Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Talk about secondary markets for private company stock has been heating up recently but the thought has been around for quite some time.  In fact I, along with others, wrote about secondary markets for private company stock in 2007 and 2008 and I am certain that the argument goes much further back than 2007 since the idea is essentially low hanging fruit.

Why is talk about secondary markets heating up now?

It seems the secondary market idea, as expected, tends to come back every time startups (and venture investors) have very few exit possibilities.  As of late things have been looking very grim with regard to exits.

The public markets have been virtually shut down in terms of startup IPOs for some time now.  In fact, I saw some numbers (via the NVCA) the other day that showed how bad the IPO market has become.  There were roughly 86 VC backed IPOs in 2007, 6 (yes, that’s a single digit) in 2008 and 0 thus far in 2009 (goose egg).

OK, so what about M&A activity?  From 2004 to 2008 M&A activity has hovered around 350ish VC backed M&A exits per year or about 87 M&A exits per quarter.  Q1 of 2009 saw only 56.  You may think that that number isn’t too far off the average but when it comes to the average size of M&A exits over time the picture becomes clearer.

In 2007 the average M&A deal size was $177mm.  2008 saw a decline to $115.7.  2009, thus far, comes in at a whopping $49.6mm average M&A deal size for VC backed startups.  Ouch!

Where else can we (entrepreneurs and VCs) get liquidity?

That’s certainly a loaded question but one that needs to be taken seriously and addressed.  Why? Well, if liquidity events are rare then VCs won’t make many investments and, therefore, startups will become more rare and, thus, a vicious cycle ensues that severely impacts our economy (especially given that VC backed startups are a large job creation engine for this country).

This is how we get to the idea of secondary markets.  Secondary markets exist for many illiquid assets at this time.  In fact, secondary markets even exist for Venture Capital fund positions (i.e. LPs can sell of their VC investments in a secondary market).

I have to admit that I do find the idea of secondary markets for VC backed (and non-VC backed startups) intriguing but I am starting to see some issues with the whole concept.  That said, before I get into some of the issues I would like to chat quickly about a pain in the butt accounting rule that may actually help to enable secondary markets for private company stock to function.

FAS 157

A lot has been written about FAS 157 and how terrible the rule is. Even FASB didn’t like the first version of the rule they released.  That said what FAS 157 does, in part, is force VCs to value their investments each quarter.  Since this is a giant hassle (for reasons I may take a whole other post to describe – on second thought that would just be tortuous for you and I so I will skip that post) a lot of valuation firms have been springing up to help VCs and other funds (PE, hedge funds, etc.) value their investments.

As a by product of this rule lots of data is being generated on private companies and the valuations over time.  This data could potentially form the backbone of a secondary market for private company stock (i.e. these valuations could be likened to the analyst reports for public companies and the secondary market participants would then go ahead setting the price for the private company stock).

Wow, this sounds great! What could possibly be wrong with a secondary market for private companies?

This is, again, quite a question.  One of my big concerns about a secondary market for private companies was something I initially missed in my thinking about them.  The issue is this:

If private companies begin to be traded on a secondary market and, through FAS 157, are valued regularly, what stops private companies from focusing on the short term (i.e. short term value of the company, etc.) just like publicly traded companies do (to their detriment it seems)?

One thing that is great about startups is that by nature they take the long view.  Startups try to create long term value and they tend not to worry about short term valuations of their stock or short term revenue opportunities.

If a secondary market begins to take that long term thinking away by pushing companies to focus short term doesn’t a private company simply become a defacto public company albeit with less regulation imposed on it?  I think it may.

Some other issues that come up are equally large.  In the words of Fred Wilson:

I understand that there are issues with this development. It will be harder to strike options at low prices when the company’s stock has a price history. It will be harder to control who the shareholders are and it will be harder to keep employees motivated to stick around if they can cash out early. These are all problems companies usually don’t face until they go public. Now they will have to face them earlier.

The issue that is that heart of the couple Fred mentions is continuity.  One reason startups are able to take the long view is that they generally have a stable management team and a stable group of investors/board members. Part of the stability of startups lies in the fact that everyone is in it together for the long term so-to-speak since they can’t liquidate their positions easily. If founders, investors, board members and employees can suddenly liquidate their stock fairly easily what is left to keep them around?

If you can’t keep your people around then you need to bring in new people. Now you’ve lost time and continuity, which is bad enough but you are also going to have a hard time setting option strike prices at a rate that give the potential new employees good upside potential.

In my mind, there is enough to worry about in an early stage startup without having to worry about a lot of the things startups have to worry about only when they go public.  It seems that adding more issues to the mix will potentially decrease the success rate of startups.

In conclusion

Fred and others (VCs and entrepreneurs alike) are fans of the secondary market idea even though they see the issues that come about. Even I can’t say that I am not, at some level, a fan of the idea (we need something that allows for liquidity).  It just seems to me that these secondary markets need to be well thought out so we don’t lose the long term thinking and alignment of interests that are both big parts of the world of startups and necessary for continued innovation and economic growth.

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

Being a long time student of finance (starting digging into the markets at the age of 13) I have been particularly interested in the financial crisis that we are in the midst of.  I have been thinking through why something as large as this crisis happens.  Of course, for something so large and complex, there are a number of things that had to come into play to create the scenario but one macro theme in particular leaped out at me.

The theme I am talking about is removing faces from finance.

What do I mean by that?  My thinking is this: once you remove relationships from financial transactions and instruments things start to get messy.

If you are once removed, for example when you buy the stock of a company that you don’t have any personal relationship with, you are probably OK and you hope that the management is giving you quality data to asses.  There’s trust there.  However, when you get further and further away from a face to face relationship with, say, derivatives like CDOs, things simply get out of hand.

I have never been a fan of derivatives and other “abstract” financial instruments.  I always found it odd that no one really knew what the underlying assets were.  Was it Joe’s house, Acme Corp., both? To the creators and traders of these securities it was just paper (digital “paper”) with an assigned value.

I am not the only one who was worried about the issues that could be caused by abstracting finance.  Warren Buffett was worried too.  He once referred to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”  Buffett also referred to derivatives this way:

“There is an electronic herd of people around the world managing an amazing amount of money who make decisions based on minute-by-minute stimuli,” said Mr. Buffett, adding, “I think it’s a fool’s game.”

His partner Charlie Munger was also not a fan.  Munger once said:

“The accounting being deficient enormously contributes to the risk,” said Munger, lamenting that executives and shareholders were getting paid on “profits that don’t exist.”

Exactly. Profits that don’t exist and assets no one really understands or can put a face to is a recipe for disaster.

At this point I should note that when I say face to face I don’t necessarily mean it literally.  I am more or less referring to the relationship one has with an asset and how close they are to it.  That being said, let’s take a look at the banks.  I will keep it short since I all of you already know what I am going to say.

Banks, given the market’s appetite for CDOs, were able to grant loans and then immediately get rid of them to someone who would package them up and send them off to a big bank like Merril Lynch who would then create CDOs, etc. etc.  Do you see the issue here?

A bank’s business is to take in money in the form of savings and distribute it (and thus take on risk) in the form of loans on which they make their interest (i.e. their profit).  Normally the banks have to look someone in the eye and really figure out if the person will pay the bank back since the bank is stuck with a bad loan if the person doesn’t pay.  The loan default is the bank’s risk.

With CDOs the bank can make a loan and immediately offload their risk (although as we saw a lot of banks didn’t offload the risk fast enough).  Now, as you can see, the bank isn’t incented to look at borrowers as closely.  They are incented to give as many loans as they can and then ship them out the door.  That is when finance becomes faceless, and also “risk-less” for one party, and when one persons transaction is viewed as risk-less the outlook becomes bleak since nothing is really inherently risk-less (just like there is no such thing as a free lunch).

We need to get back to face to face finance where people make deals with people they know and trust and they have to since they have to hold that risk.  We should really think twice the next time we try to abstract finance and create derivatives.  While cool and intereting to finance wonks creating derivatives is probably not a good practice nor does it create long term value for society.

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes

I have to admit that Umair Haque’s recent two part series of posts on venture capital really made me want to start writing on this blog again.  His posts, entitled “Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction” and “Five Problems Venture Capitalists Should Have Solved (But Didn’t)” really got me thinking.  In the words of my friend and partner in TECH cocktail crime, Frank Gruber, Haque got me “fired up!”

At a high level Haque is calling for VCs to step up their game and push innovation forward rather than sitting back, like some have been, and making a lot of “me too” investments that, even if they play out, don’t really move the needle much for the world in terms of meaningful change, job creation, etc. Here, here! I am with him 100% on changing the world for the better.  That’s why a lot of us got into VC and entrepreneurship in the first place.

I agree with Haque on a number of the points in the “Asleep at the Wheel” piece.  It certainly seems that the VC industry is flooded with too much capital looking for homes that don’t exist (however, some places, the Midwest for example, don’t have nearly enough capital to fund the great entrepreneurs, ideas and technologies they have) and that, as Haque puts it, a culture of imitation, rather than innovation, has started to permeate venture capital.  I also agree that “transparency, disclosure and discussion” can help venture capital by allowing it to become more participative and open.

Haque closes “Asleep at the Wheel” with this statement:

Unfortunately, today’s venture investors are about as interested in reform as yesterday’s bankers were. So it just might take a venture crash – just like Wall St’s financial crash – to wake up the guys and gals asleep at the wheel of creative destruction.

Ouch!  He may be right about some folks but, as long time readers know, I have been a big fan of innovation in the VC business for some time now (and have written about some innovative ideas in detail) and there are many other forward thinking VCs that are interested in improving their business too.

That said, we need to figure out a way to innovate that can also provide great returns for our investors.  One of the main issues is that we hold illiquid investments for a relatively long period of time before we can either sell them or, hold on to your hats people, IPO them (haven’t seen one of those in a while).  Once we put money into a company the clock starts ticking and, when the investment is finally exited, that clock allows VCs and their investors to calculate the efficiency or quality of an investment, which comes in the form of an IRR or Internal Rate of Return.

The IRR allows different investments to be compared to each other directly to help asses if the VC investment was a good one as compraed to, say, putting money in an S&P 500 index fund (i.e. just because you received 5x your money, for example, doesn’t mean the investment was the best one you could have made – the time your money was locked up in that investment needs to factor in).  Here is an example:

Say you invest $1,000,000 in a startup right now and you get $10,000,000 back at some point.  Either way you look at it you got 10 times your money back.  A huge home run right?  Not necessarily.  Let’s take a look at your IRRs at different periods of elapsed time:

$10,000,000 returned at 5 years: IRR = 58%

$10,000,000 returned at 10 years: IRR = 26%

$10,000,000 returned at 15 years: IRR = 17%

$10,000,000 returned at 20 years: IRR = 12%

Interesting isn’t it.  You wouldn’t have done much better than the long term market return if you couldn’t exit your deal before 20 years of hold time.  That means, at 20 years, you and your investors didn’t get a great return especially considering that, generally, the startup you invested in was inherently more risky than the overall market and, therefore, should have had a far better return than the market to account for the excess risk you took (more risk needs to equal more return to make things work – see alpha).

This is why VCs have specific hold time targets (usually about 5 -7 years and sometimes less) and limit their funds’ life to 10 years (if you have to hold investments longer than that the IRRs, even at 10x your money, start to degrade and the folks investing in your VC fund become unhappy).

The folks that invest in venture capital funds (i.e. the big institutions) want returns that make it worth the risk they took and those returns are affected by investment hold time.  Some of the things that Haque suggests VCs should have fixed or innovated on and the markets we should have created don’t appear to have the profiles that would make for good investment where good equals what LPs want in terms of IRRs.  Therefore, even if VCs did dive into this harder-to-solve stuff they may have done a lot of good but the returns may not have been there and, thus, these VCs would not be able to raise a new fund and continue to innovate since their investors would have been unhappy.

Bottom line: if the VC business wants to start moving in the direction of some of the issues Haque puts forth and suggests VCs should have solved than VCs need to figure out how to get the returns their investors demand while pushing forward on harder to solve problems.

At the end of the day venture capital still needs to be sustainable and that means driving good returns to LPs. Good returns enable VCs to continue to raise new money to invest in innovate young companies and to perpetuate the innovation the cycle.  Returns are our constraint as VCs and we need to find creative ways to work within that constraint while still taking on the big risks that help to create new industries and completely revitalize old industries.

This is the challenge and it is a big one but one that will be exciting to work on.

At the end of Haque’s “Five Problems Post” he suggests that if VCs can’t solve problems like:

• Reinventing communications
• Reconceiving capital markets
• Business models for public goods
• Business models for radical responsibility
• Discovering new sources of advantage

than VCs are obsolete.  In fact, he says VCs are obsolete as of right now since we didn’t solve those issues.  I am not sure that he correct when he says that and I do think he trivializes the issues the VC business faces by ignoring the fact that VCs do need to provide returns that make sense to their investors.

However, I tend to look at Haque’s two recent posts as inspiration.  He’s right.  VCs can do better and VCs need to continue to strive to do better and to foster meaningful innovation.

I am not sure what the answers are in terms of working to reshape the VC business into one that address what Haque suggests VCs should be addressing. That said, I am willing to investigate the issues and to try to find some solutions that can get venture capital to the next level and I am sure many others are as well.  I am really glad that Haque and others continue to challenge the VC business.  It is too easy to become complacent and posts like Haque’s can really kick people into gear.

If a number of people heed Haque’s call some really exciting new ideas, businesses and industries will no doubt emerge and we (VCs and entrepreneurs) will continue to be able to combat the world’s largest, and most nagging, issues.

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes

Andrew Lahde, manager of Lahde Capital (a small hedge fund in California), announced he is shutting down his fund.  He broke on to the scene in a big way earlier this year after his fund, only one year old at this point, returned ~866% betting on the subprime collapse.

The returns are one thing to be amazed about but his goodbye letter is truly something that will give you a jolt.  While I do think he goes a little off the edge here and there I do think that there are some interesting ideas scattered throughout the short letter that are worth thinking about. At the very least this is a smart guy who now knows what he wants in life and has realigned his priorities and I say good for him.

Here is the letter in full (via FT Alphaville and Portfolio.com).  Lahde surely knows how to go out with a bang, that’s for sure! (via The Big Picture)

Dear Investor:

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list those deserving thanks know who they are.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. Please do not expect any type of reply to emails or voicemails within normal time frames or at all. Andy Springer and his company will be handling the dissolution of the fund. And don’t worry about my employees, they were always employed by Mr. Springer’s company and only one (who has been well-rewarded) will lose his job.

I have no interest in any deals in which anyone would like me to participate. I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle. I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life — where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management — with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not. May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established.

On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.

Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant — marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let’s stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.

With that I say good-bye and good luck.

All the best,

Andrew Lahde

Reading time: < 1 minute

With the big hedge fund guys (even those who are down for the year meaning they aren’t trying to preserve their wins to help with their fees) moving a significant amount of their assets to cash equivalents it looks like my post from Monday won’t pan out (these guys aren’t always right but they are smart so their bold moves to cash equivalents are something to watch).  It seems like we may be in for some more losses as today’s drop in the Dow indicates (down to ~8500 or about -8% for the day). We have a tough road ahead but we’ll get through it.  As I said before, the tough market conditions will separate the wheat from the chaff and we’ll end up stronger and smarter as we emerge from this downturn.

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

If there is one thing I have learned about investing it is that, to be successful in the long run, you have to be disciplined.  Discipline can come in many forms but in this post I have one form that I want to focus in on.  I want to focus on setting price targets.  Firm price targets.

Price targets help to take the emotion out of investing.  You should set a reasonable upper bound that is above your purchase price and a reasonable lower bound that is below your purchase price (key word, reasonable) when you first invest in a company and then stick to those numbers.  By “stick to those numbers” I simply mean you should sell the stock if the stock hits either one of them (yes, even if it hits the lower bound and you’ve lost money – of course, if you think the stock is still solid you could buy more and dollar cost average down but that is another post entirely).

Sticking to these targets will help you avoid large losses and avoid getting too greedy when you have already made a healthy profit.

The issue that any investor faces when they are not disciplined is the natural human reaction to “chase a loss”. An example of chasing a loss is as follows. Say you have a stock and it currently sits at $50 per share (the selling point/target in this example) and you decide to hold it even though $50 was one of your targets.  The stock then drops to $46.  Instead of selling at $46 you will say you’ll sell when it hits $50 again.  The stock then drops to $40 and you rethink your current target of $50 and suggest that you’ll sell the stock if it gets back to $46 and so on and so forth until you have chased the loss all the way down.

If you had set one of your bounds at $50 ahead of time and have stayed with it you wouldn’t have ridden the stock as low as the person did in the above example.  I am sure some people will say, “yeah, but what if the stock went back up, you would have lost that extra value.” Those people would be exactly right but the issue is that you can never truly time the market.  You never know when the upper bound or lower bound will hit and if you think you can time the market you end up chasing losses.

All of the great investors I have watched since my youth and some who I have also had the pleasure of working for are always very disciplined in their approach and while this means they don’t hit every peak or valley and thus don’t extract or lose the maximum amount of value it does mean that they consistently see solid returns.

Creating discipline through price targets is one way to keep yourself from allowing emotion into the investing process. Too much emotion in the investing process typically doesn’t lead to good returns.

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

As a lot of you know, the stock market was my first love as far a business goes.  I have followed the market closely ever since I was 13 and I continue to do so today.  In my relatively short time following the market I have seen some interesting things.  The unprecedented growth in the 1990s.  The tech bubble inflating and eventually bursting. And now I am watching the incredible sell off set in motion by the credit crunch.

I honestly thought that we’d see some support in the markets around the Dow’s 9,000 mark but the market continued to fall.  That surprised me a little bit considering the values that are there for the taking right now.  I am sure the value guys, like my former boss at Eaton Vance, Mike Mach, are starting to snag some solid companies are ridiculously depressed prices and they will make a killing on the upside (value hounds are going to work!).

To me the drop from the 9,000 level to the 8,000 level was complete fear.  Irrationality had set in.  Over the weekend I did some thinking about this while riding my bike on the lake front and I figured that over the weekend people would start to wise up and the smart investors would start buying again due to the incredibly cheap stock sitting right in front of them.  Today it looks like things are picking up a little and perhaps the fear, while still there, is becoming more rational (if that makes sense) and greed is picking up again.

Matt McCall put out a post today about his thoughts on the credit crunch and how long it may last.  McCall gave a time frame that I also would have suggested; about 2 – 3 years of tough times followed by 2 – 3 years of modest growth and then we will see things pick up again.

McCall also wrote about the difference between equity driven crashes and credit driven crashes, which I think bears quoting.

In equity driven situations, investors need to feel that prices have gotten low enough and they will come back in (fear turns to greed). In credit driven crashes, the whole system needs to “de-lever” and the process is longer and more complicated. The core issue is that families have too much debt. So, the debt needs to go away to fix the problem. Unfortunately, because of cheap debt, poor oversight and general greed, this debt party has gone on way too long. Consumers are underwater on mortgages and credit cards and the government is approaching the trillion dollar nut. Fortunately, corporations are generally not as bad off though some will get into trouble.

It seems that investors are starting to believe that prices have reached a point where they are too low (let’s hope anyway!) but, as McCall says, credit is a whole other story and that piece will take a while to clean up.

This credit crunch is a wake up call for all of us.  Americans have alarmingly high debt compared to the rest of the world.  They also have alarmingly low savings rates.  Combine the two and you have a recipe for disaster, a disaster that we’re currently in the midst of.

However, there is a positive side to all of this.  Perhaps Americans will begin to borrow less and save more.  This would be great for the country in the long run.  Also, as far as startups go, times will be lean for the next 3 – 6 years but in year 7 the best and most lean companies will be left standing and they will reap big rewards for their responsible business building efforts.  In essence we will have separated the wheat from the chaff, which will make our economy much stronger going forward.

I am looking forward to McCall’s follow up post on how VCs and portfolio companies can survive the next 5 – 7 years. It should be a good read.  In the meantime I would suggest reading his latest post in full.  It’ll be well worth the five minutes you’ll spend on it.