Back of Mind

social media leads to more efficient distribution of human capital

Hello again friends.  It’s been an interesting and far too long stretch since I last posted.  I won’t make excuses for the length of my absence, but say by way of explanation that I find myself missing a lovely grandmother and functional right leg since we last spoke.  However, March is here and I just moved this morning to a weaker pain med, so let’s get thinking.

Today’s post was really first sparked by my primarily voyeuristic participation in a circle of VCs that choose to live largely online.  Probably the best example of this would be Fred Wilson, who has built his own and Union Square Venture’s reputation as elite investors largely through his blog, A VC.  His willingness to open USV’s investment strategies and his daily thoughts to the world allowed for whomever cared in the world to judge his quality.  This openness and direct access to the quality of one’s ideas, thoughts, character has fundamentally changed the way that human capital moves in the places this online openness has penetrated first.

A friend of mine told me a month or two ago that he screens requests for his time by that person’s online presence (first page of Google).  Just have a LinkedIn profile, your co.’s bio and your college 800m medley results?  Sorry, no dice.  You need to have something that shows the quality of your thinking and hopefully in an impressive way.  As Charlie O’Donnell tweeted awhile ago, if you’re not blogging I assume that you have nothing interesting to say (not sure what that says about my February).  Seriously though, the ability to read pages and pages of blog posts and tweets created by a person provides an unparalleled level of granularity to anyone that wants to see it and, more importantly, in many circles the lack of online presence reflects negatively.

Some, like my friend Sam Lessin, think in the next couple of years we’ll see a huge backlash to the lack of online privacy as people realize they’ve put too much info online, which is probably right in some instances, but the value created by developing a rich online persona will not be diminished.

For example, on StockTwits, a Twitter-based service that allows day traders to share thoughts on particular equities and trades, a few users have separated themselves from the masses and developed huge followings.  In only a few months, users such as UpsideTrader have built a stellar reputation among extremely influential investors such as Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon because new tools allowed them to open their quality to the world.

This has real-world implications.  If UpsideTrader, for example, wanted to raise a day-trading fund, I assure you that Roger and Howard would seriously consider investing, as would his other followers.  Fred’s example above is another good one.  In hiring more broadly, it’s increasingly common practice to survey a candidate’s online presence before hiring.  While at Bain, we looked at Facebook profiles primarily to check for offensive pictures, but I think increasingly it will be a positive instead of a negative.

The other interesting ‘real world’ implication is the actual and valuable networks that are now created online based solely on the quality of the information you share.  In the past, it was perhaps alumni mixers or industry events that were best suited to aggregate similarly minded people, however with the advent of a lively online community people can find and judge others far more efficiently.

As with most of my posts, there are far more loose ends here than I’d like and elements to flush out, but frankly I really just wanted to get writing again, find this topic fascinating and wonder how my professional networks and opportunities will be influenced in 10-15 years as society continues to share more of itself online.  My sense is that it will allow the cream to rise to the top far more efficiently than it does now, in all sorts of ways, and I think that’s an incredibly positive thing for our economic engine.

Imagine when instead of the inefficient signalling of University/GPA/job experience for intelligence and severely limited interviews for subject matter enthusiasm is replaced by a demonstrated intelligence and subject matter depth via a blog, participation in online communities (regular comments on relevant articles via a single profile, ala Disqus, attending relevant meet ups), examples of work product on SlideShare, etc.  The late-blooming, but extremely intelligent HS graduate will have a forum to move beyond the limitations they created as teenagers and be much more effectively utilized.  The talented designer that went into a more regularly-incomed job will be able to simultaneously pursue that interest.  I think there’s enormous potential from both a macro economic and a personal utility perspective.

Update:  my friend Andrew Parker recently wrote a post on the significance of his ‘web presence’ in his Union Square Ventures hiring process, among other things.  Article here

1pm

Macro I Dig: Compiling novel datasets

First, I’d like to note that I’m planning to create several running ‘series’, one of which is ’Macro I Dig’.  This is partially because I like little gimmicks like this as a reader myself - you know what you’re getting just by reading the title, it’s efficient - and partially because it serves as a nice metatag of sorts so that when I get around to putting search on this blog I can easily pull up all of a series’ articles.

If you think about it, the first wave of data to come online was data that existed in the physical world and was used in ways in which the physical world used it.  MenuPages put all of the local menus you had in your drawer online, newspapers put their paper content online, e-com sites uploaded product specifications, and the data was used just had it had been in the physical world, though benefitting from the efficiency of online/IT capabilities (access, storage, search).  There were valuable companies built and it was probably the right place to start.  What I’m interested in though, are datasets that have not been compiled.

The falling cost of processing and storage (Hooray Amazon) and quality labor (Hooray developing countries) allows start-ups to collect and analyze data that has never been assembled before.  An example?  How about the 24/7 geographical data collected via your cell phone or nav system?  Carriers vastly underestimate the value of that rich dataset and are not properly capitalizing on it, though I imagine will get smart when phone app developers are killing it, many using geo-specific features.  Think about the hugely wide range of uses (and therefore revenue streams) of knowing where you are and how long it took you to get there at roughly all times, if you carry your phone around nearly as much as I do. Another example I think you’ll see much more in the next 5 years is biological readings.  The rich trove of data produced by even the most rudimentary readings: heartbeat, breathing, temperature, is valuable for the obvious health prevention/diagnosis purposes but also the direct-to-consumer fitness market.  Small, lightweight sensors that can upload data online are already in the market, what needs to be developed are the incredible online apps that make runners want to strap them on when they work out.

The other critical dimension is obviously to what degree replicating a given data set is difficult or cost-effective.  Geo data is of the best variety, impossible to replicate, as unless I’m carrying around two phones, whoever owns the towers or satellites that are receiving my signal are the only source of that data.  If you happen to have a widely useful and proprietary dataset, email me and we’ll get you some capital.  Most likely however, it will be the case that a company’s capabilities can be replicated and the issue is cost.  Build or buy.

In some cases, the cost is developing a compelling value proposition for customers such that they provide a company the data.  Amazon has an incredibly valuable dataset of transactions and personal information because they provide excellent product selection, functionality and ease of use to online shoppers.  Mint has a potentially invaluable dataset of spending patterns because they did the same for personal finance (update: like this newly released data).  Facebook has a rough sense of the social graph because they provide new ways to find and connect with friends.  Google knows what you’re interested in because they effectively find you content.  This is the way you want to get data – providing a service or functionality that improves with scale and around which you can build a brand and competitive differentiation.

In others, the cost is gathering the data.  The MenuPages example above comes to mind and the way in which they failed to appreciate that their database bought them only temporary traffic on which they needed to build differentiation.  Quickly however, competitors built similar datasets, took traffic and built features to add value with that traffic, such as user reviews.  If you’re in this box, figure out quickly how to get into the one above because, irrespective of how savvy your collection techniques are, with success you’re sure to attract smart competitors.  Harden a first-mover advantage to a competitive barrier.

I occasionally spend time thinking about datasets that have yet to be captured, as part of my efforts to become filthy rich, and certainly welcome any thoughts on those with a favorable mix of high utility, scarce sources and a compelling consumer/business value proposition to capture it.  If you have a company in mind, even better.

Personally I would love to find a way to compile and organize collective human wisdom.  Not at a practical level – a space well-covered by UGC how-to sites – but at a deeper and more theoretical level.  I would love to know the keys to a successful marriage from 10 couples together 40+ years, the regrets of men who had achieved career success vs. those that had prioritized other aspects of life, and a hundred other critical things we’re all navigating in life with the help of a select few.  As a culture, we’ve moved away from valuing the experiences of our elders (even the term, with its deferential tone, feels strained), but experiential wisdom retains immense value.  If anyone thinks they have the flywheel to capture this data (there are many obstacles), let me know and we’ll start a company together.  Until then, happy dataset hunting.

4pm

Why studios are getting the sharp end of the secular trend stick and how VC relates

We’re in the first stages of video studios’ diminishing control over producing video content, in the same way labels have lost control of music in the last decade.  Brands are realizing that a confluence of trends reduces the importance of studios and allows advertisers to directly fund content, as opposed to indirectly and inefficiently through the studios.  Let’s think about the core competencies both labels and studios bring to the process of profitability producing video and music content.

First, they provide up-front financing in a specialized market with a high failure rate though a few spectacular successes.  In some ways, labels are not unlike venture capital LPs, though with vastly different, and I would think more subjective, ways of assessing opportunities.  Extending it a bit more, VCs and labels/studios can be thought of as specialized lending vehicles with far more interesting risk analysis than credit scores (admittedly seeing bands live is decidedly cooler than evaluating start-ups) and commanding returns commiserate with the high risk.

However, the steady fall in the price of shooting, producing, and distributing music and video (and IT more broadly) has made providing the up-front capital both less strategic and more accessible to competing investors, whether that be friends & family, a PE/hedge fund (interesting WSJ article on that here), or the advertisers themselves.  Similarly, there are those that point to the falling cost of starting a company as a death knell for VC (at least in certain sectors).

Second, the studios function as advertising and marketing engines for the talent and content.  Whether getting a record radio play or a film into a prestigious festival, the studios and labels provide historically indispensable exposure.  If you think of that function simply as providing indispensable exposure, there’s a clear parallel to the value VCs bring to portfolio companies with their Rolodex.

However, the explosion in online radio stations, music discovery tools, streaming music sites, on the music side, and video hosting sites, online video distributors (TubeMogul’s first business model), on the video side, has given the talent so many more tools to distribute their content and build a community around it than were available even 5 years ago and they’re constantly expanding and improving.

Moving to VC, fortunately I think we have a more sustainable competitive barrier on this front.  The access VCs (hopefully) provide is to a small set of relevant, intelligent and influential people whose attention is hard to get.  We got this question as a panel at the VC session of Lessin’s Brooklyn Future Group - “Doesn’t LinkedIn, etc. make VC contacts much less valuable?” - to which we all quickly replied something along the lines of:  no, because anyone worth reaching likely ignores random LinkedIn connections or emails.  We all have the same number of minutes to digest information as we did five years ago and will in another five, irrespective of how many ways you can pump it to people and in what volume.

Finally, studios and labels add value by evaluating the talent/content that should (in terms of profit potential) be funded, basically doing their version of due diligence.  Unfortunately for them, tools like Hype Machine in music or just the various traffic/buzz/blog analytics cos. make it so much easier to make an educated guess at what consumers are reacting positively too.  I genuinely believe that if an investor funded the highest rated un-signed artist on Hype Machine once a month they would outperform most labels.  If I’m right, that’s obviously a problem for labels.  Fortunately, once again, VCs have a more defensible position IMHO, as crowd-sourcing techniques have been much less successful and, probably because, it’s a more complex analysis than whether people will like and buy something.

So what do I think this means?  First, that although there are some strong parallels between the challenges facing studios and VCs, a more specialized selection process and unique exposure to key stakeholders will maintain a healthy, if smaller, VC industry.

Second, studios will go through a contraction process similar to the labels, though less severe because comparatively high capital costs for feature films will keep most competing capital out and margins high.

So what do these labels and studios of the future resemble?  For one thing, there’s an opportunity to flip the process in ad-supported video FROM studio chooses and funds project - marketing engine gets project exposure - advertisers buy ads from studio TO advertiser funds project - new leaner studio (NLS) assembles/chooses talent - NLS leverages free online distribution and marketing channels to promote project - advertiser uses ads as desired and owns content rights. This is a fundamental shift for the studio from the capital-providing project manager to a role player servicing the project manager, now the capital source (advertiser in this case).  The value prop for advertisers is creating precisely the content they want along all dimensions (demographic, style, cultural lean), profiting from the content they’re financing anyway, engaging with their users in a new way and giving studios a much smaller piece of the pie.  Creative destruction at work my friends.

There was a great article in MediaPost two weeks ago on the growing prevalence of this model and another today about a Kraft-financed web series.  It’s a radical shift in the content production model and I’m convinced we’re in the 3rd inning, not the 8th.  For an early vision into this ‘new leaner studio’, check out what Stuart McLean and the other smart guys at Content & Co. are up to - exciting stuff. (disclosure: we’re an investor - gotta throw a portfolio company love when it’s topically relevant, right?)

5pm

Wealth and Utility

Before I begin, I must give props to my friend Sam Lessin for sourcing this line of thought with his Christmas post (4th day of Hanukkah, whatever Sam).  Basically the question posed is what your wealth vs. utility graph looks like.  However, Sam is a little more concerned with changes in this graph over time due to macro trends (increasingly cheap access to people and information), whereas I’d like to probe a little deeper on how these graphs operate and also suggest that there’s a third axis.

First, looking at different renderings of the wealth vs. utility graph seems to me precisely the kind of introspective thinking that we should collectively be undertaking as a country after the recent period of conspicuous consumption.  Said more simply, is more really better?  As Sam alludes to with some of his graph suggestions, at least at certain points that answer may be no.  I’d even suggest there are points at which more wealth decreases utility - Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems anyone?  Given diminishing marginal returns I’m sure most of us are comfortable saying that there’s not much utility in your 1,000,000,001th dollar, but I’m talking about levels of consumption and wealth that are significantly more tangible, i.e. the difference between making $500k/yr and $1m/yr.  I’m not convinced that for a wide swath of humanity the difference between these figures drives any substantive utility, but also convinced that that swath isn’t paying enough attention to their utility to question the Western/capitalist/American notion that more wealth = more happiness.

Inherent in this discussion is your definition of utility, which is conveniently impossible to define generically.  For me, I think it’s some combination of joy,  satisfaction, and impact but the way in which that translates into real world decisions like splitting time between friends, family and romance, between work and leisure etc. is likely not worth getting into.  Let’s just say that everything that effects you in anyway over which you have control impacts it.

Sam’s discussion re: cheap access to people, knowledge, etc. above really speaks to the degree that macro changes influence how much wealth must be traded for a particular type of utility, in this case connecting with people and knowledge.  Personally, Sam’s example resonates as the idea of spending a lifetime in poverty with an internet connection is vastly more appetizing (> utility) than without.  Continuing down this path a bit, you can see that government safety nets, or lack thereof, also influence this tradeoff.  I believe the difference in the unemployment rate between Western European and American youth, for example, points to this influence, though admittedly there are a plethora of causes.

That example leads nicely into the third axis that I’d propose, the wealth of one’s peers (as self-defined).  If you think about it as the z-axis, a person for whom other’s wealth doesn’t matter would have a flat surface front and back, whereas for others there would be a large variance in wealth required to reach a given utility, dependent on other’s wealth.  I think this is the other half of the Western European - American discrepancy, the social expectations for young adults.  Quite frankly, if many of my friends were living at home after college and waiting tables I may have seriously considered joining them.  I’m very glad I didn’t, but I may have.

One last concept that I’ll throw out here is the idea of chronological utility, which is to say the variability of utility over time.  I think at some level this has a lot to do with the zeal with which some covet wealth, though I’m probably giving them too much credit as a group.  My point here is that to the degree that utility is tied to things that could increase dramatically in out-years, such as healthcare, taking care of one’s family, etc. it may be totally rational to significantly exceed the wealth necessary to make one happy at any given time in order to insure a baseline happiness level in the future.

There’s a lot to parse through here and I have many more thoughts, but I’ve already gone on long enough.

6pm

What will VC look like in 10 years?

Silicon Alley Insider has a disheartening article today titled “The Venture Capital Crash” that reminded me of a conversation I had today with Howard of First Round about the difficulty VC firms are having raising new funds.

At issue was not whether the VC industry will shrink, both in terms of AUM and firms (it will), but whether or not the current turmoil would effectively separate great, good and poor VC firms when distributing new capital.  A unique aspect of VC, unlike most other private asset classes (see: hedge fund, LBO fund), is that once we receive a commitment from a limited partner that capital is ‘locked-up’ for generally 10 years.  Of course there are ways around that commitment, such as simply not providing the capital during a VC firm’s capital call, but that’s rare and gets really ugly for all parties involved (the VC can then sue the LPs, etc.)  Now firms will manage multiple funds at a given time, but there’s still a reasonably significant lag between fundraisings, say 3-5 years on average.  What this means is that the success of a given VC firm in raising a new fund, and therefore continuing to exist, is related to both the timing of the fundraise and the quality of the firm - which depends on performance of previous funds, quality of the team, sector expertise, etc. etc.  So, while the top 80% of VC firms fundraising may be funded in the best of times (1999), only the top 10% of VC firms may be funded in the worst (now).  And given a firm’s ability to make a fund last if economic conditions are poor, i.e. the firm originally intended to fundraise a new fund in 3 years but they slow their investing pace such that it will be 5, there’s really quite a bit of inefficiency and lag built into the system.

I’m sure there will be additional efficiency (which I’d define as having the best VCs managing VC money) added to the system via firms grabbing up great VCs from firms that shut down, secondary markets for LP interests in failed funds (provides continuing price points for shut-down firms such that they maintain a performance record and good firms can re-raise), etc. however I’m not convinced the industry will maintain its best talent through a downturn as well as other asset classes.

So what does all of that mean?  First I think it speaks fundamentally to a bigger boom and bust cycle than you’d experience in other markets.  On the boom side it takes longer for capital to work through the system and be redistributed, and on the bust side if firms are not eliminated in an efficient process, but instead partially due to timing, then the smaller pool of VC firms remaining will include those that should be shut down, will not be able to fundraise, and therefore will shrink the number of firms beyond the appropriate level.

Back to the title, what I think this says about VC in 7-10 years is that the industry will be poised for new firms to take advantage of the over-correction described above.  Why wouldn’t that situation simply result in more funds being allocated to the remaining quality firms?  I thought you’d never ask.

There’s quite a bit of discussion about the ‘death of VC’ due to the reduced capital intensity of starting a company.  New tools such as Amazon EC2/S3, Google Apps, and Elance, as well as simply the not-so-slow and steady reduction in the cost of broadband/hardware/software are pointed to in these proclamations.  I’m not sure whether or not I agree with this point-of-view.

Sidebar:  Could it not be that the first stage of a company is cheaper, but the growing of it is not? In which case VCs would simply need more data points to invest OR Do we think then that the total M&A budget will shrink accordingly? And if not doesn’t that just mean that 1 in 1000 companies hits a homerun instead of 1 in 100 - with that multiple being driven by the reduction multiple in capital intensity - resulting in more companies funded by VCs but the same amount of capital going into the process because fundamentally the amount of capital is determined by risk-adjusted return, and that’s based on the exit market? OR We just see a shift to different markets, e.g. cleantech - though in this specific case I think most VCs are WAY over their skis).

Irrespective of whether the above thoughts are right or wrong, I do believe that there will be more start-ups due to the reduced cost of starting a company, which will at the very least expand the number of investment professionals within early-stage VC as one investor can only meet so many companies and hold so many board seats.

I’m (currently) most interested in whether or not the pruning of VC firms happens efficiently, and not to what degree that pruning needs to occur, and curious as to your thoughts.

6pm

Yahoo makes first product in 10 years I want to use!

In an encouraging sign that there are those within Yahoo that still pay attention to the online tech space, check out the new service below:

Vik Singh of Yahoo’s BOSS team has just launched a new search engine called TweetNews that mashes up Yahoo News stories with some of the hottest topics on Twitter. The result is a news engine that is significantly more timely than common news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo’s standard news site.

Article here

Apparently they’re currently beyond Goog App Engine serving quota, so I haven’t played with it, but the unfortunate events on USAir #1549 today highlight the value of Twitter for breaking news.

I’ve gone from using Twitter search (Summize) once a week to daily to multiple times per day in the last few months.  It brings me a type of information, personal and chronological, that I can’t find elsewhere and I think it’s likely the feature that justifies Twitters’ valutions to-date.  That being said, there is WAY too much clutter in Twitter’s current search results, as I found out today, and I’d love to see more companies alongside Yahoo and @BreakingNewsOn (and I’m sure others I’m not aware of) parsing Tweets.  It’s an increasingly rich and unique database.

7pm

Online data increases exponentially and dollars linearly, aka why ad networks' business model sucks

Though perhaps an odd topic for the inaugural post, in keeping with my newly created blog title, Back of Mind (thoughts? feedback?), I thought I’d start with what is on the back of my mind, and that is my distaste for the ad network business model as an investor.

Those last three words are an important distinction because I am extremely excited about the future of online media that the ad network model facilitates.  Fundamentally, ad networks consolidate the long tail of small online properties’ audiences in order to more effectively monetize them, thereby increasing the revenue of small online properties and creating a more compelling value proposition for the owners of those properties to continue or expand their efforts.  I believe we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of this democratization of media and I’m extremely excited about the possibilities of the 8th and 9th.  For a good example of where we’re heading, at least in the short-term, check out localized news on outside.in (full disclosure: a Village portfolio company).  Ad networks, in some manifestation, are a critical element of creating the economic conditions to see this trend to fruition, and for that I am grateful.  It’s worth pointing out here that I also believe ad networks have a lot of room to improve and that they need to given the economics Fred Wilson discusses re: his well-followed blog here.

All the above being said, I don’t get the wave of investing into ad networks.  VC Journal reports $220m into 23 networks in 2008, up from sub-$100m years from 2004-2007.  Here’s my rub against ad networks - there are no effective competitive barriers besides scale (which almost always exists as a barrier) and there is very little fundmental value being created, i.e. outside of cash flow.

On the first point, lack of competitive barriers, I’ll finally get around to tying back to the title of this post.  The majority of ad networks seek to leverage data to optimize and target ads.  There are two ways to differentiate yourself with that model, gather proprietary data or optimize/target ads better than the next guy.  I believe both are unsustainable.  First lets look at data - 1) the amount of data that is created online in a given day and, more importantly, collected and stored, is growing exponentially (not in the strict sense, but you get my point).  The number of sites an average user visits, the ways in which you can interact on those sites, the sophistication with which publishers/tools collect and use that data and simply the hours of internet use have all growth enormously in the last 5 years and I think we all expect that trend to continue.  However, the amount of online ad dollars against which that data can target is growing linearly, at best.  What this means is that the number of types of data (social, search, contextual, behavioral, etc.), sources of data, and simply amount of data create an increasing number of ways to optimize and target advertising against the same amount of ad spend.  This is all to say that a given amount of data is becoming considerably less valuable as it relates to ad networks and that data sources and/or volume of data are less important than they were yesterday, every day.  2) Ad networks do not own online data in any real way.  Even if ad networks own the data they’ve already collected or have exclusive contracts, ultimately content owners own the rights to drop cookies/extract data from their users and can switch when the switching is good.

Now let’s think about optimization and targeting.  Basically what we’re talking about here is an approach and an algorithm.  When I say approach I mean what data you choose to use (of what you have), what buckets you want to put that data into (most often aligned with large endemic advertising categories), etc. and algorithm refers to the big black comp sci box (to me anyway) that takes the data and spits out the type of ad that should be served.  So basically you have most of the 300+ ad networks (last I heard) all trying to optimize their algorithm to get the most lift from their ads with lots of overlapping sets of data.

So what do I have to believe as an investor?  I have to believe some combination of a) this ad network has THE data set, amongst all online data, to target advertising - for at least a reasonable portion of people/sites/advertisers - and that somehow it will remain proprietary despite the free flow of information and my resulting success if I do find it and b) that my CS geniuses are better than all of the other ad networks CS geniuses.  These seems like huge and unreasonable asks to me.

Wait, but Bryan, can’t a temporary period of technical outperformance entrench a leadership position?  Look at Google, they figured out search and look where they are now.  Okay first, you’re talking about consumer switching inertia vs. enterprise switching inertia - I would argue the second is far lower.  Second, there’s no easy way to compare search algorithms; Google’s success was largely marketing and design, IMHO.

So where does this market go?  My guess is that there’s a natural weeding out/consolidation process that occurs over the next 18-24 months and we enter 2011 with no more than 100 ad networks.  As to what the market looks like, I anticipate a race to the bottom in which ad networks are forced to become extremely lean and make what margin they can squeeze out of value-add features, which you’re seeing more and more of, e.g. PointRoll’s approved group of 5 ad networks.  As soon as online data proves to be of targeting value (and any exclusive contract runs out), networks will bid for that data in the marketplace one way or another, and that value will pass to site/tool owners.  On the algorithm side, I don’t see how any ad networks will create a large and sustained lead on the tech front.  Sure there will be pockets of these races to the bottom, some with better dynamics than others - I don’t think anyone sees a DR-focused, CPC player like ValueClick competing directly with a brand-focused, CPM player like Collective Media, but they will with the 10 other ‘me too’ ad networks in their space and they’ll all drive the margins out of each others business.

I’m sure there are many holes here, some of which I’ve even seen and failed to address, but I don’t see my fundamental take on this space changing anytime soon.  However, as I allude to at the top of this post, I actually think this is a wonderful thing as it will pass more dollars to publishers.  I think of ad networks a little like I think of unbranded consumer products - I’m really happy that someone makes the $1.99 six-pack of toilet paper at CVS, but there is not a chance I’m buying their stock.

6pm