very unprofessional? Everything from the subject line, all lower case, even the closing words. I wouldn't have taken an email like that seriously or would have assumed it was a scam.
The second screenshot of an email also looks highly suspicious from my non-American point of view. The first sentence has "great (meeting you)". The second sentence has "really excited", "greater (potential)" and "would love (to play a role)".
This sounds a lot like a seller financed deal. Hopefully the seller had a secured loan against those installment payments because in the event of default, at least the seller gets his/her company back.
> "Buying up small apps in the Google Chrome or Mac app store."
This is a focus of mine. I've recently acquired a Mac app and I have a hunch that there are a lot of small Mac apps producing small but reliable income.
I didn't want to share this in my comment at the risk of coming across as a self-promoter, but I've started writing about what I look at when evaluating an opportunity.
I don't really mind competition, I'm sure there folks that have been doing what I am for many years now.
If I had to boil it down to a few key points:
- Is the app something I'd use
- Is it something I'm interested in pushing towards "best-in-class". I'm an optimistic person and I know a lot of app acquisitions will end up in milking existing users and adding little value, but I'd like to believe that app acquisitions have the benefit of making apps better overall. Rather than starting from scratch, developers have the opportunity to push forward from a solid base that has achieved some level of product-market fit.
- Does it have something in common with other things I'm working on/ working towards? Sharing tech/marketing/sales efforts will help maximize the time spent on maintenance and growth.
Seems odd the previous owner accepted such a low monthly payment. I guess it required a lot of work? Or perhaps the owner felt the downside risk was substantially higher than it appears?
He got to keep 20%, and the new owners were much more interested in putting in the work for growing the business than he was.
20% of a business that's now more than 5 times the value it was when he sold 80% of it, plus $400k cash, and not having to work on it at all anymore can be a pretty good deal on it's own...
The equity piece is the key. If you sold for a lump sum you're all out and happy. But I imagine if you sell for a monthly payment, you're still emotionally attached.
Would suck to check on how the business is going and regret your decision to sell for a monthly payment with no equity.
It does depend how unscrupulous the buyer is... you may end up being cheated out of your equity.
That said, I like the cash-equity split without the condition of working on the project further yourself. It gives an incentive for the seller to not disappear/become uncontactable...
I am not affiliated at all with them, but I use the website frequently and would hate to see it discontinued or purchased by someone malicious like The Great Suspender was.
>Similar arbitrages exist everywhere. My old roommate for a while was buying Toyota Prius’ and paying people minimum wage to drive them around taking Uber rides. He'd then take the difference between what Uber paid him and what he paid his drivers… often 5-10k a month.
Most veterinarians who buy practices buy their businesses "for free". There is usually a large bank loan and a small seller loan. The deal is structured to pay a decent salary and cover the debt in 10-15 years.
Sure doesn't feel free, though, to have a personal guarantee on a gigantic loan.
LOIs are dangerous documents because, unless drafted by a capable lawyer, they likely create a contract.
If someone asks for a LOI with regards to, say, an equipment purchase, and suggests that it is a “non-binding document”, I halt the deal because they’re probably either unscrupulous or incompetent. In such circumstances a LOI is essentially a badly written purchase order, and the other party may rely on it, and bill you accordingly, and repudiation is actionable.
The document I hope they describe should be more like a Heads Of Agreement, setting out, at most, terms of reference for a deal.
An LoI lays out the understandings of the parties, so they can know whether to proceed and under what terms they should do so. An LoI also creates a backstop of intents in case of legal proceedings. Thirdly, an LoI let's parties define expected remedies in case the deal fails. There may additionally be specific implementation details spelled-out.
I'm sure there may be more reasons, but those are the ones I'm familiar.
It's similar to an engagement proposal for marriage. You aren't legally requiredto get married if you get engaged --- but having an engagement first gets all parties more committed, makes it clear that there will be a next step.
He mentions in the article, it serves to provide some sort of verifiable agreement on the important numbers, and security that the buyer is serious
Details depend on the legal system, but an LoI can have binding clauses (e.g. an exclusivity clause) and it not being binding for the final contract to actually happen doesn't mean it isn't requiring you to be truthful. E.g. if you state that you intend on selling to X (but some things still need to be hashed out which could break the deal), and X on that basis pays an auditor or lawyers to finalize details, and then it comes out that you actually were already in the process of selling to Y and didn't really intend to sell to X, then you might owe X compensation for the costs they incurred based on your misrepresentation - and X has a signed piece of paper to point to as evidence. (And in reverse if X strings you along with misrepresentations)
And the term LoI is somewhat vague - LoIs can also be actual contracts if they aren't carefully worded.
