Coupang

So you can see from Airbnb down to Rivian and Didi down between 39% and 91% in the first year.

which includes companies like Lyft, Robinhood, Uber, Coupang, the average drawdown the first year after an IPO.

The 20 largest public offerings since 2010 experienced a 60% drawdown on average in the first 12 months.

So for

But I think we'd also both agree that our understanding of e-commerce has improved really dramatically over the last year or so.

We've covered so many companies in the space now, from Coupang to C Limited, MercadoLibre, and Amazon.

that I probably would have been more confident in Shopify's growth being sustainable if I had done that other prior research.

But because I hadn't, I defaulted to conservatism.

But I think we would also both agree that our understanding of e-commerce has improved really dramatically over the last year or so.

We've covered so many companies in the space now, from Coupang to C Limited, MercadoLibre, and Amazon, that I probably would have been more confident in Shopify's growth being sustainable if I had done that other prior research.

But because I hadn't, I defaulted to conservatism.

And I still think that's the reasonable thing to do, to hedge against your own ignorance when you don't always know what you don't know.

So with this kind of effort, Korea is now getting attention from global investors.

So many of the financial investors, the venture capital investors investing in the Korean companies, like Sequel Capital investing in Coupang, and then Formation 8 investing in Yellow Mobile, and then Goodwater Capital investing in Mimivax.

This is more like a Silicon Valley venture capital investing in Korean companies.

And then strategic investment, there is Intel investing, acquired Olowax.

What's the criteria for a 500 bagger over two decades? I think maybe the most important factor would be reinvestment runway.

So if I'm thinking about it with that framing, I'd maybe say Coupang.

If they can continue to grow within South Korea and outside of South Korea and Taiwan and other adjacent markets, maybe there's the capacity to earn a lot more than they are today.

Yeah.

Okay, if anyone could predict what a 500-bagger is going to be over 25 years, you couldn't have predicted Geico was going to do that.

It's more of like, all right, they have some of the ingredients, and maybe if things go well, they could get there or in that ballpark.

Do you know Coupang's market cap today, bro?

What's the stock price? $14.30? Good thing I taxed less harvested.

Oh, man, it's been hard to own clothing not named Aritzia.

Coupang, Adobe, McCormick.

There is a long, long list of these types of companies who have historically grown double-digit earnings per share growth.

No, they're not all created equal.

Hmm.

So how do you identify investments that are maybe outside of the US area? Like, you know, you-- I think you end up investing in Alibaba and Coupang.

Like what kind of goes into your analysis of maybe regions that you're not as familiar with to make you well prepared to make an investment there?

I happen to be probably better prepared than most to invest globally because my last company, OLX, was so present and visible in so many countries, where at, at our peak, we were in 100 countries.

And the reason I get deal flow from these countries and they come to me is actually because my brand is well established.

So in India, where my company was huge, I-- and still huge, actually, and we get a lot of deals, and that's true as well in Eastern Europe and many of these other geographies.

And, but in these other geographies are we, we s- we either wait for until it's later and more proven, which is what we did with Alibaba and Coupang, or we invest in models that are-- have already worked elsewhere.

So, oh, it's an idea that's already successful in the US, it's probably going to work here as well.

There's also some trade disputes as well.

over the U.S. e-commerce firm Coupang, which had a data leak and is being fined by the South Korean government.

So relations between South Korea and Ukraine have dropped.

Relations between South Korea and the U.S. are dropping.

A very specific, highly technical field Sure, but if you want to test whether this investor logic holds up outside of Silicon Valley's immediate orbit, we can look at how global markets are behaving in Asia.

Ah, you are referring to the proxy tests run against those massive Asian consumer companies, like Sony Group, Coupang, which is basically South Korea's answer to Amazon, and Grab, the massive Southeast Asian super app.

Exactly.

But those are sprawling conglomerates.

The theory being that if they move in lockstep, investors view Grab as an AI play based purely on their software hiring.

And the data shows a highly suggestive glimpse under the hood.

Sony, Coupang, and Grab all show significant sensitivity to the AI index, directly correlated to their software engineering exposure.

The exact same pattern from the Blumenfeld study repeats itself across the Pacific.