On the heels of the bonkers Bills / Chiefs game Sunday, there was a lot of discussion “was that the best football game ever?” It’s a completely subjective question that’s prone to a lot of recency bias.
Fun piece, and not a crazy idea. Do want to take issue with one part though: the idea that Peloton is "leaps and bounds larger than their biggest competitors".
That's certainly true if you define their competitors as those selling bundled hardware and software. But it's not true you define their competitors as those selling software/content (the good part of the business!). Peloton does some such unbundled sales. But the dominant player in unbundled software/content is Zwift. #s from the two companies aren't directly comparable, but looks to me like Zwift is roughly the same size and growing faster, on almost no marketing spend (let alone hardware subsidy). That seems to me a vastly better business.
(And yes, Zwift's CGI experience is quite different from Peloton's camera on a human instructor. But they're both competitors for the same eyeballs and function. My sense is that most who have tried both favor Zwift, even if it's a bigger jump from what they'd done before (just like iPhone was a bigger jump than Blackberry.)
Only way I think Liberty gets involved is if peloton goes broke the way Sirius did.
Kleiner Perkins/John Doerr's $12M for 12% of goggle in 1999 comes to mind as an all timer.
Fun piece, and not a crazy idea. Do want to take issue with one part though: the idea that Peloton is "leaps and bounds larger than their biggest competitors".
That's certainly true if you define their competitors as those selling bundled hardware and software. But it's not true you define their competitors as those selling software/content (the good part of the business!). Peloton does some such unbundled sales. But the dominant player in unbundled software/content is Zwift. #s from the two companies aren't directly comparable, but looks to me like Zwift is roughly the same size and growing faster, on almost no marketing spend (let alone hardware subsidy). That seems to me a vastly better business.
(And yes, Zwift's CGI experience is quite different from Peloton's camera on a human instructor. But they're both competitors for the same eyeballs and function. My sense is that most who have tried both favor Zwift, even if it's a bigger jump from what they'd done before (just like iPhone was a bigger jump than Blackberry.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-10/peloton-s-biggest-rival-may-be-zwift-without-the-supply-chain-woes
I think Sheldon Adelson buying LVS in the depths of financial crisis was prob a better return. Also this is an interesting article: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-peter-thiel-turned-2-000-in-a-roth-ira-into-5-000-000-000-11624551401