Nursing My Stocktoberfest Hangover

Earlier this week, I ventured down to San Diego to hang out at Stocktoberfest 2014. As soon as I touched down, I asked myself: “What took me so long to go down here for this?” It was fun right from the beginning, and Howard puts on a great event. As I ventured over to the bar for the opening happy hour and to watch Game 5 of the World Series, I immediately made new friends, talked shop, and even stress tested my presentation for Monday on someone with way, way more knowledge about the topic than I have. That turned out to be a useful beer. (More about that in a second.)

I’ll start with Tuesday first. @HowardLindzon graciously had me participate in two sessions. On Tuesday, it was a more general panel on mobile trends for the whole audience. The panel consisted of Howard moderating, myself, Jordan Mendell (DraftKings), Alex Bard (Campaign Monitor), and Justin Overdorff (Yelp). We discussed the classic stuff around mobile ecosystem — Apple vs Google/Android, Yelp and Pandora, and apps which truly benefited from the timing of the shift to mobile. As this is mostly a crowd of technical public stock enthusiasts, it was harder to explain how to play mobile in the public markets, partly because mobile is still immature in the big picture yet maturing for entrepreneurs given the distribution constraints. Public investors think about the big companies, the handset makers, the chip layers, infrastructure, carriers, and other parts of the ecosystem. Outside of Facebook or just mobile ads in general (a growing market), it’s hard to pull this off in the public markets.

Now, back to Monday. I wasn’t worried about the Tuesday panel because I’ve done tons of panels on mobile. Easy. But on Monday, Howard wanted me to lead a breakout of how I come about picking technology stocks. I called it: “Can insights from startups drive public market calls?” Given the audience is quite technical about stocks, my method and presentation are the exact opposite, so I was a bit nervous. As a result, I worked to make it more of a question than a session, and then fostered a discussion after explaining my own methodology. (I’ve put up the slides from the talk below.) What was great about the session, after overcoming the fear of presenting it, is that nearly everyone in the breakout raised their hand and offered a comment about their reactions, and it started a great discussion. My biggest takeaway from the session actually applies to investing generally, public or private — so much of it is driven by “entry prices,” as investing is about multiples, and right now, so many of the private entry prices to obtain equity are getting quite high.

Finally, Howard and his team did a phenomenal job to make everyone feel comfortable and I saw some old friends and made new ones. As the tagline goes, for “profit and joy.” It was a joyous occasion, indeed, and speaks to the community Howard has built with Stocktwits. Thanks for hosting, Howard!