Reporting

When we talk to our customers and potential customers we love to get an understanding of their “ultimate report”. It’s the report that stakeholders can quickly rally behind and understand how the business is performing, usually to a goal or target. Through this we’ve learned a ton and want to share the learnings with our audience through a 4 part series. Part 1 of 4: Pacing Today is Part 1 of the series, pacing. Pacing is a great way to apply weights to different periods throughout a range. E.g. You may close 40% of your deals in the last month of the quarter as reps have more urgency. Pacing should let you know if you are on track or not.The above chart is an example of pacing. This one in particular related to recurring revenue businesses by day but you can apply it to any business and timeframe. The goal is to be pacing 100% to your goal (the dotted line) throughout a period. The inspiration for this came from David Skok’s SaaS 2.0 post, specifically from the Hubspot example. Through a period of time the Hubspot team wanted to know how they were pacing towards their monthly goal this way they could make any adjustments on the fly to hit their goal. As you can see, the end of a period for SaaS sales may be weighted higher as there is more urgency for a rep to close a deal but you weights could vary depending on seasonality, buying cycles, business models, etc. Another view could be: This chart is showing we are pacing above where we should be relative to our Q4 target. I love pacing because it helps make adjustments but gets the team aligned on where you should be. You might be only 2 weeks into a quarter but you want to know where you are compared to where you are supposed to end up. Being 10% to your Quarter target may be acceptable and makes sure the entire team and stakeholders are aligned while understanding the health of particular KPIs. What is your ultimate report? Want us to create it in Visible for you? Want access to the Google Sheet template that powered this post? Drop us a note. Up & to the right, -The Visible Team

Even the best companies will eventually face one of the unfortunate inevitabilities of startup life—the investor update that’s littered with bad news. But delivering dissatisfactory results doesn’t make you unique. How you handle adversity, on the other hand, can make you stand out and serve as a test that separates the strongest founders from those that crumble under the pressure. Related Reading: How To Write the Perfect Investor Update (Tips and Templates) The irony of investor updates Entrepreneurs on a hot streak tend to be better at keeping investors up-to-date than those struggling to hit KPI goals. Makes sense. We’re happiest to show our work when we’re assured accolades for our hard work. But it’s the entrepreneurs missing their goals that need to be the most transparent with investors—even if the next report resembles an S.O.S. message. You can’t lose sight of the fact that investors are bought into the company’s future as well and willing to assist. Let them help. Shielding a group of experienced mentors from chipping in with their expertise on issues they’ve likely faced before is a lose-lose scenario for investors and founders. So regardless of company performance, keep investor updated early and often. “Transparency is the foundation of all great companies,” Entrepreneurial coach CJ McClanahan says. “Everyone is going to figure out what’s going on eventually—your team, investors, the marketplace, everyone. So live by this adage: tell the truth fast.” How to avoid the big blow up Hit your investors with some unpleasant news after months of radio silence could be seen as a sign of disrespect. Thus, an unnecessary blowup could ensue, taking everyone’s eye of the ball of what’s really important: turning the company around. Regularly send your investor reports. There’s no reason a bad quarter has to turn into a company crisis, but slumping numbers will shock investors if they haven’t been able to track the company’s progress in months. This approach is also a great strategy for securing future funding. Early stage VCs tell me they are twice as likely to invest again in later rounds with companies that kept them up-to-date on performance. When it comes to the bad news, don’t be afraid to get specific. If there’s been a plan or decision that you’ve executed that didn’t work, walk your investors through your process. Explain why it didn’t work. And always justify. Even if you’ve made the wrong choice, backup your decision making with what you knew at that time and what you expected as a result. You don’t want your investors thinking you’re acting careless with company strategy. A Columbia study showed people are much more likely to empathize with poor results if they understand the process. By doing this, you’ll also preemptively answer many of the questions your investors will want to know about the company and use the moment as an opportunity to showcase your preparedness. Plus, the extra level of detail will help investors identify where you may be able to improve or how they may be able to help. After you explain your process for previous decisions, let your investors share how they would’ve done it different. If you allow the room to debate the merits of a decision, investors will feel more confident that their voice will be considered in the future. Finally, as Joshua Margolis, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, explained to HBR.org admitting that you’ve made a strategic mistake can help you maintain credibility as a founder and provide a rallying point for everyone to work harder on making the business a success. But your message won’t motivate unless it’s delivered well. It’s essential to walk into a meeting ready to deliver bad news without ambiguity. Don’t make investors guess which metrics underperformed or what efforts didn’t work. Outline the problem right away. Make sure you’ve prepared your remarks before you give them and practice, practice, practice. Go over your updates with a co-founder or a friend and double-check that you’re clearly conveying the information you want to get across. Even if you’re not a natural presenter, rehearse enough to allow yourself to stand in front of room full of investors and speak with confidence. You don’t want your body language to say something more negative than your underperforming numbers. How to turn the ship around Now it’s time to move on to the future. Like Don Draper said, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” That’s not always easy when you’re looking at hard numbers, but a shifting the conversation to a strategic focus on the future can get all investors onboard. Don’t just beg for help, get into specifics. Assign tasks to individual investors (based on their strengths) and share with the group what you expect in return. Then show what you and your team are going to do to solve your biggest problems. Much like walking through the process that lead you to poor results, show the specifics of what you plan to do to jumpstart your KPIs. Open the floor to questions and feedback after. Allow your investors to tweak the process. Strong collaboration will create additional buy-in and get everyone excited for what’s coming next. You’re in a great position to turn this situation into a big win for you and your company. Never forget that adversity is a necessary ingredient in all great startups.

Yes, bad blood between a startup CEO and one of the company’s financiers may be a plague on both houses, but the responsibility largely falls on the founder to prevent the affliction. Maybe you’re one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have managed to preserve the sacred union between founder and investor. Good. But your work is not complete! Like all relationships it’s bound to fall apart without strong trust and communication. It’s not good enough to simply declare an open door policy for emails, calls or visits. Set a schedule and stick to it. Provide regular updates that outline vital metrics and allot time for investors to have the opportunity to ask you anything. The cycle of updates and willingness to be transparent mitigates one-off asks and actually helps you stay focused on the most important aspects of the business. Follow These 5 Steps to Improve Investor Relations Go one-on-one—Set up individual investor calls. Allowing time for long-form discussions, brainstorming, individual inquiries and just shooting the breeze or sweet talking to help make every investor feel important. This is essential for those unable to attend in-person meetings. Do your best to schedule interactions outside of the office, too. If you and your investors are able to make time for lunch or drinks, you can better understand your investors on a social level as well. Regular conference calls— Follow up on written reports by setting up a call to field questions or any other particulars that pique an investor’s interest. Share a conversation and you and your investors will remember why you fell for each other in the first place. Write monthly reports: Keep it simple. Investors want updates in five key areas: how much cash is in the bank, how many months until $0, how the team is functioning, how are the KPIs and how they can help you. Having a hard copy provides your investors with a reference sheet when they need quick answers about your company. In-person meetings— Get everyone in a room and let investors pepper you with questions like you’re facing a firing squad. The physical meeting simply can’t be replaced, even if out-of-town investors can’t make it. Investors will appreciate the chance to meet face-to-face. Ask what you’re doing wrong –Vulnerability is a great thing if it strengthens relationships. Open yourself up to criticism from your investors. Let them take you to task, you’ll be better off for it. And to improve your communication strategy, ask each investor what else you could do to keep them properly up-to-date on the company’s health. Investor communication is no less important than communication with your employees. Everyone involved in the business needs to stay on top of what’s going on. And investors will have a much tougher time staying in the loop while managing a portfolio of other companies and spending most days not interacting with your business at all. So don’t let communication gaps form and relationships fizzle. Keep the feedback loop going and let harmony reign. Now say it together: ‘til liquidation do we part. Related Resource: Liquidation Preference: Types of Liquidation Events & How it Works Search through thousands of VCs with Visible Connect:

Ford was Founded in 1903 and has been a staple of American culture since. No company has created the stories and memories like those of Ford; the Model T, the assembly line, the Mustang, the Pinto, and most recently “their 2008 comeback”. We are all too familiar with the financial crisis in 2008. The automotive industry was hit particularly hard and faced challenging questions all while on the brink of collapsing. Alan Mulally, Ford’s newly appointed CEO at the time, stuck to his guns and pulled out a historical comeback. Mulally’s plan, ONE Ford, is prevalent while the company fought to stay afloat in one of the most uneasy times in recent history. Although Alan stepped down in 2014, ONE Ford is still largely influential at Ford and crucial to their company history. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Ford’s 2008 Letter to Shareholders A Message from the President and CEO, In 2008 the automotive industry faced a deep recession in the United States and Europe, the worst worldwide financial crisis in decades and a dramatic slowdown in all major global markets. Like all automakers, Ford Motor Company was adversely impacted by these extraordinarily difficult economic conditions. However, the plan Ford is operating under – what we call ONE Ford – is helping us endure these current conditions and position ourselves for future success. Our plan has been consistent for the past two years: Aggressively restructure to operate profitability at the current lower demand and changing model mix. Accelerate the development of safe, fuel-efficient, high-quality new products that customers want and value. Finance our plan and improve our balance sheet. Work together as one team, leverage our global assets. ONE Ford has transformed us into a different auto company: different than others today and from ourselves a few years ago. However, the worldwide economic slowdown – driven by tight credit markets and weak consumer confidence – has shaken the foundation of even the strongest companies, in the automotive sector and in every other industry. A plan so simple it can fit on a business card – yet so influential it overhauled the culture at Ford. ONE Ford was the first step Alan Mulally took when he took over the reigns as Ford’s CEO in 2006. The plan, simply enough, revolved around creating one vision for everyone on the team – not just executives and managers. The fruits of the plan have paid off greatly as Ford has generated record profits while staying lean and innovative. Certainly, the severe economic challenges of 2008 had a significant impact on our results for the year, both in terms of our operating losses and cash flow. After earning a profit in the first quarter of 2008, we had an overall net loss of $14.7 billion for the year, with $6 billion of that coming in the fourth quarter. That compares with an overall net loss of $2.7 billion in 2007. Our worldwide Automotive revenue was $129.2 billion in 2008, compared with $154.4 billion in 2007. At yearend 2008, our total Automotive liquidity was $24 billion, including gross cash of $13.4 billion. Fortunately, we began aggressive restructuring efforts under ONE Ford before the current crisis began. We eliminated excess manufacturing capacity, closing plants and reducing our workforce. We negotiated a new contract with the UAW to improve our competitiveness. We shifted to a balanced product lineup offering high quality, proven safety, excellent fuel economy and good value. As part of our ONE Ford plan we also secured credit in advance of the financial market meltdown. As a result of all of these actions and based on our current planning assumptions, we have sufficient liquidity to make it through this global downturn while maintaining our product plans, without the need for government bridge loans. However, as we told Congress in our business plan submission in December 2008, in this environment a number of scenarios could put severe pressure on our Automotive liquidity, causing us to require such a loan – including most importantly a significantly deeper economic downturn, or a significant industry event such as the uncontrolled bankruptcy of a major competitor or major suppliers that caused a major disruption to our supply base or dealers. When Mulally took over as CEO, in 2006, Ford mortgaged all of their assets to finance the loans spoken of above. At the time, Ford was in desperate need to restructure their company as whole and saw the need for “a cushion to protect for a recession or other unexpected event”, as Mulally put it in a separate interview. As an added bonus, staying away from a bailout was solid for marketing and created a positive image of Ford for many consumers. Staying aligned with their plan, Ford sold off most of their marques in order to stay agile and focus on their most important brand; their own. In the year or so leading up to this annual report Ford sold off their interest in Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Mazda. A few years after the report they would continue the trend and sell off their share in Volvo as well as discontinuing the Mercury line. We continue to take the decisive actions necessary to lower production to match lower worldwide demand and reduce costs. We expect this will contribute to significantly reduced negative Automotive operating-related cash flow in 2009 as compared with 2008, and position Ford for growth when the economy rebounds. Based on our current planning assumptions, we believe we are on track for total Company and North American Automotive pre-tax results and Automotive operating-related cash flow to be at or above breakeven in 2011, excluding special items. Our ultimate goal remains unchanged: to create a viable Ford Motor Company and a lean global enterprise delivering profitable growth for all. Looking ahead, we anticipate very weak global industry sales volumes during 2009, with a full-year decline in the range of about 15% from 2008 levels. Significant government policy stimulus is being implemented in most markets and is expected to improve the environment for sales later this year. Financial markets remain under significant stress, however, and further government and central bank actions are needed to provide liquidity and stabilize banks. For Ford, the year ahead will be marked by an unprecedented number of new product introductions. Consistent with our ONE Ford plan, we are introducing more products that customers want and value. As other automotive companies were solely focused on gathering capital, Ford’s previously mentioned loans allowed them to continue to invest in the introduction of new products and technologies. This has included the innovation of their hybrid/electric vehicles and renewed success of their staple models, such as the Focus. Ford also is on track with its plan to invest in new, smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles and achieve a more balanced global product portfolio. Within the next five years, all Ford vehicles competing in global segments will be common in North America, Europe and Asia, fulfilling a key element of our ONE Ford plan. This includes Ford Fiesta- and Focus-sized small cars, Fusion- and Mondeo-sized midsize cars and utilities, as well as commercial vans. Importantly, every new product will be the best or among the best in its segment for fuel economy, while providing top quality, safety, smart technologies and value. In another instance of ONE Ford, Mulally touches on the importance of consolidating their platforms and becoming a global company. In the above graphic, pulled from a 2015 Ford corporate update, you can see the continuance of consolidating their platforms. Currently all of Ford models share just 9 platforms and roughly 80% of the same parts; by doing so Ford has been able to create massive economies of scale. We also are launching the most aggressive vehicle electrification program in the industry. By 2012, we plan to produce at least four high-mileage vehicles that will use the most advanced forms of battery technology in a family of hybrids, plug-in hybrids and battery-powered vehicles. In addition to producing these vehicles, we are employing a comprehensive approach to electrification that will tackle commercial issues such as batteries, standards and infrastructure. We are working with Southern California Edison, the Electric Power Research Institute and six additional electric utility companies from New York, Atlanta, Detroit and Raleigh to develop plug-in hybrid vehicles and infrastructure. Despite an extremely difficult year we continue to see many positive developments. These ongoing improvements make us more confident than ever that we have the right plan and are taking the right actions to survive the downturn and emerge as a lean, globally integrated company poised for long-term profitable growth. As always, we thank you for your support of our efforts. Alan R. Mulally

In the world of business, moving first can be difficult and dangerous. Etsy, the Brooklyn-based marketplace connecting sellers and buyers of handmade and vintage goods, who IPO’d in 2015 is finding this out the hard way. When it went public, Etsy was the largest (and one of the first) B Corporations ever to do so at a market cap of over $3B. Since, Etsy’s value has slipped to under $1B and it is yet to convince investors of its long term viability in light of widening losses and competition from Amazon (“your margin is my opportunity”). In this week’s Investor Letter, which was included as part of the company’s S-1 filing, CEO Chad Dickerson makes the case for Etsy as a public company and tries to push Wall Street analysts to see past simple profits and also evaluate the company on the community it has built and the economic impact it has had…good luck with that. The Etsy Economy Since inception, Etsy has challenged conventional ways of thinking about commerce, business, individuals and communities. I intend to keep our unconventional operating philosophy as we become a public company, and I welcome new investors into our community. When I joined Etsy almost seven years ago, Etsy was an online marketplace for handmade goods, vintage items and craft supplies that connected sellers and buyers. Even in my early days at Etsy, it was clear to me that the vision for Etsy could extend far beyond the founding idea of the company and have even more potential to impact the world for good. Vision is just the starting point. I believe Etsy can truly change the world when our vision is met with strong culture, a powerful team and disciplined execution. In my time at Etsy, I’ve put my heart and soul into nurturing a culture and building a team and company that match the ambition of our mission. Today our mission is much more expansive than when Etsy began: to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world. The reimagination of commerce means transforming every aspect of how goods are made, bought and sold. We believe that Etsy has the long-term potential to transform the world economy into one that is more people-centered and community-focused—one that values and honors designers and makers and one that creates stronger connections among people who make, sell and buy goods. We see an economy that is more sustainable and transparent—and one that is more joyful. We believe in an economy that transcends price and convenience, one that emphasizes relationships over transactions and optimizes for authorship and provenance. We call this the Etsy Economy. Building the Etsy Economy matters more than ever. For decades now, the conventional and dominant retail model has relentlessly focused on delivering goods at the lowest price, valuing products and profits over community, short-changing the future with the instant gratification of today. I do not believe that this race to the bottom is a sustainable, successful model. Our growing community has made it clear that they desire thoughtful alternatives to mass commerce and impersonal retail and products that better reflect their personal style and values. Person by person, sale by sale, we are building a new model to replace the old. With GMS of $1.93 billion in 2014, I see the Etsy Economy emerging. Etsy’s Values If you want to understand Etsy, you’ll have to understand our values. We are a mindful, transparent and humane business. We plan and build for the long term. We value craftsmanship in all we make. We believe fun should be part of everything we do. We keep it real, always. Fundamentally, we believe that companies can and should use the power of business to create social good, which is reflected in our status as a Certified B Corporation. As we noted in the intro, Etsy was the largest (and one of the first) B Corporation ever to do so at a market cap of over $3B. Rally Software, out of Denver, was the first of the group to go public (at a market cap of just over $300MM). It has since been acquired by CA Technologies for $480MM. Natura Brazil (Market Cap: $12.4B) is the world’s largest publicly traded B Corp but it received certification after it was already public Other well known B Corporations include Ben & Jerry’s, Warby Parker, which could overtake Etsy as the largest B Corp IPO should it choose to take that route. Our commitment to using business as a force of good manifests itself in the way we run our business. People often ask me how I choose between the success of our community and the success of our business. My answer is that I don’t have to choose; we have built a business that does well when our community is successful. Making money matters to Etsy because our financial success creates long-term sustainability for our community. The more we invest in our platform, the more we enable Etsy sellers to pursue their craft and grow their businesses and the easier we make it for Etsy buyers to find unique goods. We call this Etsy’s Empowerment Loop. Community At Etsy, we believe that our strength and business success rest in the interdependence among Etsy sellers, Etsy buyers, responsible manufacturers and our employees—in other words, our community. Etsy sellers represent a diverse mosaic of needs and aspirations. Some sellers are first-time small business owners and benefit greatly from our seller support and education programs. The vast majority of sellers on Etsy are one-person shops, and we continue to embrace and develop new ways to support them. Other sellers have grown and need help scaling with the assistance of responsible manufacturers, creating opportunity for other participants in the Etsy Economy. In all cases, we empower each Etsy seller to succeed on her own terms. I have heard concerns that by allowing our sellers to partner with responsible manufacturers, we are diluting our handmade ethos. I share our community’s desire to preserve what is special about Etsy. After all, Etsy has always served as an antidote to mass manufacturing. We still do. With our vision of responsible manufacturing, we are promoting a new, people-centered model in which artisans can preserve the spirit of craftsmanship and grow responsibly by collaborating with people at small-batch manufacturers to make their goods. This brings more hands together to build both products and more diverse local, living economies. These local, living economies band together into a larger Etsy Economy made up of individuals with diverse roles but all sharing a collective vision of an economy based on community. When individuals share a collective vision, the power and possibility of community manifest in profound ways. Etsy is, by design, a collection of many small things. As we grow, Etsy becomes a larger collection of individuals and communities, with compounding benefits when they connect with each other. Etsy sellers have self-organized into more than 10,000 groups around the world, known as “Etsy Teams.” They provide local support to each other and collaborate with Etsy on initiatives, such as teaching entrepreneurship to economically disadvantaged people in their communities, lobbying the government on issues important to Etsy sellers, running local craft fairs and translating Etsy’s site into other languages. In 2012, Mayor Larry Morrissey reached out to me on Twitter asking how to build an Etsy Economy in his community of Rockford, Illinois. Rockford is a city that has faced challenges familiar to many cities in America and around the world: loss of manufacturing jobs, high unemployment and a struggling economy. We worked with Mayor Morrissey, members of the local Rockford Etsy Team, the public education system, local arts organizations and the public housing authority to launch the Etsy Craft Entrepreneurship Program. This program teaches people with a craft skill that entrepreneurship and economic opportunity are within reach on our platform. We have extended this program to 10 cities around the world and see it as an inspirational model for even deeper community involvement in the coming years. Our concept of community includes the cities where we live and work, and we run Etsy in a way that supports our own local economy and ecosystem. At our headquarters in Brooklyn, twice a week we serve a meal that we call “Eatsy.” Our approach is to foster community and productivity through a meal, designed for employees to eat together on picnic-style benches. This meal allows employees to engage with each other, within and across teams, and increases team-building and work relationships throughout the company. Eatsy also serves as an end point for company-wide meetings, so that employees can continue the conversation on important workplace topics. In 2014, we sourced food from over 40 local businesses with an emphasis on our health and ecological impact. We eat on compostable plates, and employees sign up to deliver our compost by bike to a local farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where it is turned back into the soil that produces the food we enjoy together. In this way, Eatsy goes into the very soil we live and work on. Eatsy is a metaphor for how I think about many aspects of our business and our relationship to the world around us: regenerative, mindful, interdependent, community-based and fun. Why Etsy Should be a Public Company I believe the principles and resources of being a public company align well with the model of shared success that is fundamental to Etsy’s way of doing business, namely that we make money when our sellers make money. Investing in the growth of our business and increasing Etsy’s visibility will help elevate Etsy sellers and attract more buyers, which creates more opportunities for everyone. This section is perhaps the most interesting since it attempts to answer a question that, to this day, the public markets feel has not been put to rest. To date, the public markets have shown an unwillingness to accept a company like Etsy where profit seems to take a back seat to impact — unless, of course, that company is Amazon whose scorched earth brand of market expansion appeals a great deal to Wall Street in spite of minimal profits. Accountability / transparency Etsy has a long history of providing data to the community, everything from key financial metrics, to our gross happiness index, to our carbon footprint data, to our workplace diversity stats. As a public company, we will be able to provide a higher level of transparency and accountability to a broader number of people. Community participation Being a private company means that most people don’t have an opportunity to invest in Etsy. When Etsy is a public company, anyone will be able to own a piece of Etsy, including our sellers, our buyers and anyone else who shares Etsy’s values and mission. These shareholders will be valued members of our community. Long-term sustainability We want to be a company that spans generations. Eighty-six of the original companies in the S&P 500 index are still publicly traded after 58 years. I view going public as an important step towards providing Etsy with the capital and long-term corporate structure to achieve similar longevity. In light of Amazon’s foray into the handmade goods market and Etsy’s struggles as a public company (likely related), there has been some chatter about a buyout. As we noted above, Amazon has a history of scoffing at traditional Wall Street desires and with its acquisition of Zappos in 2009 proved it is willing to take bets on company whose culture seems to be at odds with their own. Making the world more like Etsy I believe that Etsy can be a public company that holistically integrates the concerns of people and the planet, the present and the future, profitability and accountability. If we succeed, then other companies might replicate our model. We think the world will be a better place for it. As a public company, we will continue to concentrate on the long term. Our mission to reimagine commerce is a big goal and it will take time to achieve it; success will be based on strategies that evolve over years and decades, not just quarters. We are more focused on creating long-term results for us and our community than short-term results that lack that promise. I believe this approach will deliver the most sustainable long-term returns to investors. When we’re public, we do not plan to give quarterly or annual earnings guidance. I think providing quantitative earnings guidance is misaligned with Etsy’s mission. For example, the pressure to hit a quarterly financial target could incent us too heavily to seek near-term gains, which could diminish our ability to fulfill our larger mission over the long-term. We will continue to be transparent with our investors. Instead of providing guidance in the traditional sense, I plan to talk frequently with our investors about our progress, challenges and opportunities. I welcome investors who share our long-term, community-oriented philosophy. What’s Ahead I am intensely grateful to all of the people who have given so much of themselves to build Etsy, and I am excited to welcome new like-minded shareholders to our community. We are entering a new era. I believe that successful businesses will be those that combine vision, execution and discipline with values, heart and conviction. That is how I plan to lead Etsy and work with our community to build a more fulfilling and lasting world through commerce. Etsy will be entering its second decade this year, and we look forward to many more in our new form as a public company.

Like Warren Buffett, Howard Marks is a master craftsman of memos on the state of the market, investment psychology, and investment philosophy. In January of 2016 as capital seemed to be pouring out of public and private equity markets – at the time of his post, the S&P was down almost 9% from where it ended 2015 – and liquidity was on the minds of many investors and operators. For people building companies (as opposed to investment firms), his notes on liquidity provide ample learning opportunities to help effectively navigate periods of exuberance and tightening that inevitably occur. Marks framed his thoughts on liquidity well at the beginning of this Bloomberg interview where he states: “The best defense against liquidity is not needing it. It is buying things you can hold for a long period of time.” We have pulled out our favorite sections and added our thoughts below. The full investor letter (pdf) can be found at the bottom of this post. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Oaktree’s Howard Marks on Liquidity Liquidity Defined Sometimes people think of liquidity as the quality of something being readily saleable or marketable. For this, the key question is whether it’s registered, publicly listed and legal for sale to the public. “Marketable securities” are liquid in this sense; you can buy or sell them in the public markets. “Nonmarketable” securities include things like private placements and interests in private partnerships, whose salability is restricted and can require the qualification of buyers, documentation, and perhaps a time delay. But the more important definition of liquidity is this one from Investopedia: “The degree to which an asset or security can be bought or sold in the market without affecting the asset’s price.” Thus the key criterion isn’t “can you sell it?” It’s “can you sell it at a price equal or close to the last price?” Most liquid assets are registered and/or listed; that can be a necessary but not sufficient condition. For them to be truly liquid in this latter sense, one has to be able to move them promptly and without the imposition of a material discount. Much ink has been spilled in recent periods about the lack of liquidity – using the definition Marks’ favors – in the private markets. Companies of all stages are struggling to raise fresh capital without taking a haircut (selling an asset below the last price) and the IPO window is firmly closed. Liquidity Characterized I often say many of the important things in investing are counter-intuitive. Liquidity is one of them. In particular, it’s probably more wrong than right to say without qualification that something is or isn’t “liquid.” If when people ask whether a given asset is liquid they mean “marketable” (in the sense of “listed” or “registered”), then that’s an entirely appropriate question, and answering it is straightforward. Either something can be sold freely to the public or it can’t. But if what they want to know is how hard it will be to get rid of it if they change their mind or want to take a profit or avoid a possible loss – how long it will take to sell it, or how much of a markdown they’ll have to take from the last price – that’s probably not an entirely legitimate question. It’s often a mistake to say a particular asset is either liquid or illiquid. Usually an asset isn’t “liquid” or “illiquid” by its nature. Liquidity is ephemeral: it can come and go. An asset’s liquidity can increase or decrease with what’s going on in the market. One day it can be easy to sell, and the next day hard. Or one day it can be easy to sell but hard to buy, and the next day easy to buy but hard to sell. In other words, the liquidity of an asset often depends on which way you want to go . . . and which way everyone else wants to go. If you want to sell when everyone else wants to buy, you’re likely to find your position is highly liquid: you can sell it quickly, and at a price equal to or above the last transaction. But if you want to sell when everyone else wants to sell, you may find your position is totally illiquid: selling may take a long time, or require accepting a big discount, or both. If that’s the case – and I’m sure it is – then the asset can’t be described as being either liquid or illiquid. It’s entirely situational. There’s usually plenty of liquidity for those who want to sell things that are rising in price or buy things that are falling. That’s great news, since much of the time those are the right actions to take. But why is the liquidity plentiful? For the simple reason that most investors want to do just the opposite. The crowd takes great pleasure from buying things whose prices are rising, and they often become highly motivated to sell things that are falling . . . notwithstanding that those may be exactly the wrong things to do. Select Passages Specific investor actions can have a dramatic impact in illiquid markets For example, the price of an illiquid asset can rise simply because one buyer is buying, in which case selling the asset becomes very easy. When that buyer stops buying, however, the market can quickly reset to much lower levels in terms of both price and the liquidity enjoyed by sellers (and it can overshoot in the other direction if the buyer decides to sell what he bought. People have pointed out that the slowdown in VC funding (to whatever extent it has or will happen) has been largely a VC conspiracy and it is tough to write this off entirely — although I am sure that in this imagined world of VC “conspiracies” a yoga studio or vest-shopping excursion replaces the dark, smoke-filled rooms of old-timey conspiracy theories. The reality is that the venture market is small and quite illiquid, so when a few major firms decide to focus more on their existing portfolios or non-traditional players like mutual funds decide to slow down, liquidity begins to trickle out of the market. And in an already illiquid market, change can happen fast. In describing current market conditions, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures noted the following: If you want to see what was on my mind – I started foreshadowing change publicly in October 2015 with a forecast of what I expected in 2016 VC funding markets at a presentation I gave at the annual Cendana VC/LP conference hosted by Michael Kim. Word travels at light speed amongst this small network of people who all know each other and even though they’re rivals they also sit on boards together and many probably went to business school together. So when something in changing those at ground zero, in my word, “get the memo.” Of course it’s not literally a memo but that’s a metaphor for knowing that things have dramatically changed. If you’re not in this closed group of VCs you will eventually figure out the new game but the memo arrives more slowly. Many of the industry’s top thinkers were at Cendana’s annual meeting and panel after panel privately debated what they were seeing. On the other hand, at the right time, investors can make tremendous amounts of money simply by being willing to supply liquidity (are accept illiquidity). When everyone else is selling in panic or sitting frozen on the sideline, refusing to buy, cash can be king. Often when a crash follows a bubble driven run-up, most people are short of cash (and/or the willingness to spend it). A few paragraphs before this passage, Marks touches on the need to think about liquidity levels carrying over from one asset or market to another. This was the case in 2008 and 2009, when it seemed people in all markets were content to sit on the sidelines and reserve cash. During that time, investors who were unwilling to spend their cash (supplying liquidity) in the early stage private markets would have missed out on investing in generation-defining companies like Uber, Slack, and Airbnb. The bottom line is unambiguous. Liquidity can be transient and paradoxical. It’s plentiful when you don’t care about it and scarce when you need it most. Given the way it waxes and wanes, it’s dangerous to assume the liquidity that’s available in good times will be there when the tide goes out. What can an investor do about this unreliability? The best preparation for bouts of illiquidity is: Buying assets, hopefully at prices below durable intrinsic values, that can be held for a long time – in the case of debt, to its maturity – even if prices fall or price discovery ceases to take place, and Making sure that investment vehicle structures, leverage arrangements (if any), manager/client relationships and performance expectations will permit a long-term approach to investing. These are the things we try to do. In the section above, Marks is talking about the Oaktree approach to building their firm and later notes two benefits to their approach: We aren’t highly reliant on liquidity for success, and Rather than be weakened in times of illiquidity, we can profit from crises by investing more – at lower prices – when liquidity is scarce. Rephrased for someone building a company and not an investment firm, the benefits to this type of strategy would be: 1. We aren’t highly reliant on another round of funding for success 2. Rather than be weakened when the funding market pendulum swings, we can profit from downturns by investing more – at lower prices – in things like talent and customer acquisition This mirrors the approach of Slack’s Stewart Butterfield who has tried to take advantage of a period of high liquidity to protect his company (financially and psychologically) from a market downturn. “And really the thing we get out of having the cash in the bank at this point is options. We’re in a really good position where when opportunities arise that we want to take advantage of, we can just do them. Whether that’s acquisitions, international expansion, advertising — whatever it is that comes up that feels like the best move for the business, we will take advantage of. Having the freedom to pursue opportunities without the constraint of capital enables all kinds of things which otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.” – Stewart Butterfield, Business Insider Interview

Every company going out to try to raise capital from angel investors or VCs seems to have some derivative of the same question – “What should we include in our pitch deck?” While the outsize clout people give a simple slide deck may seem silly, it speaks the importance of being able to weave a compelling narrative about your business. Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital is one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. He sits on the board of companies like Square and Jawbone and led investments in Youtube and Meebo before they were acquired by Google. Recently, he checked in at #18 on CB Insights list of the top 100 venture capitalists. Basically, he knows what it takes to build great companies and how those companies should think about raising capital. Thanks to court records from the 2010 Viacom-YouTube lawsuit, we can take a first hand look at how the Youtube founders pitched Botha (exhibit 1) and how Botha pitched Youtube internally to his Sequoia partners (exhibit 2). From there, we can better understand how companies should think about structuring their own pitches to investors as well as the major hurdles companies need to get over to turn a potential investor into an advocate who makes sure to push their deal forward. Exhibit 1 – Youtube’s Pitch Here is the rundown of the order in which the Youtube founders presented their business opportunity and our interpretation of the reasoning. As you will see, the way this is presented does a great job of continually answering questions and pushback that would be brought up in the preceding section. Purpose – Why should I care? Problem – What point of friction are you attacking? Money is made at points of friction. Solution – How are you removing (extracting value from) that friction point? Market Size – How much value can you conceivably capture from this new offering? Competition – If the market is so big there must be others after it, right? While some argue that competition is not a good thing, a Blue Ocean approach to entering the market shows you have thoughtfully evaluated where others have failed and understand how to attack those areas. Product Development – What is the actual product that will serve as the conduit for this better customer experience? Sales & Distribution – How will you make the market care about this cool product? Metrics – Have any of your previous predictions been tested and evaluated by your target market? How has it gone? Team – Are you the people that are going to connect all of these dots? Exhibit 2 – Botha’s Pitch to His Sequoia Partners Raising a seed round is like making a sale to a SMB customer — smaller amount of money in play, usually one decision-maker, and a relatively short sales cycle. Raising institutional money is more like conducting an Enterprise sale. The check size is bigger, the timeline is longer, and you need to find an advocate on the inside that is going to continually work to push the deal forward and get buy-in from other decisionmakers. This latter process is the one we see at play here in Exhibit 2, where Botha takes us the Youtube cause internally at Sequoia and present the case for investment to his partners. Here, we get a rare glimpse into how an investment decision is made at a VC firm. As a founder, reading through this section is instructive in that it can help you anticipate some of the questions an investor will face from partners so you can be sure to address those in your own presentation. Intro – What is the thesis and (like in the previous section) why should we care? Deal – How do the terms and structure of the deal (valuation, our ownership, etc.) fit in overall with the portfolio we are building? Competition – How does this company fit into the marketplace of both large and small competitors? An outline of the competition quickly helps investors build a framework for what your go-to-market strategy may look like. Hiring Plan – Does this company have a plan and the ability to attract talented executives and key employees to bring the business from where it sits today to where the founders have said it will be in the future? Key Risks – What factors will cause the statements that have been made around market, product, distribution, and team to not come true? What is the likelihood and scale of those risks? Recommendation – As Thrive’s Miles Grimshaw put it in his blog post on the document, how does management, market, and monetization all tie together?

Overstock has long been a bit player in the world of Ecommerce. Founded in Utah in 1999 (at the height of the Dot-Com boom), the company grew rapidly and IPO’d in 2002 (a week after Netflix and almost right at the bottom of the Dot-Com bust) on annual revenue of $40mm and at a market cap of just under $350MM dollars. Despite being one of the few companies to come out of the Dot-Com crash alive, its long term growth has disappointed and the value of the company today sits just a few million dollars north of where they IPO’d 14 years ago. Still, the company and its CEO, Patrick Byrne have a way of keeping themselves in the news. There was the battle with naked shortsellers, its rebrand to O.co, and its early adoption of cryptocurrency. There has also been his ongoing embrace of transparency, which started with the following letter to shareholders recapping the company’s 2003 performance. The general tone and openness of this letter is uncommon for a public company and calls to mind the way Warren Buffett approaches his shareholder communication. So while the performance of the company hasn’t quite kept up with its peers, Byrne’s approach to stakeholder management is as relevant as ever. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Overstock’s “Super-de-duper” Sales Numbers The rhythm of the Dao is like the drawing of a bow. – Lao-zi Dear Owners: My colleagues executed well this quarter. Were 2003’s four quarters a boxing match, I’d say we were dropped to our knees in the first, cleared our head in the second, got on our toes again in the third, and won the fourth on a decision. In this letter I will describe how my colleagues accomplished this, and detail some mistakes your chairman made that prevented victory by a knockout. First, I will explain why I am appending this letter to our earnings release. Simply put, I want owners to understand their business: they entrust capital to me and I owe them no less. I am warned that a letter such as this has risks. A lawyer told me that my use of this more colloquial style may be misconstrued, saying: everything you write will be Exhibit A in a lawsuit against you, (but lawyers say that about most things). Bill Mann of The Motley Fool says that we live in a time when, if things go passably well, CEOs say, Everything is super-de-duper, and when they go poorly they say, Everything is just super-duper. In such a climate, if I write, X went pretty well, but I could do better on Y and Z, the former is read as an admission of mediocrity, and the latter, calamity. This fits in with what many founders in the early stage world worry about. Everyone else is “killing it”, why aren’t we? Stakeholders – as Byrne touches on above – deserve to hear from management in an honest and open fashion that lays out what has worked, what hasn’t, and what is coming next. Lastly, cynics claim that my candor is but an attempt to pump my stock by drawing investors looking for someone who does not pump his stock: I am flattered to have attributed to me such Machiavellian subtlety! (And I suggest they look up Popper’s Falsification Principle.) Saved you a click… For six quarters I have struggled to reconcile my desire to report in this fashion to Overstocks owners with the more traditional approach used by most companies. Trying to mold a murky reality into a few lines of happy quotes has always been difficult. I have thus decided (when able and time permitting) to write lengthier and more informative letters to owners, filtering out points that concern individuals, details, or strategies that might bore readers or advantage competitors. Note, then, shareholder, that when I write, X is going pretty well, just because I did not say, X is super-de-duper it does not mean, X is a disaster. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The journalists, lawyers, and cynics will find their own way. Ed Note – The entirety of the 2003 letter from Overstock is about 10 pages long…we’ve pulled out a few of our favorite passages here. You can read the entire letter here. Sales To begin with, sales were super-de-duper. They truly were. We returned almost to the hyper-growth curve (94% year-on-year growth). Just to give you a sense of the size of the business at the time of this writing, Overstock brought in just under $300mm in revenue during the preceding year and was, as Byrne notes, growing rapidly. As you would expect, this growth has since slowed significantly due to a number of factors – increased competition and the buyer behavior shift to mobile being a couple. Still, the company has returned to double digit revenue growth in the last three years. Expense Discipline I believe I can do much better here. At the risk of giving an excuse I’d note that it is difficult to get expenses precisely right when one starts a quarter with a range of expected GMS from $80 million to $120 million: optionality costs money. Still, in retrospect, I believe I could have saved $1-2 million if I had addressed some issues earlier. Something that teams at any high growth company can likely relate to. Capital Needs Funds call me regularly offering to do PIPE’s (private investment in public equity) at X% discounts with Y% warrant coverage struck up Z%, etc. etc. I am a bear of little brain, and my reaction to such invitations is roughly the same as being asked to join a game of Three Card Monte in Times Square. Yet their enquiries do keep me thinking about the issue of capital. Build a model of our business at break-even and growing 100%. Do we need capital? If we were a brick factory the answer would be, “yes”, but for the float reason given above the answer is, hard as it may be to imagine, maybe not. Yet my answer would continue, That is, if we are comfortable skimming along at times with a weeks worth of cash in the bank, as we did at one point this Q4 when we bulked up for Christmas. Are we at break-even? Not yet: our GAAP loss in Q4 2003 was 2.6% of revenue. Should we strive to be at break-even? What if, by continuing to lose two-and-a-half pennies on every dollar of sales, we could grow at our current rate for three more years (and thus turn into a >$2 billion GAAP revenue business): should we? What if we could lose four pennies but grow at 200%: should we? It depends, I suppose, on what our net margin would be when we throttled back growth. In sum, then: it is not clear that Overstock needs more capital; if we do, it is not clear we need it now; if we do need it now we are not going to raise it through a warrant-warted PIPE. That said, we will continue to look at our capital needs and try to position ourselves so that we will be able to raise capital conveniently if the right time arrives. For example, we are in the process of obtaining an inventory line of credit. Please know that I have the benefit of an excellent board, well-versed in capital and which views advising me on this issue as one of its main duties. In the early stage market, it is common to see founders plan or go through fundraising processes at a certain pace and targeting a certain amount of money just because they think it is what they are supposed to do or because it is available. While there is almost never anything wrong with opportunistically raising capital to increase optionality, the decision to raise capital of any type should always be well thought out else you risk wasting your time chasing opportunities that are not a good fit. Operations We had a few sleepless nights here. At this point I suppose I should mention that, as Team Overstock’s player/coach, it is my occasional and regrettable duty to reposition, bench, trade, and sometimes cut teammates, alas. “Benching” takes the form of sending people home on paid leave to recoup and to allow us to rearrange. For example, two summers ago I benched someone by sending him and his family to Hawaii while I took his job myself: when he returned I gave him a different job (in fact, things like this happen often enough that “getting sent to Hawaii” is synonymous around here with “getting a last chance.”) This Christmas season an executive moved to the bench: I did not put out a press release about it, partially out of respect for him, but also because his future role in the game was unclear. As I have noted recently, he is no longer with the company. While I acknowledge that losing one’s COO during the Christmas rush is discomforting (as I know better than anyone), I hope that this clarifies my thinking satisfactorily. Rare insight into how the CEO of a public company thinks about what is likely the most important responsibility he has, attracting and retaining good people. Image below via First Round’s “State of Startups”. Conclusion A man crosses a desert by shooting an arrow from his bow and retrieving it as he walks. He must cross the desert with the fewest shots possible. At times he strains the bow with all his strength and lets his arrow fly, but sacrifices accuracy, at times shooting the arrow wildly off course. Other times he aims carefully and draws timidly, attempting little but guaranteeing himself small, solid progress. In time he finds the balance of draw and aim that covers the most ground in the fewest shots. I have not yet found such balance. Yet in 2003 Q4 we drew the bow deeply, and our shot went far and fairly straight. On such a deep draw I could have blundered the shot (as I have before), and only the excellent work of my colleagues prevented mishap. I do not enjoy chancing so much on each shot. Yet I saw an opportunity to let one fly, and we still have much ground to cover. Your humble servant, Patrick M. Byrne President P.S. As much as I like hearing from owners and potential owners, I am now deluged by the volume of contacts from those saying they want to invest but must get to know me better before they do. I am flattered; I am humbled (believe me, you’d be disappointed if we met); I am torn between wanting to help answer their questions and Reg FD; but mostly, I am out of time. Though I enjoy hearing and learning from owners I must, regrettably, propose two alternatives. First, in the investor relations section of our site I intend to include material that will elucidate our business philosophy. Second, for any who actually visit us in Utah I will always make time to meet with you. Sounds like Patrick needs a “one-to-many” tool to manage the communication with his investors a bit more efficiently…we know where he can find one 😉

Starbucks was founded in 1971, was purchased in 1987 Howard Schultz (the man globally associated with the brand), went public in 1992, and opened its first international location in Japan in 1996. By the late 1990’s when the dot-com boom was in full swing, Starbucks was onboard, investing in eventual blow-ups like Kozmo, Talk City, and Living.com. In 2000 – just as the company was taking writedowns on the investments listed above – Howard Schultz and Orin Smith penned the following letter to shareholders which laid out core focus areas and set the table for the massively important technology company Starbucks has become today. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. If you like what you see and want to share Visible Investor Letters with friends or colleagues, send them here to sign up. Starbucks’ 2000 Letter to Shareholders To our Shareholders, We entered the new Millennium with a great sense of accomplishment and excitement, knowing that we were poised to share the Starbucks Experience with even more people around the world. Today, the anticipation we experienced as we began fiscal year 2000 has been more than fulfilled, thanks to the passion and dedication of our partners (employees), our unwavering commitment to the highest quality coffee, and the connection that we are fortunate to enjoy with our customers. We believe that the possibilities for our future achievements are virtually limitless, and we are even more inspired to climb to greater heights. These are still the early days of building our company and the Starbucks brand. Starbucks experienced tremendous success and growth in fiscal year 2000. We had record revenues of $2.2 billion for the year. Our stellar performance included three consecutive quarters of double-digit comparable store sales increases – an amazing achievement for any retail company of our size and maturity, culminating in a 9 percent comparable stores sales growth for the full year, the highest it has been since 1995. While 9% comparable store sales growth represented an “amazing achievement” in 2000 – when the company had around 3,000 locations – the fact that they have maintained that growth over the last decade and a half and still see strong comparable growth at 20,000+ locations is…whatever you call something more amazing than an “amazing achievement”. We far exceeded our projected target of 600 new store openings for the year, with 1,035 new company owned and licensed locations worldwide, including 778 stores in North America alone. We surpassed our goal to open 150 international stores, opening 257 international locations by the end of fiscal year 2000. In the United Kingdom, we opened 63 new locations, well ahead of our target of 50 stores. We also entered a number of international markets including Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Australia, bringing our total number of international locations to 525 at the end of the fiscal year. During the year we acquired a majority interest in our Thailand operations. We were also thrilled to announce our plans to enter Switzerland, our first market in continental Europe. Our remarkable success in virtually every international market we have entered to date has inspired us to set ambitious targets for the future. We plan to have 650 Starbucks locations throughout Europe by the end of fiscal year 2003, and we believe that customers in the European market will embrace the Starbucks Experience. Over the years, Starbucks has struggled with growth in its European markets as it has had to combat an embedded coffee and cafe culture that shuns the impersonal, big box experience Starbucks was reputed to have. That has since turned around a bit as both comparable store sales in the EMEA region and anecdotal evidence – lines to or out out the door in Lyon, France and Geneva, Switzerland seen during Visible’s recent trip to Europe. Our outstanding growth is testimony to the strength of the Starbucks brand worldwide. When we opened our first store in Tokyo, consultants told us that Japanese customers would never use to-go cups or drink coffee while walking on the street. If you visit Japan today, you will see people proudly holding Starbucks cups with the logo facing out. As the result of our customers’ warm acceptance, Starbucks Coffee Japan became profitable in fiscal year 2000 – more than two years ahead of plan. Additionally, we were extremely pleased that Nikkei Restaurant Magazine, one of Japan’s most respected food service industry publications, recognized Starbucks as the most preferred restaurant chain in Tokyo, just four years after our entry into the market. In addition, Interbrand Corporation, the world’s leading brand consultancy, recently ranked Starbucks as one of the top 75 global brands. These accomplishments confirm our belief that we have incredible opportunities ahead. By the end of fiscal year 2000, Starbucks had more than 3,500 locations worldwide, serving more than 12 million customers per week in 17 countries. We believe that in the past we dramatically underestimated the size of the global market and the power of the Starbucks brand. We now believe that we have the potential to have at least 20,000 locations worldwide, with as many as 10,000 locations in international markets. Amazingly, they have surpassed this number at the beginning of Q1 2014 and haven’t looked back! Our core retail business in North America continues to thrive. We introduced the sumptuous White Chocolate Mocha and Caramel Apple Cider drinks early in the year, followed by two decadent new blended beverages for summer – Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino ® and Orange Mocha Chip Frappuccino ®. These popular additions to our menu provided our customers with delightful indulgences for every season. We also introduced the Starbucks Barista AromaA ™ coffeemaker and thermal carafe – an instant hit with customers. And our positioning for Holiday 2000, “Home for the Holidays,” offered simple, traditional messaging designed to capture our customers’ hearts. In addition to festive favorites such as the Eggnog Latte and our unique Christmas Blend coffee, we introduced the delectable Gingerbread Latte to bring alive the flavor of the season. We also created and unveiled the revolutionary Starbucks Barista Utopia™ vacuum coffee brewing system. This stylish, innovative machine brews the perfect cup of Starbucks ® coffee for our customers to savor at home. Customers gave the Utopia a very enthusiastic reception, and we were delighted by its success. This was a pivotal year for two Starbucks brands that complement the coffeehouse experience – Tazo® tea and Hear Music™. In fiscal year 2000, Tazo Tea crafted and introduced a new line of filter bag and full-leaf teas to tempt customers’ palates. Our customers also enjoyed an enhanced music program through Hear Music’s displays and branded compilation discs. These two emerging brands are positioned for strong growth, and they add to the richness and texture of the Starbucks Experience. One mark of a great company is its ability to choose business partners who reflect its core values and guiding principles. Our Business Alliances group, part of our specialty operations, created and nurtured relationships that reach more than 20 million customers per month by providing increased access and visibility to the Starbucks brand. During the year, we signed licensing agreements with several key accounts, including Albertson’s, Inc., Safeway Inc., Dayton Hudson Corporation (Super Target stores) and Marriott International, Inc. Our achievements to date have extended the Starbucks brand and created significant momentum for our future growth. We are confident that we have the potential to open many more licensed locations in grocery stores, airports and other convenient venues. We also announced an exciting alliance with The New York Times, which recently became the exclusive nationwide newspaper sold in all of our company-owned locations in the United States. As part of this strategic three-year agreement, The Times will use its advertising resources to promote the Starbucks brand. We are proud to team up with The Times to provide our customers with one of the world’s most widely read and respected newspapers. A newer Starbucks partnership worth noting is their tie-up with Lyft, which again positions the coffee maker as one of the most employee-friendly and forward thinking companies on earth (more on those two things below!). Even in the best years, we face challenges. In the fourth quarter, we took a non-cash write-down of our entire investment in living.com Inc. and the majority of our equity positions in Kozmo.com, Inc., Cooking.com, Inc. and Talk City, Inc. to reflect fair value. We have learned from this experience and we believe this knowledge will benefit our business going forward. Starbucks is an entrepreneurial company, and we have achieved extraordinary benefits from courageous and innovative business practices. That spirit and practice of innovation will continue. However, we remain focused on our core business, and we realize that the growth potential within that core business is far greater than even we previously imagined. Going forward, we will pursue only those opportunities that we feel will complement our core operations. After these specific setbacks and the meltdown of the market as a whole, many businesses would have (and did) shy away from investing in (either internally or externally) technology. Starbucks did not do this, instead opting to commit to the Internet (and later, mobile) and an important part of their long-term business. Starbucks is a technology company and they have been since well before the popularization of the “every company is a technology company” idea. L2 Digital is one of our go-to resources for understanding what drives the growth (and decline) of individual companies as well as broad sectors. They have done a number of studies and reports on Starbucks and their tech success over the years. Here are a couple of our favorites Our people are crucial to ensuring that we deliver the Starbucks Experience every day. The passion they bring to our customers is one of our greatest assets. To ensure that our partners share in Starbucks success, we provided stock option grants to eligible partners under the Bean Stock Plan for the 10th consecutive year. Our ongoing commitment to providing a great work environment has also had many positive impacts on our partners and customers. One indication of our collective passion is the dedication and team spirit displayed by partners at our LaBrea & San Vicente store (opened through our alliance with Earvin “Magic” Johnson). The morning after these outstanding partners won the fourth largest lottery jackpot in California history, they chose to come to work and cheerfully opened the store at 5:30 a.m. to serve their customers. It may be buried down towards the end of this letter but a commitment to building a culture that attracts and fosters the growth of talented people – at all levels of the company – is one area where Starbucks truly stands out. Through a partnership with Arizona State University, Starbucks covers tuition for its team members across the United States. In total, the company spends more per year on employee benefits than it does on coffee beans! Starbucks long-term success as a company will be measured in part by our ability to be a responsible global citizen. As part of our ongoing efforts to address social and environmental issues in coffee origin countries, we committed to a year-round offering of shade grown, organic or Fair Trade certified coffees. We launched this Commitment to Origins™ category with Shade Grown Mexico coffee in collaboration with Conservation International, and we were proud to introduce Fair Trade Certified coffee to our customers through a new alliance with TransFair USA. In addition, we significantly increased our commitment to provide financial support for Conservation International’s work to protect global biodiversity. Starbucks also continues to be one of the largest North American contributors to CARE, the international aid and development organization, and we are honored to support their work to improve the lives of people in coffee origin countries. We are also deeply committed to bringing the joy of reading to people around the world. The Starbucks Foundation assisted more than 100 organizations in fiscal year 2000 by providing more than $1 million in literacy grants in North America. We also extended the program to include initiatives in New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines. In addition, we held our fourth annual All Books for Children drive, through which we collected more than 335,000 books for schools and literacy programs. Our joint venture with Earvin “Magic” Johnson’s Johnson Development Corporation to open Starbucks Coffee stores in under-served urban neighborhoods continues to enrich lives and contribute positively to the communities in which the stores operate. During fiscal year 2000 we opened 11 new stores in six states in the United States through this unique joint venture. We each assumed new leadership roles in fiscal year 2000 that were designed to leverage our respective skills and experience in our growing and dynamic company. We feel that our transition has been seamless, and we are more confident than ever that the Starbucks brand has tremendous opportunities ahead. We are humbled by Starbucks success. The achievements of the past inspire us to continue this amazing journey together as we strive towards our goal of becoming a great, enduring global brand. For all of you who bring Starbucks to life, thank you for your ongoing support. Warm regards,

Driven primarily by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to keep his company nimble, Facebook waited a long time to go public. This brought intense scrutiny from a lot of onlookers who were quick to pile on when the company’s IPO got off to a rocky start. Weeks prior to the actual IPO as part of the company’s S-1, Zuck outlined his vision for the future in a letter to Facebook’s shareholders and made it clear that he was playing the long game. All of the charts, images, quotes, and emphasis below were added by us. Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter. At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television – by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones – the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries. There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on. And there is still a long ways to go! We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other. Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small – with the relationship between two people. Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness. At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships. People sharing more – even if just with their close friends or families – creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives. By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. An Example of a Facebook Social Graph We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate. And accelerate, they have both on the Facebook platform and through acquisitions of user-base behemoths WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook (The Big Blue App) Monthly Active Users We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy. We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives. One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products – ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction. Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design. In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well. We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions. We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time. By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few. Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them. Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress. Our Mission and Our Business As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works. I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team. Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team – and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base – I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems. Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services. And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits. By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term – and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company. This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it. Over the years, Facebook has made a lot of investors very happy both…during their private days and – apart from a post-IPO blip since their IPO The Hacker Way As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way. The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world. In the years since this letter, “Hacker” seems to still have it negative connotation attached to it in light of security breaches at large corporations and tensions between governments about spying. The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it – often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping. Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.” Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win – not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people. To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler. To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers – even managers whose primary job will not be to write code – to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp. The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook: 1. Focus on Impact If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on. 2. Move Fast Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough. 3. Be Bold Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time. 4. Be Open We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact. 5. Build Social Value Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do. Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together. Mark Zuckerberg

VC financing markets have, recently, felt like a monopoly game where your best friend is the banker and you let them pick their token first. It has never been easier to raise capital and at the entrepreneurs terms. What many founders and entrepreneurs forget is the responsibility they hold after they have a term sheet signed and fresh cash in the bank. Venture Capital and Investment Firms have a duty to provide returns to their Limited Partners (aka their investors); they are not just a bunch of rich people and organizations who give their ‘fun money’ to chance. I had a chat with close friend and Analyst at Real Ventures, Alex Shee about ‘why do VCs need data on their portfolio companies?’ and what they do with that information. My hope to is to help founders understand the importance of accurate and consistent reporting so that we can stop all these fucking stupid blog posts on the nipping frostbite of ‘some tech winter.’ Why do VCs Need Your Data [and Updates] Their Own Analysis AS: We look over a company’s metrics and add in our own analysis: doing advanced modeling to ensure projections and growth looks good now and for the future. We also establish benchmarks; it’s not just about comparing, its about establishing what success looks like. The idea of benchmarking is to be predictive using data; its also a manner of analyzing macro trends in the market and helping companies fully capitalize on opportunities. NM: VCs also take a look at each company to provide comparison and see if there are any patterns (good and bad) that others have already gone through. Using their experience, and market knowledge, to find and identify opportunities or triggers that the company may not foresee. To Make Sure You’re Doing OK NM: Yes, your VCs do care about you. They probably reviewed 100+ other company proposals, went through the due diligence and opened up their time, office hours, resources, and bank account, to YOU. Your success is their success, and their success helps build toward yours. AS: Our success is directly linked to our portfolio. The more data we have the better informed we are. The better informed we are the more chances we can help. The more we can help, highly correlates to companies succeeding. Investors look for 3 things: Vision, Traction and Good Management. The only way to demonstrate traction is through metrics. The only way to show good management is through transparent reporting. VCs Have Their Own Investors to Report to NM: Investors have to report to their LPs (Limited Partners); for those of you who don’t know how the Venture Capital food chain works. People forget that a Venture Fund is meant to provide a return back to its investors at a multiple much higher than public markets. Limited Partners of a Venture Fund come from all different places, from wealthy individuals, to financial institutions, to school endowments and pension funds; even governments make investments into venture funds. Also, for those curious minds, VCs almost always contribute their own capital to the funds they raise. AS: When you raise your maiden fund, you talk about your experience, knowledge, network, and any success as an Angel to raise capital. After your first fund, all those details barely mean anything. Investors (Limited Partners) want to know the success of the fund; from the financial details, pedigree of portfolio companies, to impact metrics that are important to them. Limited Partners require transparency to succeed against the public markets. “LPs need to have accurate, timely information to continue to invest in the private market, otherwise they’ll look towards other markets that provide better communication of their investment.” Internal and External Auditing NM: VCs need to know how a company is progressing so they know how to properly report their value and returns to their LPs and firm. VCs want to get as much of the money from successful (and unsuccessful) investments so the sooner they know what to expect for a return, the easier they can maximize their profits, and continue to invest in more startups. AS: VCs also get audited for more reasons than just tax. The financials have to show a true and fair view of the state of the investment funds, so that the LPs can have comfort they own what they think they own. We also have our corporate taxes to manage, which normally requires an audit. To See How They Can Help AS: The reason why we do it [Venture Capital] is to help. Everyone in the VC world wants the companies in their portfolio to succeed. The more information we have the better we can determine how we can help. Being in the dark is no different for an investor with a company than a significant other in a relationship; we just sit there, wondering why they’re not answering and what could possibly be wrong with no direction. NM: A person goes into Venture Capital to several reasons, but the best (and true) VCs do it to help companies grow and be part of something great; this success then translates to maximizing investment returns which then makes everyone happy. VCs know that there are 3 big needs of young companies: Capital, Talent, and Resources. With early-stage capital becoming a very competitive space, investors are offering more than just capital to entice a company to sign their term sheet. To Learn From Your Success [and Failures] NM: When VCs provide their time, experience, and knowledge, you’re receiving the value of all the compounded learnings and experiences they have from all companies they have worked with. By providing updates, feedback, data, and context of your own progress, they can not only help you, but other companies as well. AS: Our experience goes a long way to help grow a company in the best way possible, but this also helps when a company is looking to raise future financing. Knowing all the metrics and details helps us advise on what type of pitch deck to build, what metrics to show off, and what other investors they can introduce us to for follow-on financing. Last Words The more informed your investors are, the more time, talent, and resources they can provide to you. There needs to be more fiduciary responsibility maturity in the Startup<>VC world. While many of us look at VCs as sugar daddies because of the rampant access to capital and valuations in the recent years; we should view this like getting a loan from a business partner. I want to thank Alex for taking the time to chat and write this with me. I know that ‘humanizing Venture Capitalists’ isn’t the most popular thing to do, but if we don’t, they’ll eventually disappear. Enjoy Your Day, Go Create Something, and Make Someone Smile

Investor Letters leverages the Visible platform to surface insightful stakeholder updates sent from leaders of public and private companies as well as top asset managers, venture capitalists, and product and business thinkers. Subscribe and receive a new investor letter, supplemented with Visible charts and actionable insight every Wednesday. Amazon Before it Was Amazon It might be the most well-known (and prescient) investor letter in the history of the technology industry so we will keep this week’s intro short. Jeff Bezos’ 1997 letter to Amazon shareholders is truly a master class in building a business – in 1997, 2016 or undoubtedly any date before or after. We have added a bunch of notes below (anything you see in bold, in quotes, or presented as visualizations was added by us) to help showcase how Amazon has delivered on the promises made in this letter. The Investor Letter To our shareholders: Amazon.com passed many milestones in 1997: by year-end, we had served more than 1.5 million customers, yielding 838% revenue growth to $147.8 million, and extended our market leadership despite aggressive competitive entry. But this is Day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com. Today, online commerce saves customers money and precious time. Tomorrow, through personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery. Amazon.com uses the Internet to create real value for its customers and, by doing so, hopes to create an enduring franchise, even in established and large markets. “Day 1” – Amazon has grown of age alongside the global Internet, as a vast majority of new Internet users have come online during Amazon’s lifetime. We have a window of opportunity as larger players marshal the resources to pursue the online opportunity and as customers, new to purchasing online, are receptive to forming new relationships. The competitive landscape has continued to evolve at a fast pace. Many large players have moved online with credible offerings and have devoted substantial energy and resources to building awareness, traffic, and sales. Our goal is to move quickly to solidify and extend our current position while we begin to pursue the online commerce opportunities in other areas. We see substantial opportunity in the large markets we are targeting. This strategy is not without risk: it requires serious investment and crisp execution against established franchise leaders. One of the most amazing things Amazon has done in the almost 20 years since this letter is turn investments they were making to improve their core business – heavy spending on infrastructure – into a multi-billion dollar business of its own, AWS. There were (and still are) major players in the cloud infrastructure space that Amazon was going straight up against but that hasn’t stopped the rapid growth of AWS. According to Deutsche Bank, AWS as a standalone entity would be one of the fastest growing enterprise tech companies ever. It’s All About the Long Term We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital. This idea – the Amazon flywheel – brilliantly illustrates the way that Jeff Bezos and his team see all of these factors building on and feeding into one another. Note, as Benedict Evans did here, that there is no outward arrow titled “take profits”. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise. That customer base expansion focus? It is going pretty well. Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies. Accordingly, we want to share with you our fundamental management and decision-making approach so that you, our shareholders, may confirm that it is consistent with your investment philosophy: We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures. While they are not as well known as Google for launching and then quickly shuttering projects, Amazon has certainly lived by the philosophy they espouse above. The Amazon Fire Phone is just the latest in along line of projects like this. We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. Amazon’s dominance goes a step beyond simply market leadership. In 2015, Amazon accounted for $0.51 of every incremental $1.00 spent online and are now responsible for almost a quarter of all retail growth in the United States. We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner. We aren’t so bold as to claim that the above is the “right” investment philosophy, but it’s ours, and we would be remiss if we weren’t clear in the approach we have taken and will continue to take. With this foundation, we would like to turn to a review of our business focus, our progress in 1997, and our outlook for the future. Obsess Over Customers From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click(SM) shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling. By many measures, Amazon.com came a long way in 1997: Sales grew from $15.7 million in 1996 to $147.8 million — an 838% increase When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows. We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. The focus on growth remains, as evidenced by the chart just below. And the second image, highlighting the growth of Apple and Amazon relative to other massive multinational businesses drives home the point of just how successful that focus remains today. Cumulative customer accounts grew from 180,000 to 1,510,000 — a 738% increase. The percentage of orders from repeat customers grew from over 46% in the fourth quarter of 1996 to over 58% in the same period in 1997. In terms of audience reach, per Media Metrix, our Web site went from a rank of 90th to within the top 20. We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy (Ed note: Look at those names!) Infrastructure During 1997, we worked hard to expand our business infrastructure to support these greatly increased traffic, sales, and service levels: Amazon.com’s employee base grew from 158 to 614, and we significantly strengthened our management team. (Ed Note: Now over 230,000 employees) Distribution center capacity grew from 50,000 to 285,000 square feet, including a 70% expansion of our Seattle facilities and the launch of our second distribution center in Delaware in November. Inventories rose to over 200,000 titles at year-end, enabling us to improve availability for our customers. Our cash and investment balances at year-end were $125 million, thanks to our initial public offering in May 1997 and our $75 million loan, affording us substantial strategic flexibility. Our Employees The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success. It’s not easy to work here (when I interview people I tell them, “You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three”), but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy. We are incredibly fortunate to have this group of dedicated employees whose sacrifices and passion build Amazon.com. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you are probably well aware of the PR issues the company faces in the wake of a major New York times investigation into its corporate culture. Here a a few select quotes. Goals for 1998 We are still in the early stages of learning how to bring new value to our customers through Internet commerce and merchandising. Our goal remains to continue to solidify and extend our brand and customer base. This requires sustained investment in systems and infrastructure to support outstanding customer convenience, selection, and service while we grow. We are planning to add music to our product offering, and over time we believe that other products may be prudent investments. We also believe there are significant opportunities to better serve our customers overseas, such as reducing delivery times and better tailoring the customer experience. To be certain, a big part of the challenge for us will lie not in finding new ways to expand our business, but in prioritizing our investments. We now know vastly more about online commerce than when Amazon.com was founded, but we still have so much to learn. Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency. The challenges and hurdles we will face to make our long-term vision for Amazon.com a reality are several: aggressive, capable, well-funded competition; considerable growth challenges and execution risk; the risks of product and geographic expansion; and the need for large continuing investments to meet an expanding market opportunity. However, as we’ve long said, online bookselling, and online commerce in general, should prove to be a very large market, and it’s likely that a number of companies will see significant benefit. We feel good about what we’ve done, and even more excited about what we want to do. 1997 was indeed an incredible year. We at Amazon.com are grateful to our customers for their business and trust, to each other for our hard work, and to our shareholders for their support and encouragement. /s/ JEFFREY P. BEZOS Jeffrey P. Bezos Founder and Chief Executive Officer Amazon.com, Inc. Further Reading on the Rise of Amazon This video from NYU professor Scott Galloway gives an awesome look at the dominance of Amazon and its fellow behemoths Google, Apple, and Facebook. We used a couple of graphics from his presentation above. The AWS IPO by Ben Thompson. In fact, go read anything Ben writes — about Amazon or anyone. Why Amazon Has No Profits (and Why it Works) by A16Z’s Benedict Evans

Subscribe to Investor Letters Investor Letters leverages the Visible platform to surface insighful stakeholder updates sent from leaders of public and private companies as well as top asset managers, venture capitalists, and product and business thinkers. Subscribe and receive a new investor letter, supplemented with Visible charts and actionable insight every Wednesday. When Nike CEO Mark Parker sat down to pen his 2008 letter to shareholders, the company was in relatively good shape considering the world economy was in the midst of an economic meltdown. He had been in the job for about 2 and a half years and had just added $2.3 billion of incremental revenue – up 14 percent year over year – during fiscal 2008. In January 2009, a dollar that had been invested in Nike just before Parker took over was worth significantly more than a dollar invested at the same time in top competitor Adidas or in the S&P 500. Unlike most companies during that same period, Nike’s stock had actually appreciated in value during those 2 and a half years. $1 Invested in Nike, Adidas, & the S&P 500 All wasn’t perfect in the land of the Swoosh, however. In January 2009 the stock price dipped below the psychologically important $10 level and competition was increasing significantly. Nike Stock Price: 2001 – Present In the U.S. footwear market, for example, #2 Adidas had been gaining market share for years, growing significantly faster than Nike. Add to that the under the radar growth of Under Armour and the entry of new players into the footwear and apparel markets and it was clear the company would be in for a long drawn out fight on multiple fronts. The Investor Letter Note: Emphasis, quotes, and charts in the letter below are mine. With historical letters like this, we try to point out how predictions and strategies played out in the market and what you can learn from what transpired. To Our Shareholders, When I stepped into the CEO role 2½ years ago, the leadership team reaffirmed a simple concept that I knew was true from my nearly 30 years of experience here – NIKE is a growth company. That fact shaped the long-term financial goals we outlined more than seven years ago. It also inspired our goal of reaching $23 billion in revenue by the end of fiscal 2011. Fiscal 2008 illustrated the power of that financial model, the strength of our team, and the ability of NIKE to bring innovative products and excitement to the marketplace. While long term, Parker was right about the growth oriented nature of the business, the short-term patience his board was certainly tested. Following the letter, Nike struggled to expand, shedding revenue for the next two years before jumping on its current trajectory. The idea of Nike as a growth company is one that Parker and his team have rallied around to this day, as the headline on their investor relations website still features the tagline. Nike Annual Revenue Growth (%) Our unique role as the innovator and leader in our industry enables us to drive consistent, long-term profitable growth. In 2008 we added $2.3 billion of incremental revenue to reach $18.6 billion – up 14 percent year over year with growth in every region and every business unit. Gross margins improved more than a percentage point to a new record high of 45%, and earnings per share grew 28 percent. We increased our return on invested capital by 250 basis points1, increased dividends by 23%, and bought back $1.2 billion in stock. 2008 was a very good year. For a company to be able to say that while the world economy, and consumer confidence were melting down is impressive. As we enter fiscal 2009 we are well-positioned for the future. The NIKE brand continues to grow in relevance and influence. We’re focused on six key categories – running, basketball, football, men’s training, women’s training and sportswear. Each category team is immersed in its sport’s culture, connecting with consumers and building deep relationships. These connections are the source of insights we use to create the innovative products that fill our pipeline. NIKE is a premium brand, and we earn that reputation by delivering experiences that surpass the expectations of our consumers. Our portfolio of brands also continues to grow. Converse is mid-way through its 100th anniversary celebration. This brand delivered its best year ever in fiscal 2008 and continues to grow in the U.S. and in the key emerging markets of China, Russia and Brazil. Hurley and Cole Haan also had record years for revenue and pre-tax income. And NIKE Golf increased revenue and pre-tax income as we continue to deliver innovation and widen our lead as the largest apparel brand in the golf industry. The popularity of golf, and of its biggest icon, Tiger Woods have fallen significantly in the years since Parker’s letter but Nike has managed to stave off some of the decline with revenue for the segment dropping only slightly over the last three years. Growth in our portfolio of brands is only half the story. The other half is change. Our portfolio is based on three things – pursuing the greatest growth opportunities; leveraging NIKE resources and capabilities; and serving consumers with premium products and experiences. In applying these three principles we saw opportunities to take action in 2008. We sold the Starter and Bauer businesses, and we acquired Umbro, one of the world’s great football brands and a source of tremendous growth potential for NIKE, Inc. as we continue to expand our position as the biggest football presence on the planet. Like its China strategy, the investment in football (soccer to us Americans) has paid off. Nike is quickly catching up with #1 Adidas and is poised to capitalize on the growth of the game in its biggest market, the United States. After all the work we have done this year, I’m very pleased with how we have enhanced the position, performance, and potential of all the brands and categories in the NIKE, Inc. family. They illustrate the commitment we have to athletes and the unique role we play in sports and the cultures that surround our consumers. As I write this we’re heading into the Beijing Olympics – a moment that NIKE has been working toward for 30 years. NIKE is the number-one sports brand in China, which is also our largest sourcing country and our biggest market outside the U.S. This insight is one of the keys to Nike’s recent and future growth. While still only accounting for 10% of overall revenue, sales in Greater China – which grew 30% to about $886MM in the quarter ended August 31, 2015 – is by far the company’s fastest growing market. During the past four years we have worked with thousands of athletes from more than 100 countries. We’ve gained valuable insights nobody else has and used them to design and deliver some of the best performance innovations NIKE has ever developed. From the Hyperdunk basketball shoe, Zoom Victory Spike, and LunaRacer to Swift apparel and the Pre Cool Vest – NIKE product innovation is setting new standards in all 28 Olympic sports. And we’ll continue to connect with Chinese consumers long after the Olympic torch goes out, bringing innovative products, retail experiences, and communications to this exciting marketplace. We’ll give the world a chance to catch its breath from Beijing, but only for a minute. On August 31 we launch The Human Race, the world’s biggest single running event in history – runners around the world competing and connecting simultaneously through the power of NIKE+ technology – raising funds for global causes with every mile. This is what NIKE is all about – innovating on multiple fronts and creating a bigger more vibrant marketplace. That’s what we do best and we’re doing it all over the world. And our world is changing. The digital age is fueling change at its fastest rate in history.Power is in the hands of consumers. They have near infinite choices and unlimited access to those choices. The cost of entry into their world has risen dramatically. To be relevant, to be accepted, a company must bring its authentic self to market. For NIKE this means vast new opportunities to reach and reward consumers – with product innovation and compelling experiences at retail and online. We’re leveraging those opportunities by sharing our passion for sports and design and communications – our own never-ending story. Again, this insight has proved prescient, as the company remains well positioned to capitalize on the growth of digital and targets $7B in e-commerce revenue by 2020. More than ever our story involves the commitment to innovate for a better world. We’re very focused on creating products that reduce their environmental impact and showcase sustainable innovation. We’re committed to helping improve working conditions across the industry’s supply chain. And we continue to invest in our communities through programs like Let Me Play and our partnership with the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Every day we see how social and environmental change can promote innovation and growth in our business and in the world. This year we were named one of the world’s most ethical companies (Ethisphere Magazine), one of the world’s top sustainable stocks (Sustainable Business and KLD), #3 in 100 Best Corporate Citizens (CRO Magazine), one of the 100 Best Places to Work (Fortune magazine), and the World Wildlife Fund and others have recognized NIKE for our work on climate change. I’m grateful that we’re being noticed for our contributions, but our work in this area is a journey. There is always more to do. I’ll point to a $100 million partnership between the NIKE Foundation and Peter and Jennifer Buffett’s NoVo Foundation. Together we are creating an exciting new initiative called the Girl Effect. The premise of the Girl Effect is as simple as it is profound – when we invest in the health, safety and education of an adolescent girl, we create a ripple effect that improves her quality of life and that of everyone around her – her family, her village, her nation and, ultimately, all of us. Global research and experience show that investing in girls and creating the Girl Effect may be the most powerful missing piece to the puzzle of alleviating poverty. For all we have accomplished this year, we remain humbled by the amazing things we witnessed in the world of sports – Tiger Woods playing through pain to win the U.S. Open, Paul Pierce leading the Boston Celtics to their first NBA title in more than 20 years, the passion of a historic European Championships, and Rafael Nadal outlasting Roger Federer in the longest and most dramatic final in Wimbledon history. It is epic moments like these – and the millions of everyday moments created by athletes around the world – that inspire us. Their dreams motivate us to create the most innovative product in sport, and to serve more fully every consumer who shares our passion for performance and excellence. That is our responsibility and our privilege. As we move through fiscal 2009, now is not the time to be timid. We know that doing business as usual – doing what we’ve done in the past just a little bit better – is not enough. As we’ve mentioned, Nike hit a rough patch shortly after this letter but has rebounded strongly and, despite its size, remains a growth company with a masterful handle on branding and digital marketing. We are committed to the principals that got us here – innovation, consistency, and competitive fire. We’re focused on managing for growth. Where others retract, we reach out. Where some react, we create. We are on the offense, always. I wouldn’t trade what we have with anybody in any industry. Mark Parker President and Chief Executive Officer NIKE, Inc. Further Reading There is, of course, no shortage of information to read about Nike and the massive success they have seen recently. Here are a couple quick places where you can go to get a better idea of what helped them get from where they were when Parker put together his report to shareholders to where they are today. Can Nike become “the Fifth Horseman“? from L2 Inc. Fortune’s 2015 Businessperson of the Year – Nike’s Master Craftsman What were Nike’s digital growth enablers in 2015? Want to share Visible Investor Updates with colleagues? Send them here!

The way that a company manages relationships with its investors says a lot about the professionalism of its management team and its likelihood of sustainable success. A recent (unscientific) survey we conducted among dozens of early stage VCs showed that investors are 2 times more likely to make follow on investments in companies who have provided regular investor updates. While some of that is explained by our desire as humans to only share information that paints us in a positive light – meaning that only companies doing well would want to tell their investors – it is clear that the highest performing companies care about building mutually beneficial relationships with their key stakeholders. Regular investor updates are key in keeping your backers involved in your business so that they can provide input and assistance in their respective areas of expertise. They are also a sign of an active and engaged entrepreneur who values what her stakeholders bring to the table. Perhaps most importantly, consistent investor updates help stop inbound and asynchronous requests and give you time back (135 hours per year according to another survey we conducted) to focus on building your company. So when is it most important to be sending investor updates? 1. You are having trouble hiring the best people for your company You are not alone, hiring is hard! In a recent First Round survey – called The State of Startups – the #1 concern among founders was the ability to hire good people. For early stage companies, where trust is a crucial component in the hiring process, leveraging personal networks is often one of the best ways to bring on the best people. Because of their involvement with so many companies, investors often play the role of super connecters in the early stage tech market and can have a major impact on your ability to find the right fit for your open roles. This connectedness helps partially explain the rise of the “Venture Community” or “Venture as a Platform” model made popular by firms like a16z and First Round. When successfully applied, this model tends to create a virtuous cycle and turns out to be very good for business…both yours and your investors’. Investors help people in their network find good jobs which bolsters their reputation. Their companies (that’s you!) fill the roles they need and can accelerate their product and business progress. Those companies have more success and generate better returns for the investor. Investors are willing and often able to help your company find the right people to support your growth. All you need to do is ask! 2. Your circle of feedback is getting smaller and smaller One of the most important things that you can do as a founder, product person, or business leader is stress-test your ideas with the smartest people you can find. To pull an example from outside the tech world, Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio – the most successful hedge fund manager of all time – seeks to find the right answers by seeing whether his ideas stand up to scrutiny from the brightest people in his network. “I stress-tested my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong. I never cared much about others’ conclusions—only for the reasoning that led to these conclusions. That reasoning had to make sense to me. Through this process, I improved my chances of being right, and I learned a lot from a lot of great people.” – Ray Dalio, Principles It can be easy to fall into a pattern of running things by the same people every time you need to make a decision and in some ways, it is important to have people you can consistently call on for input. But exposing your ideas to a wider range of people – something your investors can help provide, either through their own feedback or intros to people in their network – can help unlock insights that wouldn’t have been possible with the same small circle you always rely on. 3. Things have been quiet on the press and promotion front When investors don’t hear anything about your business for extended periods of time, they tend to check out. With startups, no news = bad news: Why investor updates are really, really important http://t.co/bywRt6mf85 @jason via @nuzzel — Andy Smith (@kabbenbock) February 10, 2015 For the most part, early stage investors have their priorities pulled in a number of different directions. Maybe they are angels who also have their own company to run or they are at a VC firm with a dozen other investments and another fund that they themselves need to go out and raise. Don’t make it any harder than it already is to stay on their radar. When you and your team are heads down building your product and don’t have the resources to trumpet your progress to the press, you may go months without any major announcements or releases. Filling these information gaps with quality investor updates are the only way you can make sure your backers stay engaged. 4. You need to raise more money As the proverb goes, the best time to send an investor update (or plant a tree) was when they first wired the cash. The next best time is today. However, when you are down to a month of runway and haven’t checked in with your investors in a while, it might be too late… If u haven’t sent an investor update in > 3 months … no need to reach out now. I’ve already checked out. — Jason M. Lemkin (@jasonlk) December 16, 2015 So make sure you get started before you hit the point of desperation. Good companies have insight into when and how they will need to finance the business in the future. If you have a good handle on how much runway you have left, you can be proactive in setting yourself up – by asking your investors for intros to later stage VCs, for example – to raise your next round successfully. 5. You just raised a round Your relationship with investors is very similar to the type of courtship you go thorough with potential customers. You target the right people, nurture your relationship over time with timely updates your progress, and eventually bring them onto your cap table and into your business. It doesn’t stop there, however. Once you’ve brought investors on board, your goal should be to convert them from “customer” to “evangelist”. A customer pays your business money. An evangelist pays your business money and helps you make even more money by speaking and acting positively on your behalf. Similarly, investors take an ownership stake in your company while evangelist investors have a sense of ownership that stretches beyond what shows up on the cap table. Building evangelism helps take care of the four previous points in this article. When you are able to convert someone from investor to evangelist, that person will be willing to anything they can – from hiring and finding customers, to providing feedback and facilitating introductions to future investors – to support the long-term success of your business.

In 2015, 78 New York Times articles have included the word “Unicorn”. That ties this year with 2014 for the word’s highest number of mentions and with investors and pundits surely clamoring to puff up or tear down a couple more companies before the holiday break, odds are good that we’ll see a few more mentions in the (web)pages of the “Gray Lady”. 1901, as evidenced in the chart above, was a far less enlightened time than we live in today. For starters, “Unicorn” made it to print a mere 5 times during the course of the year. And while transatlantic experimental radio communications were made for the first time, we were years away from Radio on the Internet. Although Satori Kato filed a patent for the first soluble instant coffee, Blue Bottle wouldn’t open its doors until more than a century later. Additionally, Micro VCs and accelerators were few and far between…meaning businesses were forced to actually make money to stay in operation. (Add to that Stanford’s crushing 49-0 loss to Michigan in the first ever Rose Bowl right at the beginning of 1902 and it made for a tough time for Silicon Valley’s tech elite). 1901 was also the year that saw the birth of the world’s first Unicorn – long before Aileen Lee coined the term in 2013. Through a merger of 10 different steel and manufacturing companies, U.S. Steel Corporation became the world’s first billion dollar company with an authorized capitalization of $1.4B (just under $40B in today’s money). The names surrounding its origin remain recognizable to this day and adorn skyscrapers, foundations, and institutions across the globe. There was John Pierpont Morgan, who entered the steel industry a few years prior to the founding of U.S. Steel and is better known for the massive financial firm now bearing his name as well as his rescue of the U.S. economy during the Panic of 1907. There was also Andrew Carnegie who founded Carnegie Steel in 1873 and agreed to be bought out by Morgan for just south of $500MM in bonds and stock of the newly created U.S. Steel in order to retire to a life of philanthropy. Additionally, two Rockefellers, Marshall Field, and Charles M. Schwab (not to be confused with Charles R. Schwab) had key seats at the table during the formative years of the business. The Not So Lean Startup 1902 was the first full year of operation for the fledgling business, a year in which they employed over 168,000 people and had a payroll figure of $120,528,343 (in 1902 dollars). For perspective, U.S. Steel had a larger employee headcount than contemporary behemoths like Apple (115,000 employees), Amazon (154,000 employees) or Microsoft (128,000 employees). Like many of today’s billion dollar companies, U.S. Steel paid its rapidly growing base of employees more on average than a typical American worker. We can only assume these wage discrepancies caused a massive influx of free trade, organic coffee shops and dog yoga studios into the early 20th century Youngstown, Ohios and Gary, Indianas of the world. It’s not being a hipster if computers haven’t been invented yet! Predictable Revenue is easy when your Board of Directors runs the economy Today, investors and pundits worry about companies with negative unit economics, high burn rates, and unsustainably high valuations. For U.S. Steel, the only concern may have been where to find a safe big enough to store all the cash it was throwing off each month. In addition to its impressive top line numbers, the company was highly profitable and grew that profitability each month on a Same Month YoY basis. And while regulators may have had issues with the business, investors likely had trouble speaking a questioning word through the wide smiles they had on their faces as they walked to deposit $56,52,867 in dividends in the bank. At the end of 1902, the company was left with a cash balance of over $50,000,000. Imagine all the passive-aggressive bus stop advertising they could buy today with that kind of money! Life Before AWS Today’s companies are fortunate to live in the age of AWS and WeWork, where two or three people can build a product, find some users or revenue, and display enough traction to raise capital from investors. Launching a startup today is significantly less capital intensive than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. 115 years ago? In its first full year of operation, U.S. Steel spent over $29MM on the maintenance and renewal of capital equipment alone… …and was mining millions upon millions of tons of iron ore all across the world. The inventory of hard assets in most early stage companies today consists of nothing more than a few MacBooks and a ping pong table. Guilty… U.S. Steel Today With a current market cap of just under $1.3 billion, the company is worth less (on a non-inflation adjusted basis) than it was over 100 years ago. It remains one of the largest integrated steel companies in the world (and the largest in the U.S.) but, of course, that that title means significantly less than it did in the days of Morgan and Carnegie. And while it may be long in the tooth, the stock chart below shows that the company still appears to have a taste for the boom and bust lifestyle of the early 20th century — which, frankly, seems to be the lifestyle many of today’s emerging unicorns favor as well. And because there is never a bad time for a Godfather clip, we are compelled to mention that the company played a crucial role in the 20th century rise of America’s industrial might (for better and worse) and became a name that every outsider – from the Corleone family to a number of smaller, more nimble competitors – strived to outdo.