Loan Sharks, Facebook and the Growth Fetish

Think about the following game. I'm going to let you pick seven or twelve then I'm going to role a pair of dice. If you pick seven you win seven hundred dollars if seven turns up and you lose one hundred if it doesn't. If you pick twelve you win two thousand dollars if twelve turns up and lose one hundred if it doesn't.

I assume everyone who reads this blog would pick seven at this point but what if I added the following detail, there's a loan shark waiting outside with a large gun and he is going to shoot you dead if you don't hand him two thousand dollars.

Suddenly, that twelve is starting to look pretty good.

This example is extreme, of course, but it's not all that unrealistic. There are lots of situations where the value of money follows a nonlinear or even stair-step curve. (ever been a nickel short at the coke machine?). Unfortunately we often make all sorts of assumptions about smoothness and well-behaved functions when talking about finance and economics.

Think about stock options. Let's say you bought a share for one hundred dollars. Furthermore, lets say that the CEO (whose options are also pegged at one hundred) has a choice between two strategies: one has a fifty/fifty chance of a share price off 100 or 105; the other has basically a fifty/fifty chance of lowering the price to 50 or raising it to 110.

Which is the better strategy? That depends on whether we're talking about the point of view of you, the stockholder, or of the CEO.

This is, of course, another toy example, albeit a more realistic toy than the first. For a real and timely example consider this from Marketplace:

Facebook's ad revenue is growing steadily, but not fast enough to justify its stock price.

Williamson: Everybody is going to be looking for is some traction in mobile revenue.

If Facebook's ad sales aren't gaining momentum, the social network could face another problem: share overhang -- meaning, jittery employees could dump shares and the stock plummets. Since the IPO, employees haven't been allowed to sell shares. But starting in August, they will be.

Brian Wieser: If the revenue turns out to be way above expectations, it is possible to alleviate some of the share overhang.

Brian Wieser is an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. But he says if earnings disappoint, employees could stage an ugly sell off.

Other than the marketing analytics aspect (where Facebook is very sharp) I don't have any special expertise here, but to a casual observer, the company appears to be facing a seven/twelve choice.

The seven is to shore up the mobile side of the business, get costs under control,and focus on deepening the relationship with existing customers.This strategy has an excellent chance of paying off handsomely for many years.

The twelve is to try to try to grow fast enough to justify the stock price which is a hell of a long shot (When you're closing in on a billion members, a business plan that assumes further explosive growth may not be realistic). Unfortunately, even having a chance at that goal requires pouring money on the problem and squeezing more cash out of members in ever more annoying ways. This strategy runs the risk of leaving the company cash poor with a tarnished brand and unhappy members.

All of this takes us back to the growth fetish, the tendency to overvalue short term growth even when it may end up reducing the long term returns of a company.

More on mergers and the growth fetish

As a follow-up to this post (which was part of a larger thread), this NBER paper (courtesy, I believe, of Felix Salmon or Brad DeLong) suggests that the business case for many if not most mergers is decidedly weak.

The study by professors at the University of California, Berkeley, concludes that acquisitions, while nearly always initially cheered by investors, end up hurting a company, and in particular its share price, in the end. Winning by Losing, which was released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that following an acquisition the stock of that company tends to underperform shares of similar companies by 50% for the next three years. Another finding of the study: Deals done in cash, which is often considered a more conservative way to pay for acquisitions, tend to do worse than deals done for stock. If an acquiring company doesn't want its new owners' shares, you shouldn't either.

Of course, just because the market overvalues acquisitions doesn't mean that it overvalues growth in general, but this is another piece of evidence for the pile.

More thoughts on the growth fetish

I recall a quote from investor Peter Lynch saying (if memory serves) that he didn't like it when companies invested his money, meaning that if a company he owned stock in was sitting on piles of cash he would prefer for it to send him his share of the money as a dividend (or use it for a stock buy-back) rather than spend it acquiring new companies.

I don't have the passage in front of me but I think it's safe to say that Lynch would consider exemptions for expansion and vertical integration. Acquisitions in those categories have to be examined on a case-by-case basis. I doubt, for instance, Lynch would have objected to Tyson picking up pork producers after it achieved dominance in the chicken market.

Instead, we're talking about something like a tobacco company acquiring a cookie manufacturer -- different markets, different vendors, different everything. There are a lot off these acquisitions that don't make a great deal of sense to the casual observer (how did Starwood hotels end up with ITT Tech?). Obviously, the people who made these decision had access to information not available to the general public and there are undoubtedly cases where these decisions would have made more sense had the casual observer been thoroughly briefed. Still, given sheer number of odd-looking acquisitions, I have to suspect that at least some of them are attempts to cash in on the growth fetish.

More on the growth fetish -- Facebook vs. Groupon

There is a worthwhile exchange going on between Felix Salmon and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. I've already quoted Salmon, but Gobry makes some good points as well. Still, the part I found the most interesting is the part I think he got wrong.

Breakthrough technology startups are different from other kinds of businesses in that they either create a new market or violently disrupt an existing one. This means that they almost invariably require to spend lots of capital in order to stake out a defensible market position against their numerous competitors. In particular, many technology markets have winner-take-most or winner-take-all dynamics, either because of network effects or economies of scale…

Felix writes that Groupon had a profitable Q1 2010 and “it’s easy to see how it could have grown steadily from that point onward.” Except that given the characteristics of the daily deal business, particularly the need for scale, what would have happened if Groupon had tried to “grow steadily” and profitably, is that the company wouldn’t be around anymore.

It’s LivingSocial that would have raised over a billion dollars and be worth $10 billion today, Groupon would have been sold for scrap like BuyWithMe and plenty of other daily deals also-rans, and Andrew Mason would be back to doing yoga on YouTube. Groupon would be a footnote.

This illustrates (at least for me), a common error among growth fetishists -- overgeneralizing valid arguments for growth-at-all-costs. The first paragraph above is absolutely on target. There are situations where establishing dominance and critical mass as quickly as possible is incredibly valuable. Cases like Facebook. To make a bad pop culture reference, when it comes to mainstream social networking sites, there can be only one. Once Facebook was in place, all that was left was niches.

Put another way, it would cost more to unseat Facebook than it did to build it. Under those circumstances, Zuckerberg's bury-the-problem-in-money approach to running a business made sense (even if it was aesthetically lacking).

The first mover advantages for Groupon are far less obvious. There's no reason why we couldn't have two online gift card businesses. Consumers would get a wider selection and the merchants would almost certainly see lower fees (there's no way Groupon could charge those rates in a competitive market). Nor are the economies of scale that significant, at least not for the part of the business based on arranging deals with local merchants.

A potential competitor would have to spend a lot of money building a mailing list but probably not that much more than Groupon spent on its list. In short, if a potential competitor were to spend as much money as Groupon has, it might just catch up (particularly given the fact that Groupon is not a very well run company).

In terms of lifetime value, I suspect that the money Groupon spent on explosive growth was badly invested. However, in terms of buzz and stock price, it may have been money well spent as far as the backers were concerned.

Venture capital and the growth fetish

Felix Salmon has another smart post on venture capital and the way he feels it distorts American business:

Another way to look at this question is to compare US fight-to-be-number-one capitalism with the kind of capitalism practiced in undeniably successful countries like Germany, Korea, Brazil, and Japan. Those countries don’t have nearly as many world-beating behemoths as the US does, but overall their economies and current accounts are doing very well on a bedrock of medium-sized firms and family-owned corporations.

So in a way, Gobry is making my point for me. The IPO market and the VCs who feed off it are playing a game which might make a small number of people extremely rich, and which will create a very small number of hugely successful world-beating companies. They’re not playing a game which is good for founders; they’re not playing a game which is good for healthy, long-lived companies; and they’re not playing a game which is good for the economy as a whole. That’s kind of the point I’m making in the piece when I say that “Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist”.

I think this fits nicely with one of our ongoing themes here at OE, the growth fetish:

Think of it this way, if we ignore all those questions about stakeholders and the larger impact of a company, you can boil the value of a business down to a single scalar: just take the profits over the lifetime of a company and apply an appropriate discount function (not trivial but certainly doable). The goal of a company's management is to maximize this number and the goal of the market is to assign a price to the company that accurately reflects that number.

The first part of the hypothesis is that there are different possible growth curves associated with a business and, ignoring the unlikely possibility of a tie, there is a particular curve that optimizes profits for a particular business. In other words, some companies are better off growing rapidly; some are better off with slow or deferred growth; some are better off simply staying at the same level; and some are better off being allowed to slowly contract.

It's not difficult to come up with examples of ill-conceived expansions. Growth almost always entails numerous risks for an established company. Costs increase and generally debt does as well. Scalability is usually a concern. And perhaps most importantly, growth usually entails moving into an area where you probably don't know what the hell you're doing. I recall Peter Lynch (certainly a fan of growth stocks) warning investors to put off buying into chains until the businesses had demonstrated the ability to set up successful operations in other cities.

But the idea of getting in on a fast-growing company is still tremendously attractive, appealing enough to unduly influence people's judgement (and no, I don't see any reason to mangle a sentence just to keep an infinitive in one piece). For reasons that merit a post of their own (GE will be mentioned), that natural bias toward growth companies has metastasised into a pervasive fetish.

This bias does more than inflate the prices of certain stocks; it pressures people running companies to make all sorts of bad decisions from moving into markets where you don't belong (Borders) to pumping up market share with unprofitable customers (Groupon) to overpaying for acquisitions (too many examples to mention).

I didn't consider the role of venture capital at the time. Perhaps I missed the biggest factor.