Bargaining Power in the Streaming Industry

Does Roku need WarnerMedia more than WarnerMedia needs Roku (WSJ, Dec. 2020). Also, who is buying and who is selling? "Roku initially paid media companies to license content for the channel. But lately, Roku has demanded programming from media companies as a toll for carrying their apps, people familiar with Roku negotiations said. If media companies provide enough compensation to Roku in other ways, such as ad or subscription money, the company relaxes its demands for Roku Channel programming."

Bargaining Power of Suppliers

"Peter Jackson’s Special-Effects Firm Looks to Become a Content Producer" is an example of forward integration (WSJ, Dec. 2020).

Are you willing to accept a lower interest rate to lend to green projects?

Borrowers get slightly lower interest rates when they sell "so-called green bonds" (WSJ, Dec. 2020). The difference, called the greemium, means that lenders receive a lower interest rate. I am confident that corporations will be more socially responsible when being responsible results in lower costs and higher prices.

Another dim view of stakeholder capitalism

"Since profits result from increasing revenue and cutting costs, businesses that put profits first have to work hard to give customers more while using less. In short, profits are an elegant and parsimonious way of promoting efficiency within a business as well as society at large.

Stakeholder capitalism ruptures this process" (WSJ, Dec. 2020).

The writer identifies four reasons that CEO's might sign on to the Great Reset.

1. Some people ... may simply prefer that firms take politically correct stances and don’t consider the cost. 
2. Others may think it looks good in a press release and will never go anywhere. 
3. A third group may aspire to jobs in government and see championing corporate social responsibility as a bridge.

4. Finally, there are those who think they can benefit personally from the reduced corporate efficiency. As businesses redirect cash flow from profit-directed uses to social priorities, lucrative positions of management, consulting, oversight and more will have to be created. They’ll fill them. This is rent-seeking, enabled by the growing confluence of business and government, and enhanced by contemporary social pieties.

Pricing during COVID

Here are great examples of firms using better pricing techniques during COVID (WSJ, Dec. 2020).

How to improve accountability for social responsibility

Edmansand and Gosling point out flaws with focusing on purpose rather than profit and offer a suggestion about how to increase accountability for corporations pursuing purpose (WSJ, Dec. 2020).

How to become a billionaire

Paul Graham says that the best way to secure YC funding is to convince the investors that "what you're making will ever be something a lot of people want" (Paul Graham, Dec. 2020). 

Here are some money quotes:

1. "So this is one thing the YC partners will almost certainly dig into during your interview. Who are your first users going to be, and how do you know they want this? If I had to decide whether to fund startups based on a single question, it would be "How do you know people want this?""
2. "The worst advice I ever heard about how to succeed in a YC interview is that you should take control of the interview and make sure to deliver the message you want to. In other words, turn the interview into a pitch. ⟨elaborate expletive⟩. It is so annoying when people try to do that."
3. "If professional billionaire scouts know that exploiting people is not the skill to look for, why do some politicians think this is the defining quality of billionaires?"
4. "The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want. Newly started startups have no choice but to delight users, or they'll never even get rolling. But this never stops being the lodestar, and bigger companies take their eye off it at their peril. Stop delighting users, and eventually someone else will.