Is Tiktok Shop slowing? J&T Express just reported SE Asia parcel volumes, and are flat for the year at ~31M per day for the last few qtrs. They're guiding to 50-55% full year growth, implying Q4 holiday season only ramps to 33-37M parcels. Evidence Shopee's VIP & logistics investments are working? $SE $1519.HK

On Shopee VIP. Once customers sign up, they stop comparison shopping + avg spend increases 5x (granted, there's bias, as power users sign up first). VIP members already make up >25% of GMV - think it's a good ROI on capital, by locking up their customer base / reducing churn, and in turn increasing customer LTV. h/t @farrer36am. $SE english.cw.com.tw/article/ar…

The analogy gets better... it took medallion 3 years to successfully expand from FICC markets to equities. Required a completely different data set and tick-by-tick data. They lost money the first couple of years, but eventually became their largest market. Feels similar. $APP

Thanks for having me on @DrewCohenMoney 🙏

This debate resurfaces every few years. Empirically, the data says it doesn't matter (even if logically, it should). #software #sbc

Well, looks like $RKT vacuumed up the entire industry's refi volumes. Not only PennyMac. And 30 yr fixed just hit the lowest in 3.5 years this week.

Happy to share our Q4 2025 letter. Especially at a time when the future of internet and software business models are being questioned. In it, we offer our take on: - The "AI Scare Trade". The market is pricing in fear, not facts. These businesses aren't broken (yet), but investors are selling indiscriminately. - What's still investable? Software faces real headwinds - disruption to terminal value assumptions and forced pricing model shifts. But ~80% of a software company's value is trust, reliability, and headache-free solutions. That doesn't disappear overnight. - Network effects are real moats. Gaming, ecommerce, consumer internet - they're all down substantially from highs. But as AI reduces barriers to entry, the barriers to scale go up. Distribution grows more valuable. - Thoughts on $SE, after a -45% drawdown. We don't think the TikTok boogeyman is as scary as the market fears. In fact, the opposite. - New Oriental $EDU exit. Originally bought near net cash, and business has stabilized since. Time to move on. Full letter linked here: content.haydencapital.com/Ha…

Key Take-Aways from @ballmatthew 's State of Video Games Report: 1. In-App Advertising 2x'd in last 5 years $APP 2. Mobile in-app ads is almost as big as PC & Console Spend combined 😲 3. 65% of mobile games revenue comes from mid & low end smartphone users $SE 4. "Rest of World" (SE Asia, Latam, etc) accounted for all of the growth since 2021.

News officially hit Bloomberg. Thanks for picking it up @oliviasolon. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

AppLovin - Interview with Xiaochuan (architect of $APP's Axon engine). Thought this was the most in-depth public conversation on AppLovin's business to date. (P.S. Youtube has great subtitle translation) Axon & Technical Philosophy - Axon was built by just 5 people in 3 months - AppLovin was the first to implement models with prediction windows exceeding 7 days - Deliberately avoids developing its own LLMs, preferring to use the best available models on the market — building LLMs in-house wouldn't generate the best ROI E-Commerce Expansion - Decision to enter e-commerce made in May 2024, with the product launching later that year; original team was only 10 people - Entering e-commerce was effectively building a new model from scratch - The gaming and e-commerce algorithms share nothing except infrastructure and accumulated organizational experience Core Competency & Culture - AppLovin's edge isn't industry-specific — it's rooted in how the company approaches problems (the culture itself), which he believes positions them to tackle challenges well beyond gaming and e-commerce - His relish for being called an "underdog" comes through clearly throughout the interview Social Media Ambitions - Already working on building a next-generation social media platform - Strategic logic: Meta started with captive organic traffic and built an ad platform on top; AppLovin is doing the reverse - starting with the ad platform and building toward organic traffic - Owning that organic traffic, if achieved, would be a significant advantage Short Seller Response - When the short reports were published, Xiaochuan personally reviewed the systems and code to assess whether the claims had merit Hiring Philosophy - After 2023, overhauled hiring: moved to paying among the highest salaries in Silicon Valley, and shifted focus away from seasoned veterans toward people with fewer than 2 years of experience - Core belief: experience is overrated, the capacity to learn is underrated; breakthroughs come from willingness to abandon convention - "You can't operate like a large company if you don't have a large company's resources" - Most prominent AI researchers are overpriced — high visibility and intense competition drives salaries beyond their marginal value - Targets talent at the "periphery of the spotlight": technically strong but undervalued by the market, and still carrying the underdog mentality that well-known names often lack (i.e. "Moneyball") - Entire engineering org runs on fewer than 100 people youtu.be/18qSqzTdnbs?si=-wlo…