Ep#1: Heard of Kodak? Boat Survival , Too sugar too sweet

Heard of Kodak?

Film reels used in cameras?

Kodak absolutely dominated that space. The brand was the 5th most valuable in the world.

Some perspective:
iPhone: ~50% of all phones sold in the US.
Maruti Suzuki: ~50% of all cars sold in India.

Kodak?

Kodak: 66% of all film reels sold in the world.

The second-largest company after Kodak was so small, back then, barely anybody had heard of them.

Then, someone invented the digital camera. You know what happened after that.

But here’s something not many know: the first digital camera prototype was made by an engineer named Steve Sasson. And he worked at… Kodak.

Kodak did try to do something with it. But it failed to capitalize on this early move.

That’s not the only ship Kodak missed.

In 2001, before Facebook or Instagram were born, Kodak acquired a photo-sharing startup called Ofoto.

Today, for many, it is hard to imagine a world without picture sharing platforms like Instagram. Kodak had it back in 2001. Kodak tried to use that company to make more people print pictures.

In 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.

Kodak does not dominate the way it once did. Not even close.

While earlier, practically everybody had heard of it, today, not many remember.

This isn’t to say Kodak wasn’t good at making decisions. What appear poor decisions now seems so only because we know what actually happened. This is hindsight bias. 

A mistake (almost) killed Kodak.

And mistakes, everyone makes.

As investors too, we cannot avoid making mistakes.

They will happen.

The most successful organizations & people have a closet of skeletons - mistakes.

Mistakes are the fuel of success. You make five/ten/hundred/thousand attempts, one succeeds.

🌚Apple Newton. Never heard of it? Because it failed. It was a smartphone.

🌚 Zune. Microsoft’s competitor to the iPod. Failed.

🌚 Tesla Roadster.

🌚 Amazon Fire.

The list of failed items is probably longer than those that succeeded.

Not all of your investments will give you solid returns. There will be bad ones.

There will be promising ones that never took off. There’ll be those that did extremely well but crashed right before you could take advantage of it.

What we can do, is to ensure that when a mistake does happen, it doesn’t kill us.

Survivability comes first.

And that survivability comes from diversification.

Apple iPhone practically killed Blackberry and Nokia. But they couldn’t kill Samsung.

Blackberry and Nokia made phones. Samsung made phones and a ton of other goods.

When investing, the first priority is to survive.

If you lose all your money today and a new opportunity comes up tomorrow, how will you take advantage of it?

Will Boat Survive the intense competition? ! 💭

boAt earned INR 2,350.8 Cr in FY23 from the audio segment and INR 901.5 Cr from sales of smartwatches

However, boAt slipped into the red for the first time since its inception, reporting a loss of INR 129.4 Cr in FY23 as against a profit of INR 68.7 Cr in FY22

The startup’s EBITDA margin deteriorated to -1.6% in FY23 from 4.98% in FY22

Do you really skip sugar?

I don’t touch sugar!

This is most answer people gave when we ask them (if they are doing weight loss)

Because most people are unaware how sugar is getting added to our diet.

Children / Adults are recommended to consume less than 25 grams / 6 teaspoons of added sugar per day.

If you take a health* drink, you need to limit other added sugar intake such that health* drink + breakfast + lunch + snacks + dinner < 25 grams added sugar

Each brand may have varying serving sizes and flavor variants.

Most families I spoke to said they typically use 20gm scoops per serving of packaged item.

That's my reference here. You may be consuming more than 20gm per drink. do you ?

Here is a list of 74 Names given to a sugar which you gave a miss!