by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting, Life
Yet another year of the black swan April 25, 2022 by Lance Whenever I lose more than a million dollars I feel compelled to sit down and think about what lessons I learned. I paid for them. The year of 2008 was, alas, highly educational. I remember the story about...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, DARPA, Technology
The Time has Come for Style and Fashion in Electronics. Electronics as Fashion. April 25, 2022 by Lance “4:37,” replied an electrical engineer as he consulted his nondescript black watch blinking off the seconds. He was, of course, right. He could have...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, DARPA, Research, Technology
Needed: Digital Assistants That See and Hear by Please do not hand me a saw when I am holding a nail. Do not tell me about restaurants in Pittsburgh when I am gathering my luggage in San Francisco Airport. I want the services of a competent assistant who understands...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Research, Strategy, Technology
Poetry and Cleantech Investing April 25, 2022 by Lance I am occasionally asked by friends about prospects for all sorts of “green” technologies to have an impact on satisfying the world’s energy consumption. It is difficult to get ones mind around the scale of the...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting
For several years I have searched for cycle-independent metrics to analyze the performance of companies in the semiconductor equipment industry. The problem I was trying to address was how to judge the performance of businesses in the presence of violently cyclical...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting, General Management, Product Development
Over time, successful businesses develop models of how they operate that are self-consistent and self-perpetuating. For instance, one company will focus on differentiated products that command high gross margins while another will focus on operational excellence with...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting, Strategy
Suppose I proposed to you a stock purchase strategy of the form, “when the stock is at a high or medium price, buy it, but when it is historically low, don’t,” what would you think? Doesn’t sound very good, does it? It is the logical inverse of dollar-cost...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting
Ever wonder what the relationship is among growth, profitability, and stock price? Below, I try to calculate the relationship from first principles. Obviously, it is based on an idealized model, but I think you will find that it gives some insight. First let’s...
by Lance | Apr 25, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting
As budget season approaches the Company must decide which of its strategic concepts will be crystallized into real strategies by allocating to them our scarce resources. While the goal is to maximize shareholder value, the need for crisp decisions inevitably leads to...
by Lance | Apr 22, 2022 | Business, Finance and budgeting, General Management
How much is a company worth? What is its “proper” market capitalization? After adjusting for debt, receivables, etc., one formal way to think about the company’s value (its equity) is that it is the net present value of the profits from all future products. That...
by Lance | Mar 15, 2022 | Business, Product Development |
Almost all engineering-oriented companies have a product development processes with phase gates. These phases generally include, at least, investigation, development, alpha-testing, beta-testing, production, and obsolescence. Each company generally customizes the...
by Lance | Jan 11, 2022 | Business, Product Development |
For most technology companies, products are their lifeblood. A lot goes into making this happen, but if one steps back and looks at the process, the mathematics that is perhaps most applicable to a company as a product-generation-machine is queueing theory. In my...
