I really, really enjoy using generic market research websites as a starting point for learning about industries that are: a) huge b) invisible to me in my daily life c) incredibly rich in their levels of activity, development, impact in the world.
Examples of these sites are:
- Mordor Intelligence
- Markets and Markets
- Grandview Research
- Fortune Business Insights
Examples of the industries that you come across include:
- Riot Control Equipment, a $7.5B+ annual revenue producing industry.
- US Medical Billing Outsourcing, a $6.7B+ industry; uniquely American in its scale and administrative oddity.
- Plant Based Meat in Asia, expected to grow at 19%+ CAGR over the next five years. I am somewhat skeptical of the crystal ball they are using to glean this number from.
- Explosives for the Defense Industry, a $14B industry that I hope never to be on the receiving end of.
- Autonomous Train Market, expected to grow from ~$13B to ~$18B, based on Asia Pacific’s growing urbanization and installations of metro trains in their cities.
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Some thoughts on this:
1. What is the best way to viscerally get up-to speed and build an understanding of a new industry?
If you’re an analyst, here are some of the basic ideas:
- read an industry primer by a bank,
- jot down questions you have, and start trying to answer them yourself
- then start talking to experts, get them to answer those questions and point you to better questions
- attend a tradeshow,
- build up some convictions and predictions to test out your understanding even further
- tinker with the products
- follow industry news, figure out what it all means
- observe/profile companies, top executives, sub-segments
- take someone else on a tour of the industry, and write your own primer (we come full circle).
This isn’t rocket science, but it takes time, and it’s likely that if you’re an actual analyst, you’ll be bandwidth constrained and more focused on the micro vs the macro.
Nonetheless, if you are reading this, you might be a curious ‘Industry Explorer’, the type of person who is excited by the idea of a National Geographic for Capitalism. Perhaps you enjoy searching for idiosyncratic secrets that you can wield in meaningful ways (i.e a roll-up of medical equipment rental companies, or building vertical SAAS for pharmaceutical packaging manufacturers).
If that’s the case, you should message me (my email is krishkhubchand at gmail dot com). I’m more than happy to be a sounding board during your explorations.
2. I like the idea of experimenting with different ‘media forms’ that unlock deeper insights for understanding these industries.
There are two big innovations in the information landscape, which have gone mainstream recently.
First, podcasts. This has been most pronounced within finance. Starting with venture capital at the forefront, but with other asset classes not too far behind. Examples of this include 20VC, Invest Like The Best, This Week in Startups, Allocators Pod, and…dare I say, my own foray with the Frontier Markets Podcast.
It’s notable that the more institutional the asset class, or the more sensitive the information landscape is within it (ie NDAs, alpha-secrecy), the less sophisticated the media ecosystem around it (duh!).
This is an example of a ‘supply constraint’ on the high quality production of a certain type of media.
I enjoyed listening to the first ~10 minutes of this conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and Alexey Guzey, where they ask: Despite the astronomical increase in the number of podcasts, why are there so few high quality, in depth ones being produced?
One of the answers they suggest is that if you’re of the intellectual caliber to produce ultra high quality conversations with experts, your opportunity cost on time is higher (you can be doing so much more that is ‘real’ and ‘high status’ versus ‘start yet another podcast’). The result is a sort of inefficiency in the market because the bar to quality is lower. Therefore, if someone genuinely smart and curious set out to make great podcasts, it wouldn’t be shockingly difficult to ‘outperform the market’, so to speak.
Lots of people don’t do things because of their fear of crossing the ‘moat of low status’, in Cate Hall’s terms.
In any case, I think there’s a sort of ‘ugh field’ or ‘schlep’ or ‘blind spot’ where asset classes that were previously hyper secretive could benefit from just 1-2 actors coming out and aiming to publicly host and share the conversations that previously happened only behind closed doors. For example, getting into the valuation of Heathrow Airport, owned by Global Infrastructure Partners, or digging very deep into the financial state of specific mid-market PE companies in the US.
The benefits to being the host of such a media asset are becoming increasingly ‘known’ by the public. Therefore we have efforts like Turpentine Media which seem to maximize the deployment of this formula, or institutional finance conference panels like ‘How Podcasts Are Changing The Face of Finance’.
I digress.
Second, the format of newsletters for aggregating industry information has been superb. IndustryDive does this for high cap-ex industries. They recently exited for $500m+. Substack has lots of analysts that do this. The main value here is ‘learning over time’ and the information arriving at you; a sort of ‘drip education experience’.
I believe the newsletter remains underrated as the ‘perennial form’ of industry information exchange.
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Finally, one experimental format I’d be interested in seeing is the use of AR/VR to dig deeper into a supply chain, or the journey surrounding an industry. I’ve wanted this since 2019, and perhaps with Apple Vision Pro, it might be feasible to do this in a pragmatic way.
Realistically, what might this look like?
- you look at an item
- you can see the production journey and a breakdown of its constintuent parts’ production journeys — think of the story iPencil, but in graphic form.
- you then can see the historical journey of how this product was build upon other innovations, a sort of ‘timeline of the technology’ and the figures behind it, the funding behind it — Check out this book to get a taste of what that format feels like in text form. It’s called: ‘Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact’ by Vaclav Smil.
- you can see the different use cases, the customer journeys — and experience them, O
- you can see the ownership structures, market structures, ownership histories…who is the equity and capital behind this? – capIQ/bloomberg vibes.
- you can see who contributed to this — IMDB vibes
- you can get the legal/regulatory/standards context — WestLaw vibes
The idea is to make this ‘holistic view’ of a product/market as frictionless, integrated, and dynamic as possible. The interface IS the innovation. This is a ‘tool for thought’ and the insights that the ubiquiouts deployment of such a mode of ‘understanding’ might bring could be priceless. As Alan Kay says, ‘A change of perspective can be worth 80+ IQ points’. The trouble, of course, is it’s almost impossible to underwrite insight and its value, without having courage.
I plan on sharing more random insights from industries I’m studying – and I’ll be running some experiments at the intersection of information, media, and industries as well.
Excited to keep you posted – and congrats on readings this unedited, stream of consciousness post.
Krish
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