cbaxter

I spent some time learning about the “western diet” that we have here in the United States and was fairly shocked at how dramatically it has changed over the last 20 or so years, partially as a result of a shift in farming policy in the 1980s that encouraged rapid production growth in corn through hefty subsidies. I don’t want to rehash statistics or issues, since they are well covered in Pollan’s books (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) and recent documentaries (Food Inc, King Korn).

The basic premise is that corn, since it is over-produced and artificially-cheap has largely taken over elements of the food chain, including meats (corn is the leading feed source, versus grass) and packaged foods / sodas (high fructose corn syrup/HFCS  is the leading sweetener, versus sugar). I am certainly no professional in this field, nor am I nutritionist — but intuition tells me it’s probably a good idea to eat less of this industrial food, or none of it all.

That said, I’ve made an effort to avoid corn-fed animals and HFCS, which has proved harder than I expected. Avoiding corn-fed meats (and the embedded antibiotics that are used to prevent a corn diet from killing the animal too early) is tough — more than 50% of the corn grown in the United States goes to animal feeds; everything from cows to chickens to fish. Not eating HFCS pretty much rules out all sodas and 90% of snack/processed foods that are in the supermarket.

The result is that I am cooking a bit more at home and spending more time at Washington, DC farmers’ markets (there’s one in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday and one in Dupont on Sunday — http://www.freshfarmmarket.org/), which bring in locally grown produce and pastured/grass-fed meats. Granted the fat (read: taste) content may be lower on the meats, but it’s nice to meet the farmer face-to-face and know that no hormones or antibiotics were packaged alongside the sirloin.

On a side note, it was interesting to me (from King Korn) that the government’s response so far has been: don’t worry about the food, just exercise more. This is a pretty funny response that is likely a result of talented industry lobbying. Sure, we can put soda machines in schools, as long as the kids get on a treadmill to burn off the new empty calories. The position has even made it into the new food pyramid (http://www.mypyramid.gov/), where the government doesn’t say “eat less of the crappy stuff” — clearly a good idea, but instead “exercise more”.

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When I initially saw the iPad, I thought it was a big iPhone and balked at the idea that it was running iPhone OS (now iOS) instead of MacOS. Granted, the hardware looked great, but I did not see how it would fit in with my everyday life.

After spending a week with one, I can now say that I get it. It is my “go to” device for surfing the web, responding to email and — apparently, with a dock and bluetooth keyboard — blogging. Interacting with websites through a larger touchscreen is a dream and, with a solid battery life and almost instant boot from sleep to Safari, it’s much easier than pulling open the laptop.

The Apps are great, as well (specifically Scrabble) — but I expect to see a lot of improvement here. I really like the media applications (BBC, Reuters, Wired), but don’t like the lack on any social features — e.g. they are like static print and lack the ability to share or email…so I’m on the websites a lot still.

Overall, it’s a great user experience and really fun device. Essential? No. But that doesn’t mean Apple won’t sell tens of millions to happy customers. I’m looking forward to upgrading iOS 4 (and backgrounding) this Fall.

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I have been using Kiva for the last week and it has been a great experience. I am clearly a bit late to the game signing up, but I had to give it a try. For the few who may not know, Kiva is a micro-lender of sorts that facilitates peer-to-peer lending for emerging market entrepreneurs – coupled with a personal and comprehensive website. I love both the business model (even though it has been under pressure lately) and the mission. I remain convinced that the private sector is the best way to alleviate poverty globally.

So far, I have two micro-loans outstanding (one in Peru and one in Costa Rica) — see below for a screen shot. I’m currently covering Latin America and the Caribbean at my day job, so I have a slight geographic preference for where I am looking for development. One of the entrepreneurs sells popcorn, the other raises cattle. One loan is currently in pay-pack, the other is still fundraising. I’m already excited to get my loans back, so that I can lend them out again…more likely, which is great for Kiva, I will just add more money into the system.

Now, clearly emerging market lending is risky, so how is this actually achievable? My understanding is that Kiva is essentially refinancing the micro-finance lenders, who actually clear and book the loans in advance. So, while my actual dollars may not always go these specific entrepreneurs at funding the close, it is still a wonderful concept that effectively facilitates capital into the private sector.

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Well, it appears I’ll be moving in a few weeks as school is officially almost done. As a first step, I’m unloading some furniture on Craigslist, which is always a fun experience for me. Selling stuff online is a sure way to meet some interesting folk in the area. The first to go was my bookshelf, which was apparently a big hit on the classifieds scene, as the local IKEA outfit has been stocked out of the item for a few months now…but this is on tangent to the topic at hand.

Pulling back, in order to prepare for the eager buyer (who was very excited for his upcoming holiday to Cyprus), I took down all my books and various other items (RC helicopter, RC tank, Tickle-Me-Elmo, etc.) to get ready for the big dis-assembly. Looking at the piles of books on the floor, I decided that a shelf probably wasn’t the best place to keep these old friends – there are many that I’ve reread, but I’m getting more attached to the world of Kindle and the ever-lighter ebook.

This time around, instead of stuffing them directly into the land of cardboard houses filled with snowy peanuts, I first took the ISDNs and dropped them into Google’s My Library. I’ve now indexed just over 90 books (some with free content, others with no content) into the system and feel more comfortable keeping these “old media” buddies in the box a bit longer than usual.

The logical next step was to port this into Amazon, where I’ll be able to rate / comment on the books, giving them the content they need to make recommendations on future reads. Also, I assume they will have no problem with selling me digital versions of the books along with the proprietary Kindle (just like Apple did with my songs and the iPod), although I’m still not a fan of their hardware just yet.

I’m excited for the possibilities of digitized libraries, social highlighting / note taking, and the ability to rapidly access and share this information in the future. To borrow words from Ray and Fahrenheit 451, “Somewhere the saving and putting away had to begin again and someone had to do the saving and the keeping, one way or another, in books, in records, in people’s heads, any way at all so long as it was safe, free from moths, silverfish, rust and dry-rot, and men with matches.”

EDIT: It’s official. My awesome girlfriend got me a Kindle 2, so I’m almost 100% off the paper books. I’m definitely loving it and the software link to Amazon is great. I’ll review the whole experience in  more detail another time.

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This clipping from a professor (c. 1994) is classic. It cuts right to the root of flaws in our educational system. Granted, I am biased to my own experience, but I found the public system of lectures, bells and repercussions to be suffocating. It may have changed since, but I doubt it. This conditioning was ideal when graduates would leave for lifetime employment at a nine-to-five job that rewarded passive obedience. Unfortunately, the industrial era has long-ago passed and with it went the ability to hide behind the facade of smiles and nods. If we are again to succeed, companies need strong minds who are innovative and not fearful of expressing opinions. Granted education reform, no matter what form, mimics turning a battleship in unsteady seas, but I would like to see more entrepreneurship and creativity encouraged. We need more innovation, with that we can build the drones.

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The deflation of the housing bubble (which was fueled by low rates and relaxed lending standards) triggered the current financial crisis and is now impacting Main Street through deteriorating consumer confidence.

Falling home prices are a sure way to turn consumer spending levels toxic, but I think it is more than fiscal conservatism that is triggering decisions. I took a quick look at median home prices (and the year-on-year increases) and compared the gains to the average household income.

The average consumer trend for the last 5-10 years has been to live comfortably, and then refinance surplus debt (credit cards, auto-loans, etc) into the home mortgage. As the mentality that home prices will always go up persisted, it became easier for consumers to associate home gains as additional household income that could be captured through refinancing.

Although based on wide assumptions, the table below shows that consumer incomes were 10-20% higher due to average home price appreciation. This is compounded for people who purchased more expensive homes at higher multiples of their income levels.

Not only has the fall in home prices cut consumer wealth, but it has erased the homeowner’s ability to supplement their household income by tapping into home equity gains.

Until home prices stabilize / appreciate, I don’t see how the economy can increase household income levels by the c. 20% that was provided by home appreciation. Following this logic, I don’t see how consumer companies can capture the domestic earnings to get their prices back up.

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This afternoon I took a shot at building some elements of Facebook Connect into this site. Overall, it was a fairly painless process and I think the results are pretty cool.  To borrow Facebook’s language, Connect lets you:

• Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
• Connect and find their friends who also use your site
• Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

In easier language, it means that this site can now recognize visitors by their Facebook profile (if allowed) and (if wanted) can now distribute information back to their profiles. For example, if you comment here you can elect to publish comments back to your newsfeed in Facebook. You can also invite friends to this community, share content back with Facebook, etc. This particular blog is running on WordPress, so I used  a plugin developed by Sociable! to get it up and running. Their documentation covers the main steps, but to highlight some points:

1. Navigate to Facebook Developer and create a new application. Make note of the API and Secret keys (needed later), set the callback URL to your website (e.g. this site is www.christianbaxter.com) and change the logo pictures.
2. Extract the plugin and load it to the plugin folder
3. Activate, select options to enable and add the keys
4. Add the Community widget to the sidebar

I’m pretty impressed with the results. On arrival, the community widget offers users the option to login via Facebook (or another method). If they login, it registers them to the community and ties into their Facebook account, with permission. From there, users can invite people to the community, easily share content back and enable the option to post comments back. I haven’t enabled the comment system because I’m still using Disqus to manage comments on this  blog (love the email features). They have synced up with Connect as well, so it should be work through their systems for now (possibly needed another login though). We can expect Facebook to continue pushing the Connect platform with more capability and features. They have the value of the strongest (my opinion) social framework to offer websites and a set of applications that will be useful outside of the walled garden.

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Tags: facebook, Wordpress

Private Equity funds (including Venture Capital funds) are largely structured under a “2 and 20″ business model. This will run through a quick example about how it works from the Limited Parter and General Partner perspective.

• Limited Partner (LP): Invest money in the fund and include: pensions, investment managers, high-net worth individuals, etc.
• General Parter (GP): Select companies for investment and manage the portfolio until exit is realized (IPO, strategic sale, recapitalization)

The 2/20 model says that the GPs receive a 2% management fee on committed capital (in this case, $100m) and 20% of any realized capital gains. The LPs, on the other hand, invest $100m into the fund and receive their initial investment plus 80% of the gains. These percentages can change, but they are fairly standard in the industry.

The management fee is used to keep the lights on and pay salaries (supposedly) and the “carry” or 20% gains is the profit share.

Now, in our example, the fund has a life of 10 years, so the total management fee is 2% times 10 years = $20m. This leaves $80m to invest in companies after fees. For simplicity, we assume 10 investments at $8m each, and mixed outcome on investments (2 winners, 5 even money, and 3 losers).

The table below outline the sample timing and fund IRR. Now, when all is done, the fund has returned a total of $200m in cash, of which $100m is consider capital gains. This gain is then split between the GPs ($20m) and the LPs ($80m).

Granted, this is a simplified example that ignores GP investment in the fund (usually 1%) and the ability to reinvest in follow-on rounds of successful businesses, but it covers the basics.

The model itself encourages big bets on companies that can give the investors the massive returns (e.g. the Apples and Googles). Funds are less interested in companies that will only return a moderate return over 3-5 years. To compensate for the losers, the fund needs to strike it big with a few names to bring home the IRR to investors — they expect in excess of 30-40%.

While this model is generally excepted and does work, there are conflicts, especially when firms raise multiple or overlapping funds. For example, investors may cherry-pick for certain funds/investors or take riskier bets on a fund that is underwater. Also, as the number of funds grow, so does the total management fee, which creates a conflict vs. need to generate excess carry.

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Tags: 2/20, venture capital

I had a class tonight (Managerial Leadership) that was taught by a guest speaker, Tim Sullivan from Madison Dearborn. It was a great lecture overall and picked up on transitional leadership elements between the military and private sector, among others.

One point that stuck out was regarding team dynamics. The research he brought up concluded that a team’s outcome is not necessarily dictated by the best performer, but more likely by the worst. This is sort of a weakest link analogy. Essentially, there were three team members you wanted to watch out for (or more importantly want to avoid being):

1) The Jerk – condescending, sarcastic, etc. 
2) The Slacker – feet on the desk, late to meetings, etc.
3) The Pessimist – bad attitude, always negative, etc.

Basically, if one or more of these characters are adamant in a given team structure, then a negative performance is more than likely. This was tested by injecting an actor into groups who convincingly played these parts and then comparing outcomes.

This is interesting, since I often looked to the strongest member to gauge performance. More helpful is that I can recognize times when I have exhibited each of the characteristics and will now (hopefully) be more aware of it’s impact on the dynamics.

It’s worth mentioning that this was based on 45 minute student group performances and may not be representative of all teams / longer relationships, but I did find it interesting and will keep it in mind. 

For more info, the research was done by Will Felps (Rotterdam School of Management) and the American Life story (source) is here.

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Tags: leadership, team structure

I’ve been debating my stance on preference between private and public markets, specifically with respect to how I’m allocating components of my portfolio. I recognize that advice leads us down the idea that public market diversification is ideal.

The logic that a 30+ stock portfolio is more diversified than holding only few companies is hard to dispute. This reduces the portfolio’s asymmetric risk (e.g. company specific risk). This way, if one company blows up, you hopefully still have 29 that are doing OK. The flip-side if that is if one does extremely well, you have diversified against the upside.

This logic leads investors to the concept of the market portfolio, which is essentially a portfolio that owns every available stock and is fully diversified. This is closely replicated through Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and various global indexes. The premise here is that a market return (for example, 8%) does not compensate investors for ANY asymetric risk, which can be diversified away. Therefore, the investor is best off owning every stock and being fully diversified. You get paid for taking Beta risk, that’s it.

The next step is to ajust this portfolio for your risk tolerance. Do you want very little risk? Then allocate your portfolio with 95% treasuries and 5% of the market portfolio. Feeling very bullish and lucky? Borrow debt and leverage yourself in the market portfolio. Essentially, the “Random Walk” idea is that you own market and manage risk through the use of leverage.

So what’s the problem? Although I do not propose a solution, I am seeing a lot of problems with the public company ownership model overall. 

Points that I am struggling with include:

• Boards (representing my interests) are handicapped in terms of access to information
• Management has access to insider information, I (as the investor) do not
• Executives can be distracted with quarterly earnings targets and empire building
• It’s costly and time-consuming to keep up with compliance (Sarbanes Oxley)

There are other examples to both support and contradict (liquidity, transparency, access to capital) this position. I’m still debating on a diversified portfolio of public companies or a diversified portfolio of semi-private ones.

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Tags: market theory, public vs private