Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4 items tagged “investing”

2012

What are the best tech conferences & meetups to attend as an investor?

We have a good list of upcoming Startup related events on Lanyrd here: Startup conferences and events—including both iCal and RSS feeds and the ability to sign up and receive email updates. New events are being added by our community all the time.

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Why are web applications more popular than desktop applications with investors?

How often do you install a new desktop application? How often do you try out a new web application?

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Which angels or VCs like to invest in fitness companies?

The easiest way to answer this question is to take a look at existing fitness companies and find out who their investors are. CrunchBase and AngelList are invaluable for this, but many companies also list their investors on their own sites.

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2009

You can buy an iPod nano on Apple, Best Buy, etc. for about $149. Amazon sells it for $134. That’s probably cost price. It turns out that Amazon can sell almost everything at cost price and still make a product because of volume. It’s all down to the Negative Operating Cycle. Amazon turns over its inventory every 20 days whereas Best Buy takes 74 days. Standard retail term payments take 45 days. So Best Buy is in debt between day 45 and day 74. Amazon, on the other hand, are sitting on cash between day 20 and day 45. In that time, they can invest that money. That’s where their profit comes from.

Jared Spool, via Jeremy Keith # 22nd June 2009, 5:13 pm