The Diff readers who enjoyed Geezer Teasers may also like https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-the-emperors-new-groove.html . Especially the story about how the producer realized that his and Sting's expectations were not aligned with his so agreed to do a documentary with Sting's wife to provide extra incentive to keep Sting on board when reality eventually caught up with everyone.
The tech giants probably lead in value/direct employee - for example Netflix is worth $250b and has 10k employees, so $25m/per. I think the other FANGs are in the same range though.
You could argue that at some point that a business that owns IP and beyond that mostly coordinates vendors isn't really a business at all, in the traditional sense. There must be some "businesses" that license music or video catalogs or books or pharmaceuticals that have only a couple of actual employees but are worth hundreds of millions or billions. The FANGs or even big franchisors like MCD or DPZ are somewhere on that spectrum.
In a lot of cases it makes more economic sense to own the parts of the value chain that employ more people, and I think that's where Amazon and Costco and Starbucks end up.
Value/employee it seems hard to beat Instagram with the $1b acquisition at 100 employees.
Historical examples are probably much more fun though.
A) Seafarers / Piracy:
Captain Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy is apparently the richest pirate in recorded history, when his ship was sunk it had an estimated $400m of treasure aboard (in todays figures which a a pretty debatable calculation) and a complement of 146 men.
Of course there were plenty of other pirates/privateers, merchants and general size lords.
I couldn't find any easy summaries but early trading the early long hail trading voyages generally seem to have been incredibly profitable (1000% returns in some cases) but incredibly dangerous.
B) Invasion / Mercenaries
William the Conqueror landed in England with about 7,500 men (largely to be paid on a success fee basis) and well he conquered England.
Putting a value on that seems to be incredibly complex (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6506987.pdf) but I think we could safely assume that a DCF model based on net crown revenues from 1086 until (at least) 1642 and English civil war would have been staggering.
The mercenary 'White Company' under John Hawkwood appears to have operated on something like a partnership basis. It seems to have ranged in size wildly from ~250 to ~5,000. Again figures are patchy and conversion to contemporary currency fraught but there appear to have been multiple five and six-figure paydays *in 1300's money* (https://www.camrea.org/2017/01/02/soldier-of-fortune-glory-days-for-sir-john-hawkwood-king-of-mercenaries/).
Overall in the historical examples it seems that the returns correlated pretty well with the risk
The Diff readers who enjoyed Geezer Teasers may also like https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-the-emperors-new-groove.html . Especially the story about how the producer realized that his and Sting's expectations were not aligned with his so agreed to do a documentary with Sting's wife to provide extra incentive to keep Sting on board when reality eventually caught up with everyone.
The tech giants probably lead in value/direct employee - for example Netflix is worth $250b and has 10k employees, so $25m/per. I think the other FANGs are in the same range though.
You could argue that at some point that a business that owns IP and beyond that mostly coordinates vendors isn't really a business at all, in the traditional sense. There must be some "businesses" that license music or video catalogs or books or pharmaceuticals that have only a couple of actual employees but are worth hundreds of millions or billions. The FANGs or even big franchisors like MCD or DPZ are somewhere on that spectrum.
In a lot of cases it makes more economic sense to own the parts of the value chain that employ more people, and I think that's where Amazon and Costco and Starbucks end up.
As Tyler might say, self recommending, as an exploration of research on what seems to be happening in the market wrt the entrance of a whole new trading class - https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/market-ecology-and-the-new-species
This tweet thread from Frank Rotman is also quite interesting - https://twitter.com/fintechjunkie/status/1380294262332489734?s=19
Forbes has 54 employees and revenues of about $20 million https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.forbes_media_llc.5b5aef396e9a4c15dbcaf4791d6e4e53.html
FWONK has, like, ten employees or something. Otherwise, Equinix, American Tower, Public Storage. Seems like something in common there.
Self-recommending for folks interested in philosophy and intellectual history, here’s some threads on a bunch of thinkers (Heidegger, Strauss, Arendt, more): https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372675033336778755
China’s future will obviously be affected by demographic trends. One forecast: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-04-07/chinas-shrinking-families
Inflation may be partly predicted by demographic trends. https://www.bis.org/publ/work722.htm
Value/employee it seems hard to beat Instagram with the $1b acquisition at 100 employees.
Historical examples are probably much more fun though.
A) Seafarers / Piracy:
Captain Samuel "Black Sam" Bellamy is apparently the richest pirate in recorded history, when his ship was sunk it had an estimated $400m of treasure aboard (in todays figures which a a pretty debatable calculation) and a complement of 146 men.
Of course there were plenty of other pirates/privateers, merchants and general size lords.
I couldn't find any easy summaries but early trading the early long hail trading voyages generally seem to have been incredibly profitable (1000% returns in some cases) but incredibly dangerous.
B) Invasion / Mercenaries
William the Conqueror landed in England with about 7,500 men (largely to be paid on a success fee basis) and well he conquered England.
Putting a value on that seems to be incredibly complex (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6506987.pdf) but I think we could safely assume that a DCF model based on net crown revenues from 1086 until (at least) 1642 and English civil war would have been staggering.
The mercenary 'White Company' under John Hawkwood appears to have operated on something like a partnership basis. It seems to have ranged in size wildly from ~250 to ~5,000. Again figures are patchy and conversion to contemporary currency fraught but there appear to have been multiple five and six-figure paydays *in 1300's money* (https://www.camrea.org/2017/01/02/soldier-of-fortune-glory-days-for-sir-john-hawkwood-king-of-mercenaries/).
Overall in the historical examples it seems that the returns correlated pretty well with the risk