Posts by John Tornow

Warren Buffett's annual letter to shareholders (PDF) of Berkshire Hathaway was published this weekend. It's always a great read and a fascinating look at one of the world's most successful companies. More importantly it gives some insight into how the company thinks and how the leadership views the larger financial world.

Here are some of my favorite lines:

Berkshire will forever remain a financial fortress. In managing, I will make expensive mistakes of commission and will also miss many opportunities, some of which should have been obvious to me. At times, our stock will tumble as investors flee from equities. But I will never risk getting caught short of cash.

On debt (emphasis mine):

We use debt sparingly. Many managers, it should be noted, will disagree with this policy, arguing that significant debt juices the returns for equity owners. And these more venturesome CEOs will be right most of the time.

At rare and unpredictable intervals, however, credit vanishes and debt becomes financially fatal. A Russian- roulette equation – usually win, occasionally die – may make financial sense for someone who gets a piece of a company's upside but does not share in its downside. But that strategy would be madness for Berkshire. Rational people don't risk what they have and need for what they don't have and don't need.

Sounds like some great personal advice as well.

On long-term optimism and belief in the American economy and prosperity:

Our country's almost unbelievable prosperity has been gained in a bipartisan manner. Since 1942, we have had seven Republican presidents and seven Democrats. In the years they served, the country contended at various times with a long period of viral inflation, a 21% prime rate, several controversial and costly wars, the resignation of a president, a pervasive collapse in home values, a paralyzing financial panic and a host of other problems. All engendered scary headlines; all are now history.

There are also many other countries around the world that have bright futures. About that, we should rejoice: Americans will be both more prosperous and safer if all nations thrive. At Berkshire, we hope to invest significant sums across borders.

All of the annual letters starting from 1977 are available online as well.

I’m thrilled to announce a new venture I have been working on for a good part of the past year: It’s called Air Mail. Air Mail is a weekly publication covering the world of politics, business, arts, travel, and much more. Each Saturday we’ll be sending out an email newsletter at precisely 6am Eastern Time with highlights of the week’s stories. Behind the newsletter is a website containing the full complement of articles and shorter pieces for the week.

We’ve published a few beta issues internally thus far and the goal is to launch to the public starting this summer. The writing and editorial work that is going into this is phenomenal. My friends Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley are two of the most wonderful people you will ever meet and their work is second to none.

Air Mail’s branding and style pays homage to a bygone era of postal service design with strong reds, blues, and imagery from when air travel was considered new and thrilling.

On the technology side we have created a publishing platform that is designed for the modern web and the world of mobile devices. This technology will allow our small team to manage everything that goes into publishing a weekly issue including copy editing, photo rights management, editorial approvals, and the layout of the issue itself. We’ll also begin taking subscriptions later this year so a full suite of billing features is also in place. I’ll go into some more detail in future posts about this platform. I’m very excited about it.

Air Mail was officially announced in The New York Times a few weeks ago and we’ve started taking signups on our website. There is a lot to be done before we’re ready to start publishing, but we’re well on our way. I’m looking forward to sharing more about the work soon, but for now, it’s just a ‘coming soon’ announcement. If you’re interested, you can sign up to receive the first few issues for free once they are ready for the world to see.

This is probably one of the most photographed areas of Brooklyn, maybe all of New York, but I still love it. Taken just beyond Water St. on Washington in DUMBO. It was too foggy out on this day last December to see the top of the Empire State Building behind the bridge, but it's still there somewhere.

Craig Mod, with an excellent piece about email newsletters:

Newsletters and newsletter startups these days are like mushrooms in an open field after a good spring rain. I don’t know a single writer who isn’t newslettering or newsletter-curious, and for many, the newsletter is where they’re doing their finest public work.

His new newsletter is called Ridgeline and it’s wonderful.

Original Link →

Benjamin Mullin, Lukas I. Alpert and Tripp Mickle, for The Wall Street Journal:

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a "Netflix for news," would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple's streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately working in and around the publishing industry. As a whole the industry's concerns are almost always tied to declining revenue, legacy high-costs, and therefore reduced or non-existent profits. I find it difficult to believe that any publisher is willing to take a 50% cut on revenue. Apple would need to deliver a massive upswing in subscribers for this to even be a conversation.

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Taken from atop the High Line looking down West 14th Street on a cold early New York morning.

Frank Bruni, with a nice piece about Tony Romo ahead of tonight's Super Bowl:

Romo, 38, previously spent more than a decade as a quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys. He was great but he wasn't great, and with him as its leader, the team never went all the way. In a twist that's testament to second acts in American lives, he's doing something as a star for CBS that he never did as a star for the Cowboys: going to the Super Bowl. I suppose that's fitting, because he's more than great in his current gig. He's peerless. And he's a sensation.

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Speaking of Jack Dorsey, it looks like he is making the PR rounds this week. He’s also featured in a nice piece at Rolling Stone.

I liked this bit where he responds to Seth Rogen’s concern that racists were being verified on Twitter:

That was heartbreaking. I DM’d him, and we got on the phone together. He said to me, “I’m surprised at myself for not hanging up…But I think you have the right intent. But you all are terrible communicators.” I agree, we have been bad at communication, we haven’t been as forthright as we need to, we certainly haven’t been as transparent. We do care deeply. But we need to do it in scalable ways. This work doesn’t happen overnight.

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I really enjoyed this interview with Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, by Bill Simmons. Twitter is still a fascinating company to me despite its problems. Bill Simmons pulls no punches asking tough questions about harassment, Twitter’s role in politics, Trump, and controversial features like editing tweets.

There’s also a nice trip down memory lane with discussion of Twitter’s early days and how it came to be. (I remember vividly using the text message version of Twitter at SXSW in 2007. A simpler time.)

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Pine trees seen near North East, Pennsylvania.

Slack:

Today we’re launching a new logo, as we start to refresh our look in general. We loved our old logo, and look, and know many felt the same. And yet, here we are to explain why we decided to evolve it.

The design work was done by Pentagram.

Change is hard, and I’ve been so used to seeing the familiar Slack icon for years that this will take some getting used to. The logo itself doesn’t bother me near as much as the awful dark purple background behind it.

Related:

• Pentagram’s ‘Range of Possibilities’ for Slack by John Gruber

Original Link →

Rocks, bricks, and some driftwood pieces on the shores of Lake Erie in New York.

It’s a cold day in Texas and I’m missing the beach. Taken last fall during a business trip to Soho Beach House, Miami. A lovely place to begin working on a new project.

“Christmas trees” on the shores of Lake Erie near the city of Dunkirk, New York.