This will be Friday night fast – have outdone myself in worst possible post time. I am out next week and loads of feedback from the newsletter on EGC (Employee Generated Content) and Staples Baddie on social media.
Two good questions – liability and incentives for EGC. Legal question: I will invite Robbins firm to answer Sept 3rd at Porsche. As far as monetary incentives – no. Blows up the model – nothing but a paid spokesperson.
Lesson: Sell EGC as ‘Intrinsic’.
A couple of EGC incoming side swipes at me – “This would not work for my B2B premium brand” – “EGC does not apply to me”.
Well, Musk’s employees at SpaceX differ. They marketize Musk and EGC brilliantly.
Houston, People Solve Problems.
Live Rounds
Live Rounds – Salesforce is taking heavy hits – great time to negotiate with them – nothing longer than 12 months – 80% discounts.
A smart 55 person company put a boot in their ass and Salesforce founder, Marc Benioff, is running around shouting two things: “We have time and we are AI ready” not knowing if he said, “We are AI Native” would put $500m on his market cap.
I don’t have time to get into what is AI Native – but those two words helped pop Groupon’s stock from $10.09 to $30.00 a share.
In movie Apocalypse Now, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall’s character) shouts my favorite line – “Give us some breathing room” as the Vietnam tree lines were blown back 200 yards from napalm bombs.
New Apocalypse Now is traders fear that companies will replace their software subscriptions with cheaper AI tools. It’s hammering not just publicly traded stocks but the valuations of private ones too.
Meet Dave Codrea at our next Porsche event. His company, Greenleaf Management (which has around 55 employees), was facing standard enterprise software bloat, shelling out roughly $100,000 annually for Salesforce’s CRM platform.
The Solution: Using Claude Code (Anthropic’s agentic AI coding tool) alongside Replit, Codrea built a fully customized, bespoke CRM application specifically tailored to their property management workflows.
The Result: They successfully ditched Salesforce, dropping their software overhead from six figures to just $300 a month to run and maintain their own AI-built applications.
Recommend: Buy CRM dirt cheap.
Hawkeye: This is not panic mode, but watching it like a hawk – international capital allocators are on the margins, yet just enough to get our attention, only $26 dollars out of $100 going to the US, lowest since 2020, and fell $10.00 in 16 months.
Here is how to hedge: buy some quality stocks from South Korea.
Rule of law, checks and balances and independent judiciary system front and center of admired American capitalism. But don’t worry about it too much; our taxes are low.
I hope you bought Groupon. It jumped like crazy. I know the CEO. Very serious, disciplined, and a good guy.
“Thanks I did u r my stock mkt guru” – Ray S.
When I sent a message two months ago to buy at $12 per share, it was not from studying stock charts or insider illegal info.
I looked at the business and said this company has all the attributes of a native AI business, and then saw the board approve a major restructuring plan to reduce total employees from 1734 to around 1200 in phase one – remind you Groupon once had 11,000 employees at its peak.
Here’s the deal with AI – this is a company that might have 40 people in 5 years with triple revenue.
Another Acopalypse. What else is new.
Well Iran. I’m worried that I’m the only one worried. Iran got the goldmine in the MOU and why did they walk away from running the table and breaking the bank?
My nightmare: Nuclear Weapons.
Rock Bass and Sheepshead fish1. I’ll see you at the Jetties.
Sheepshead fish 2
Cliff Notes:
1. Sheepshead is a marine fish famous for its distinct, human-like teeth.
