Years ago, I noticed that Palo Alto start-up Palantir had taken over my old office back in the days of Prophet.net. These data-scraping upstarts grew and grew, taking over every available morsel of Palo Alto office space, until they finally decided to ditch town and leave California. Just last month, they came public in a much-anticipated offering, and it did absolutely nothing.
I have long puzzled over the enormous market cap of Beyond Meat, particularly since I never see anyone buying the stuff here in oh-so-hip Palo Alto. As I wrote back in July, “There was literally the entire inventory. Three lonely, squished packages tucked away in a forgotten corner of the refrigerated section. I suspect a month ago these three fellas were still in there. In any case, BYND seems to be sputtering. Based on little more than my three-second glance at my local Whole Foods, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion the $8.4 billion valuation of this company is a bit rich.“
Judging from after-hours action, I guess its lack of popularity is catching up with the share price:
The town directly south of my own home of Palo Alto is called Mountain View. It is a similarly-sized town, and although these days it seems like governments are capable of nothing but losing money, Mountain View has proved itself quite different:
That was no fluke, by the way. The year prior, the town threw off a profit of over $100 million. Not a bad business! But I think those days are over.
The “main drag” in Mountain View is called Castro Street (not to be confused with the gay mecca of the same-named street in San Francisco). Castro is packed from end to end with all kinds of restaurants and retail stores. Until Covid, it was reliably one of the most vivacious places to go in the Bay Area.
(more…)As some of you know, Marissa Mayer lives near me, and she is beloved by the children of the neighborhood since she does great Halloween. This year, of course, the trick-or-treating has been banned, but Ms. Mayer is undeterred. She has, as always, decked out her house splendidly. She also, being a zillionaire, bought the only funeral home in Palo Alto, just for the hell of it, and has turned the entire thing into a huge display of gargantuan pumpkins (hundreds of pounds each). I took a few photos early in the morning while walking my dogs:
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