Happy Holidays

2020 has been a long, bumpy ride, but fortunately all things come to an end - both the good, and the bad.

As we head into the New Year, our team is reflecting on successes and lessons learned over the past year as well as opportunities that lay ahead. As Tom Pollock put it, "it's never as good as it looks, and it's never as bad as it seems." And that's how we'll close out 2020, with an optimistic spirit and firm belief that better times are ahead for everyone.

From the Permanent Equity Family, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year! Here's to your success in 2021.

The Barry Diller playbook (The Generalist)
+ "The Barry Diller playbook is easy to understand but hard to execute. First, identify a market with room to grow...Second, accumulate share...Finally, spin out the winners."

Load the trucks (Permanent Equity)
+ "Working alongside your employees is the most effective way to learn what’s working and what needs fixing. You’ll see which employee keeps their work stations neat and clean. You’ll hear when one of them is expecting a child, You’ll gain a pulse on what’s happening in their lives."

How to jam a buyer (Matthew Hinson)
+ "The best way to cover your ass in a deal is to think of the worst potential scenario and work backward probabilistically. As you read these, you might find them silly and think, “I would never fall for that”. Maybe not."

Marketplaces year in review - 2020 edition (Marketplace Pulse)
+ "Third-party sellers increased their sales by $95 billion in a year, up from $200 billion in 2019. Amazon’s sales grew by $45 billion, from $135 billion. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), the total amount of sales on Amazon websites, including those by the company itself and by the marketplace, grew from $335 in 2019 to $475 billion in 2020. GMV was up 42%, while first-party sales were up 35%, and third-party volume was up 47%. 62% of Amazon’s worldwide GMV was by the marketplace. Up from 60% in 2019 and 58% in 2018."

2020: a year in charts (Chartr)
+ "2020 was the first full year of Chartr publishing our newsletter. It will also, hopefully, turn out to be the most eventful and crazy year that we ever chart. We’ve gone back through our content, including all of the 277 charts we published this year, picking 25 that tell the story of 2020."

The risk not taken (Andy Dunn, CEO of Bonobos)
+ "For the first three years of Bonobos, I lived with $3,000 in the bank, a $3,000 apartment, and $150,000 of debt. During that time — 2007 to 2010 — I was only a month away from being out of cash. I was paying myself, initially, $70,000. This is plenty of money in most places, but in NYC it can fly you pretty close to the trees on just rent and alcohol."

The rise and fall of the bank robbery capital of the world (Crime Reads)
+ "In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour of every day. This is the story of how a bandit culture took over the city."

We'd love your help.

If you stumble across something great, send it to weekly@permanentequity.com.

If you know an owner, operator, or someone who works with SMB's, please give us the highest compliment and send them our way. You can find previous The Weekly issues here.