{"id":102,"date":"2022-06-20T15:15:45","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T15:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/?p=102"},"modified":"2022-06-20T15:15:46","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T15:15:46","slug":"background-the-company","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/2022\/06\/20\/background-the-company\/","title":{"rendered":"Background: The Company"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This is part of the back ground series of notes on technical leadership<\/em>This is about your company. I&#8217;ve had a friend explain &#8220;the company&#8221; to be like an additional (and very powerful) co-worker, who is completely amoral and self-interested. It&#8217;s a useful but extreme metaphor. Making this metaphor slightly less extreme, we could consider the Company as being somewhere on the following scale:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On one side, its an amoral and self-interested and exclusively in pursuit of money&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>On the other side, it has some ethos and still relentless pursues money<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s probably somewhere in between. So this will really be about the incentives of your company. Let&#8217;s consider why.<\/p>\n<p>While your company does not have emotions (or any tangible form for that matter), it has a direction which is responsive to certain metrics that it and its current and prospective shareholders consider. Invariably, these are directly or indirectly represented in the quarterly and annual financial statements that the company produces.Here&#8217;s an example for Meta:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A good summary of the last 10k can be found <a href=\"https:\/\/last10k.com\/sec-filings\/fb\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"outline: none;\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/li>\n<li>The official document filed with the SEC can be found&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/investor.fb.com\/financials\/sec-filings-details\/default.aspx?FilingId=15299621\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"outline: none;\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Look at the summary. One of the things that should stand out is the *Revenue* section. This shows the amount of revenue the company generates by reported segment.Now, consider the incentives of the company. What are items in this report that need to grow? That should grow? What are items that need to shrink? What are threats to these numbers? More tangibly, Advertisements clearly are an important part of Meta&#8217;s revenue. Let&#8217;s consider some factors that may change this revenue stream:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>More income is generate per ad impression. <em>Positive impact on revenue<\/em><\/li>\n<li>There are more ads impressions. <em>Positive impact on revenue<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>The advertising effect is found to have 0 statistical significance and the concept of advertising crumbles completely. <em>Negative but highly unlikely<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em><\/em>Because we know so little about the advertising effect, how companies advertise effectively could change dramatically. <em>Neither positive nor negative and likely<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>As you ponder the impact of these numbers on the health and future direction of the company, consider the following questions:<\/p>\n<p>1. Compare our revenues and costs YoY. What do you notice?2. What are other risks that you see (from the summary)? Risks or potential pivots?3. Consider Segment profitability? What does this mean to you?4. What percentage of revenue was advertisements?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is part of the back ground series of notes on technical leadershipThis is about your company. I&#8217;ve had a friend explain &#8220;the company&#8221; to be like an additional (and very powerful) co-worker, who is completely amoral and self-interested. It&#8217;s a useful but extreme metaphor. Making this metaphor slightly less extreme, we could consider the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tygraf.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}