8/27/24-PR Crisis🔥,Aidan Gomez's Cohere, Who is Target🎯?
Friend, if you have to swallow a frog🐸, you don't want to look at that thing too long.🤢
Welcome back. In a busy world we can be distracted with the trivial many things or we can focus on The Vital Few.
Something that I am thinking about
How to Manage a Corporate/CEO/Politician Public Relation Crisis-
Public Relation Crisis Occur all the Time, and here are a few from recent memory-
Crowdstrike 🦅, Microsoft Blue Screen of Death
Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster🎟️
Snowflake❄️ failure to force MFA on customers.
OpenAI and Sam Altman🤣
United Airlines✈️ Passenger Removal
Bud Light🍺 and a nation drunk on culture wars
Countless food recalls🍜🍗🍝 due to food safety
The only thing for certain is that a new PR crisis is waiting around the corner. There is a basic recipe for how to manage the crisis. Recipe → Process → Steps, you get the point. Although the cartoon process at the top makes me laugh, a serious and battle proven version is below. Take a moment and review the steps.
I am not going to review each and every step although they are all important, I do want to spend a moment on the first 4 steps taken together. If the media is creating a circus, the organization has to act ASAP, but they need to get to the root cause of the problem. Until the organization responds publicly the media is going to fill the information gap with noise, rumors, and negative nonsense. Round the clock corporate urgency is required.
The problem might be ugly and embarrassing, but ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Uncover the root cause, ensure you are 99.99% correct and communicate to the public ASAP. Like the man said “Friend, if you have to swallow a frog🐸, you don't want to look at that thing too long🤢. It ain't gonna get any prettier. (Just get it done!)”
The final point I wanted to emphasize is the need for the organization to respond to questions and concerns. Spend more than enough time addressing customer and stakeholder concerns in PUBLIC. Before customers can move forward they want to feel like you have heard them.
Finally, cross your fingers and hope a new PR Crisis strikes some other organization so that your time in the public spotlight is over. 😉
Investing, Companies, Market Past/Future
(I invest in Companies, not in stocks.)
Interesting companies that hosted earnings results or information sessions since my last edition that I reviewed-
Technology- AMAT 0.00%↑ , SNOW 0.00%↑ , ADI 0.00%↑ , CSCO 0.00%↑
Housing / Banking - TOL 0.00%↑ , HD 0.00%↑ , LOW 0.00%↑
Others- WMT 0.00%↑ , TGT 0.00%↑
(With data and charts it is not what you look at, it is what you see that matters.)
Podcasts
50 Min Pod🎧- 20VC with Aidan Gomez. Aidan Gomez is the Co-founder and CEO at Cohere, one of the leading AI platforms for enterprise. I found Aidan to be one of the most down to earth and clear speaking LLM foundation model CEOs. He is not trying to impress you with his brilliance, he is just answering questions honestly and direct. Aidan was friendly and authentic.😀
Cohere raised over $1BN from some of the best with their last round pricing the company at a whopping $5.5BN. Prior to Cohere, Aidan co-authored the infamous paper “Attention is All You Need,” which introduced the groundbreaking Transformer architecture. He also collaborated with a number of AI luminaries, including Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean, during his time at Google Brain, where the team focused their efforts on large-scale machine learning.
Videos
13 Minute video. Why Are Texas Interchanges So Tall?
Massive highway interchanges (more than 100 feet tall😯) are a nice reminder of our capacity for grand designs and ambitious projects. For all my engineer, civil engineer, math and science fans, Grady from the video below does an amazing job of explaining infrastructure engineering that we find all around us. [If you squint, road design resembles electronic circuit design, just the scales are different.]
Books and Articles since my last edition
(Reading Great books is like a conversation with the finest minds of the past.- Descartes. If I get bored of a book I quit and move on.)
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher Nonfiction, Memoir
It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette Nonfiction , Business
Here is a link to many of the books I have read and my 1-5 star rating- Goodreads Books Read
Wild Card🃏
Who is Target🎯? In big box retail, be 1st or be 2nd, or be GONE!
If you shop at a Target, great. My family shops at a Target from time to time. But, most of the time we shop at Walmart, Amazon and Costco.
In my 8/29/23 post I wrote about how Brutal👊🏽 US retail has been over time. (Link here)
Why does this keep happening to established recognizable companies? Too much growth, lack of innovation, bureaucracy, disinterested future management, lack of customer obsession.
I would also add that retail margins are thin, the capex investments to maintain and upgrade several thousand stores is significant, and the leading competitors are fierce. Moreover, I believe there is a Pareto power law at play where large amounts of cash flow to the top 2 players and the smaller competitors are left with scraps.
Target is presently being discussed in the finance news as a turn around story. I would ask you to think of it as a value trap. In my opinion, investing in Target is like lighting money on fire🔥. I don’t want you to burn up your money.
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Disclaimer: All of my posts are for informational purposes only. I might own some of the companies discussed in these posts. This is NOT a recommendation to buy or sell securities discussed. Please do your own work before investing your money.
Reading Theft of Fire, enjoying.
I totally agree with Target, I think they are a bit of a ticking time bomb. I do not think they have enough value drivers to set them apart from the big competitors.