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Trump Inc Startup: Ultimate Unicorn

Two weeks back I predicted that DOW would reach 20K in first quarter of 2017. Looks like it may touch even before end of 2016. I am sure many folks who are investing in stocks are happy with that and must be thanking Trump for that (even though he is not even President yet).
Last week Trump met bigwigs from Technology world for the first time. Given than all except one were against him, it must have been an interesting meeting. Conpiciously other than Palantir and Uber, none of the so called Unicorns were present. Most of the presence was by big companies with market caps over $100 Billion. Talking about Unicorns, "Trump's Presidential bid" must be the ultimate unicorn of all time and majority of folks missed seeing this unicorn which was in front of us for last 18 months. Only few folks from technology - Peter Thiel being one of them (no wonder Peter made big money in Paypal, Palantir and Facebook).

So let's look at "Trump's campaign" as startup and evaluate its success:
  • It was founded by Trump about 2 years back funded by his own money including sweat equity. After all he traveled all over USA and gave countless speeches
  • He took on big establishment on GOP side as well as democratic side
  • He raised money from grass-roots (aka kick-starter style)
  • He smartly targeted spending of ad dollars where it could get maximum ROI similar to startups would do with limited resources
  • He spent half what big company "Clinton Inc" spent
  • Against every one's advice, he spent last few hours in Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania states where pundits had said it was impossible for Trump to win these states (and these are the states which made him President-elect)
  • He ran the campaign single-handed and ruthlessly (don't we know the style in which Steve Jobs ran Apple during early years?). I think this may be necessary for startups.
  • He effectively ended "Bush" and "Clinton" dynasties similar to what Amazon is doing for so many old-world businesses
  • And it had a blockbuster IPO on Nov 8, 2016. 
Now that Trump Campaign Inc has gone IPO, it is time for Trump to behave like a public company and be accountable to his shareholders (American Citizens).

Comments

Unknown said…
Interesting perspective Shyam, time will tell whether it follows majority of recent tech IPOs..
3:34 PM
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