I wanted to share a playlist I’m putting together, a bunch of random songs grouped together from my Sunday morning.
Chill song for relaxing
Thoughts on the Spotify IPO
When Spotify announced their IPO awhile ago, I was surprised they were even going for an IPO because of their financials. I'm not going to make this post a deep dive into the financials of Spotify but more on a layperson's thoughts on something like this IPO.
I've used Spotify since the very first day they launched in the US, I'm a huge fan. The product has incrementally gotten better over time, so much that I'm amazed at how well the team has been able to iterate and slowly but surely move the product forward. The music discovery and radio have improved, enough to the point that I cancelled my subscription to Pandora about 6 months ago because I felt like Spotify was close enough in the suggestions that I was wasting my money on Pandora at that point.
Spotify's a good product but I'm not too keen on the business model. Software usually wins when it scales well, the initial effort is huge but over time the number of users start to match the effort and surpass it. Economies of scale work very well for software companies but I think that's not the case for Spotify.
Spotify's biggest issue right now is paying record labels. You can't have popular artists on your platform without paying big record labels. I'm thinking early on it was a side business for record labels but as CD and digital sales have gone down and streaming has become a popular option for consumers, they've started paying more attention to it, money has started rolling in. This means Spotify is at the mercy of record labels, they're going to need to renegotiate better contracts and if they can't they're going to have to pay whatever the record labels are asking. Of course, this is pretty baseless and opinionated but I'm sure it's not far off from the truth.
As the user base grows, the amount of songs being heard grows as well, this means more money will need to be paid out to the record labels. Ignoring bandwidth and user acquisition costs, the cost of paying record labels increases as users increase and that means it's going against the phenomenon of economies of scale. It sounds to me like Spotify is getting paid by users, taking that money and paying record labels, paying operating costs, and probably not having much money left after, this might not be the best investment to make right now.
I'm personally waiting to see how they do during their first quarter being public and then I'll decide if I should buy their stock or not. Currently, I own no Spotify stock and I am not affiliated with Spotify. These are all just opinions so please don't take it as facts or investment advice.
Goodbye Bilo – December 2nd, 2017
Earlier today, we had to put Bilo to sleep.
Bilo Star (pronounced Be-lo) was born in the first week of February in 2015. He was just a few months short of his 3rd birthday. When he was just a few weeks old, my sister had adopted him and in July of 2015, I brought him to live with us in San Francisco.
Here's a video of Bilo and his sister playing when they were just a couple of months old:
Bilo and Heisenberg became friends and they started to spend time together.
From an early age, Bilo was always a little unhealthy but once he came to San Francisco, we fed him on time every day and we started to notice his health and playfulness increase. Spending time with Heisenberg allowed him to get stronger.
But slowly, he was starting to get less active and eat less. It started getting bad again where you can see he was sleeping way too much and never eating on time.
About four months ago, Bilo started getting food allergies so we took him to the doctor and they recommended a better food and gave him some allergy medicine. Over the next few months, his eating improved a bit but he was starting to get weak again. We had some other tests done when we took him for that checkup, and nothing conclusive was in the lab results so the doctor recommended we keep feeding him properly and paying attention to him.
This past Tuesday, Kristen pointed out to me that he was starting to sneeze a lot and wasn't touching his food at all. On Wednesday, we took him to the doctor and did some more tests, nothing came out of those. The hospital did give him some fluids and some medicine to decrease his pain.
This morning, we took him to the doctor and they told us he did not look well and his health is not going to improve so the humane thing to do is to put him to sleep. I didn't wake up today thinking I was going to have to do this and I didn't know he would be gone so soon.
Bilo was a mysterious and very loving cat, he loved sitting on people's laps and he loved watching birds on TV. I'm going to miss him a lot.
Here are a few songs for Bilo that remind me of him a lot.
The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
This was posted on my previous blog but I wanted to keep this post on this blog because it means a lot to me.
