DCG

This is a bit random, but I figured I'd throw this out there. I recently launched an online magazine focused on helping entrepreneurs find the ideas, inspiration, and tools to start and build successful companies. In addition to articles about various aspects of starting a business, a primary focus of the site is interviews with people who've started their own business (& optimally have had some success ;) ). For those of you on here that have started their own business, I'd love to feature some of your story on the site. I'm interested in things like where you got the idea for your business, the steps you took to start and grow your business, and the marketing strategies you've had success with.If you are interested, please send me a private message and tell me a bit about yourself and your business (please provide a link to your website so I can check it out). Assuming your business sounds interesting, I'll follow up with you and send you some written interview questions related to your business (you can take your time and provide written responses using Google forms). While the site obviously doesn't have much traffic yet, as it just launched, it can be a chance to get some free publicity to a new market - and more importantly, hopefully provide some value to other people looking to get started with their own business.Check out the site: Venture Blend Entrepreneurship Magazine. -I'm also interested in guest posts if that's more up your alley. Let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Dustin

I've got to admit I've always been unclear why Marlin's only contributions to this board over the years is promoting Andy Kilpatrick's books.

Carl Icahn is a jackass. Marc Andreessen is one of the most successful and respected VCs in the world, and a very smart guy. Doesn't mean ICahn is wrong though and Marc didn't screw over Ebay shareholders :p Fair enough. iCahn is still a jackass though. ;D

Carl Icahn is a jackass. Marc Andreessen is one of the most successful and respected VCs in the world, and a very smart guy. And it looks like this quote originated from someone else at Andreessen Hororitz named Monte Malhotra.

If it's actually Prem, you can add buying those pants to his long list of bad decisions lately.

Being that Wasts has been more wrong about equity investing over last last 6 or so years than nearly everyone else on the entire planet, I trust Buffett's opinion a bit more.

I added to KMI today as well.

Don't have any high conviction ideas at the moment, but just purchased Chevron and Kinder Morgan. Focusing on high-yielders in this market.

It sounds like they're going to charge $0.99 per year, which seems more than reasonable. With 450 million users (not sure how many people would resist paying a dollar a year if they like the service), that can give you a quick half a billion in annual revenue. The question (as mentioned earlier in this thread) is that it seems like another company could easily replicate this technology and steal business away from them).

All that functionality exists in other forum software. It's the people that makes forums good overall though.

...I just wish this board's software had a mobile version..like nearly every other forum software on the planet. I view this board on my phone a lot and it's a pretty awful experience.

Comcast to buy Time Warner for $45 billion.

Check out their amazing website: http://www.jwmays.com/

I'm 37 years old, have a 30-year-fixed mortage, & I think we're (my wife & I) taxed at either 25% or 28%. As far as investing ability, I've done well over the last 6 or so years (although I started with a relatively small amount of investable cash), but it's been a great run for the market. I'm not naive enough to think that I can guarantee I can continue to produce great returns every year going forward.

The issue is I'm having a hard time finding stocks with a large discount to fair value right now without a lot of risk (I'm not really looking to put all our cash into companies like SHLD and JCP that have the potential to be insolvent within a few years). If I was in the same position in 2007 this putting the money into stocks vs paying off a mortgage wouldn't be a question.

We'd have to sell our current house. So a purchase of a new house would have to be contingent of selling our current house, which is very common.

Figured you smart folks might be able to give some advice about this. We have a mortgage on our house, and had a townhouse we were renting out that we recently sold. We're trying to decide whether it makes sense to put the cash we had tied up in that property into paying a good chunk of the mortgage on our house left. We'd be able to pay off approximately 50-60% of our mortgage, and could theoretically pay off our house in the next 5-6 or so years if we did that. Our mortgage is currently about 5%. We don't think our current house will be our permanent house, and will likely try to sell it in probably about 3-6 years from now, but we're not sure about that. Does paying down that much of the mortgage make sense, or should we consider putting the $ into stocks or other investments? So I guess the question to ask ourselves is whether we can invest the cash at a rate higher than 5% (our mortgage amount), but we also don't want to risk losing much of it.

yeah...seems like someone likely signed her up under this name as a joke. Guess it's possible it was entered by a BofA employee, but doubtful.

To have good margins in online retail (or brick & mortar for that matter), you need to either produce the product(s) you sell, or be the exclusive company that sells the product(s). Re-packaging other products can be decent as well (for example, purchasing food products from other companies and re-selling them as gift baskets/boxes. Combining products increases the value and lets you charge more. Real low barrier to entry though, so tough to keep margins high for very long doing this.

Would you mind posting the link or telling me what the title of the article is? I can't seem to find it on the Fortune website. Took way too long to find, but I finally found the link. Here you go: http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/16/technology/keurig-green-mountain.pr.fortune/ Edit: damn..looks like you have to be a subscriber to view the whole article. Guess you'll have to pick up a copy of the magazine. Anyway, it gives some good insights into the company, and shows they have more of a moat than you might think.

I'm not any more. I owned it for a while and unfortunately sold it way to early to move cash into something else (don't even remember what). They're a local company mainly based here in Vermont so things I was hearing from a couple people who worked there (nothing really that wasn't public news) and other news I was reading just didn't match up with Einhorn's thesis (which was basically that once their patent expired, the company was doomed). Producing K-Cups is a much more involved process than it seems. There's actually a great article in the latest Fortune magazine about GMCR which touches on k-cup production. Starbucks tried doing it themselves and struggled with it.

[/size] [/size]Because they've found that it's more expensive to do on their own than licensing GMCR, who already has the infrastructure in place. I've been saying Einhorn was wrong on this for a while (see here).

Enterprise value is near $8 billion though when you include their debt. I'd like to see some insiders make some purchases. It's just tough to value a company bleeding over a billion in cash a year.

Verisign is certainly not a Small Cap though. They're currently valued at around $8 Billion.

I have MS Office on my Mac and used Word and Excel for years w/out any issues. Over the last couple years I'm mainly switched to using Google docs. Pages and Numbers are good as well, and now they're part of iCloud so you can access them through icloud.com if you're away from your computer.