Our weekly thoughts and general ramblings about everything related to business – from industries and investments to management and operations.

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The Sound of Silence

We recently learned that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was known for her awkward pauses (to be fair, probably not awkward for her, just awkward for her counter-parties.) From a 2013 The New Yorker article: "During conversations, she is given to taking lengthy pauses. This can be unnerving, especially at the Supreme Court, where silence only amplifies the sound of ticking clocks.

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What We Learned About Capital Allocation at the Canucks Game

We recently decided to pay down a large chunk of debt at one of our portfolio companies ahead of its scheduled amortization.  The company in question had a fantastic 2017 and generated significant excess free cash, which put us in the welcome position of having to determine the most prudent allocation of that capital.  Our options in this regard were relatively straightforward

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Weekly Thoughts: Technical Debt

Here is something that caught our eye this week: Technical Debt Deliberate, Inadvertent, Reckless and Prudent We recently had an interesting conversation about Technical Debt with a rep from one of our industry ERP vendors.  In software development, coders will often take short cuts in the way they build their codebase in order to ship the product sooner.  While this might be the right business strategy in the early days when a company is trying to establish itself, gain customers, and generate initial revenue and earnings, the short cuts taken often limit the ability of the software to gain additional users beyond certain thresholds,

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Weekly Thoughts: Chenheads

Here is something that caught our eye this week: Chenheads Turning obscure markets into scalable businesses Back in 2015, we wrote a piece about the sneaker market.  As a reminder, some of us think of shoes just as… well, shoes, while others get pretty passionate about their footwear. (OMG, that is a great pair of Air Jordan 3 Retro OG Black/Cement!!!) Since a key component of this market is that supply of new product is limited by the manufacturers, a healthy second-hand market exists for people — mostly self-described “sneakerheads” — to buy and sell sneakers.  When we first looked into the market, this trading activity was

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