Perhaps, provided you get started a little before the Fed drops interest rates
to zero and starts printing a Trillion dollars every year....
Founders can sometimes cash out at a financial profit even as the business is
losing money; it just requires naive secondary investors. This may be
particularly easy just now, thanks to historically low discount rates and
historically unprecedented amounts of cash sloshing around the economy.
I recall someone who refused, when it was explained to him, to believe space
transportation is an inherently no profit business (In fairness, it does defy
common experience). It is today my impression that he is no longer in denial on
this subject.
Bill
Sent from my Commodore 64
On Sep 18, 2015, at 12:37 PM, John Carmack <johnc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have a bit of a hard time accepting the zero profit assertion, but a lot of
true things are often hard to accept, so I won't argue against it without
data.
However, even if you grant that in the long term profits will trend to zero,
that doesn't mean that you can't have a decade where you make billions.
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bill Claybaugh
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2015 8:54 AM
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: Rocket Labs
Sent from my Commodore 64
On Sep 17, 2015, at 12:16 AM, David Weinshenker <daze39@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bill Claybaugh wrote:
Why assume evil when nature is a sufficient explanation?
Airlines are both commodity businesses--they have no pricing
power--and service businesses--they have inherently high costs--so
they naturally, through competition, fall to no profit pricing. Space
transportation is no different.
So what you're saying is that transportation (space, air, or
otherwise) - as a business - is a relatively pure example of the sort
of "flat and crowded" market in which "racing to the bottom" may be
expected as an emergent behavior?
Careful, details matter: if every family in America were going to keep
several spaceships in the garage, we would be comparing to the automobile
industry, for example, where none of these issues occur.
The specific nature of the space transportation business means that it is
inherently no profit; that is not necessarily true of all transportation
related businesses.
Bill
-dave w
