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Monday, June 23

Things from my Newsblur: June 2014 Edition

- Tickets for Restaurants
The in-depth story about why Alinea, Next and the Aviary moved to a ticketing system for their bookings as opposed to the standard restaurant reservation system (or using OpenTable).  While it’s long, it’s a great in-depth explanation that explores the qualitative reasons for making such a move and provides a lot of interesting data that helps show the impact of the move.   I won’t be surprise if a number of restaurants (especially higher-end ones) move to such a system in the coming years! (Nick Kokonas, Alinea)

Ever wondered about how lucrative (spoiler alert:  unless you make your LPs good money, it isn’t!) it is to run a small VC fund?  Well, in an extraordinarily transparent post, Charlie O’Donnell walks you through the economics of his small fund!   (Charlie O’Donnell, This is Going to be BIG)

Fred Wilson’s one of the best known and (with his partners) most successful venture capitalists on the East Coast (and I suspect the US & world).  He also writes a blog, where he posts every day which should be required reading for those budding entrepreneurs out there, those who work for/with them, and those that invest in them (and I guess, just folks who want to learn/know stuff).  Here’s the transcript (on his blog) of a recent interview he did with Business Insider (Alyson Shontell and Fred Wilson, Business Insider and A VC respectively).

Uber’s been in the news recently, with protests in Europe’s and the firm’s claims that the “median small business income” with Uber X in NYC is $90,000+.  Here, Justin Singer goes into the numbers and unsurprisingly finds that the numbers are rather generous (essentially it’s more of a revenue figure, than an income one), and leads to some more general questions about Uber’s future.  (Justin Singer, Justin-singer.org)

- An Oral History of Ghostbusters
Our Man’s mentioned that oral histories are all the rage, but after the recent one on Trading Places, how could he not indulge you with the one on Ghostbusters.  Is seemed like it was a mess to make, but a LOT of fun!  Anyways, who you gonna call?  (Justin Matloff, Esquire)

Unfortunately, the commonly told story behind its origination isn’t entirely (or at all) true!  (Mark Hay, Roads & Kingdoms)

It still boggles Our Man’s mind that when he was getting his MBA, Henry Singleton’s name never came up – given he was one of the great entrepreneurs, businessmen and capital allocators in the 20th century!  If you invested in Teledyne stock in 1966, you’d have had a 53x return on invested capital over the next 25yrs (vs. 6.7x for the S&P 500, and 9.0x for GE).  Here’s the closest thing to a case study on Singleton, and his conglomerate Teledyne.  (John Chew, CS Investing via Value Walk)

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