The Profile but for companies

Kyle’s own idea-tag, attached to passages in the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters where Warren Buffett tells the story of a company the way Polina Marinova’s newsletter The Profile tells the story of a person. He tags Buffett’s narrative of State Farm — the semi-retired Illinois farmer who launched it in 1922 to beat the “haughty institutions in New York, Philadelphia and Hartford,” eventually amassing one of the largest tangible net worths in American business — as the kind of deep, narrative company portrait he’d want a “Profile but for companies” to produce. A second tagged note reframes investing itself: “Think of it as building a relationship with a company.” The thread treats company-building stories as biography, worth studying as counter-evidence to business-school dogma.

Jared Sleeper on getting up to speed on a company — September 24th, 2020

A checklist from Jared Sleeper, verbatim:

• Jared Sleeper on how to get up to speed on a company The Profile but for companies
  • Review past notes
  • Get pricing cold
  • Identify top competitors
  • Read latest transcript Q&A
  • Check Glassdoor
  • Check G2Crowd
  • Check Google Trends
  • Other unique data?
  • Guidance v. performance
  • Check LinkedIn hiring
  • Chat with IR
  • Make sure all the given data is in the model
  • Tune model row by row
  • Identify key drivers for revenue modeling
  • TAM Analysis
  • Write down key questions
  • Key people and impressions
  • Trading dynamics- share structure/lock-up,etc.
  • What would be unique way to get familiar / deep here?
  • Watch a demo and/or demo the product

Where this appears

• Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters — tagged on Buffett’s State Farm story and on the note that investing is “building a relationship with a company.”