Resources for Investing in Internet Businesses

Hi All —

Yesterday, I shared on Twitter the resource page I published for understanding and investing in internet, marketplace, and media businesses. Since not everyone lives on Twitter, I wanted to quickly share the link and list here as well.

If people have other suggestions, feel free to DM me on Twitter or email me at ardacapital01@gmail.com. I’ll continue to update the page over time.

---

---

Table of Contents:

1. Foundational Materials

2. Blogs, Newsletters, and Trade Publications

3. Other Internet Books

4. Media and Telecom Books

Foundational Materials

Strategy:

• Ben Thompson’s Platforms vs. Aggregators, Aggregation Theory, Defining Aggregators, and Spotify, Netflix, and Aggregation are critical to understanding Internet businesses.

• Increasing Returns to Scale by Brian Arthur (book and HBR article)

• Information Rules

Analysis and Trends:

• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Reports

• Mauboussin’s The Economics of Customer Businesses

• Tribe Capital’s Unit Economics and The Pursuit of Scale Invariance

• Tren Griffin’s The “Free Parking” Business Model

• Bill Gurley’s Above the Crowd (ATC). It’s worth reading through all the articles at some point but would highlight The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All, The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula, and How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size, in addition to the ones listed in the marketplace section.

Understanding Marketplaces:

• ATC: Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth and All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces

• Perfect Store, The: Inside eBay

History of the Internet, FANG, and Others

• The Highwaymen

• How the Internet Happened

• Amazon: The Everything Store, Amazon Unbound, and The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing

• Google: In the Plex

• Facebook: The Inside Story

• Uber, Airbnb, et al: The Upstarts

• Skift’s The History of Booking

Memos and Docs

The memos provide insight into the companies think about their businesses and strategy

• Zuckerberg’s Memo on Owning VR/AR Platform and Acquiring Unity

• Zuckerberg on Monetizing the Messenger Ecosystem

• Gates’ Tidal Wave Memo

• Amazon’s Deal Memo for Ring and Blink

Blogs, Newsletters, and Trade Publications

• Stratechery by Ben Thompson - covers/writes about the internet (understatement)

• Mobile Dev Memo - covers digital advertising, gaming, and the app economy

• Above Avalon - exclusively covers Apple

• Sports Business Journal - everything sports media related

• Entertainment Strategy Guy - covers streaming and media.

• Puck - Matthew Belioni’s Hollywood newsletter is a must-follow.

• Ben Evan’s Newsletter and Annual Presentation

• Skift - covers the travel industry

• AdWeek - covers agencies and advertising

• Octahedron’s Quarterly Review

• Prosus Capital Markets Days - Prosus’ investor presentations are interesting ways to learn about different business models (e.g., food delivery) across geographies.

Other Internet Books

• Engines That Move Markets

• How the Internet Happened

• Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You

Media and Telecom Books

Hard to separate the internet from media these days so including those recs here.

• Netflixed

• Cable Cowboy

• The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies

• Cutthroat: High Stakes & Killer Moves on the Electronic Frontier

Government Documents

DOJ and CMA documents have a lot of detail about the big tech internet businesses

• DOJ’s 2023 Investigation on Google’s Advertising Business

• 2022 - Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets

• 2019 - CMA’s Online Platforms and digital advertising market study

• 2018 - The Role of MVNOs in Cable’s Entry into Wireless

And ICYMI, here’s a link to the Software list.

---

If you’re finding this newsletter interesting, share it with a friend, and consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

Always feel free to drop me a line at ardacapital01@gmail.com if there’s anything you’d like to share or have questions about. Again, this is not investment advice, so do your own due diligence.