Blackwells is obviously not a neutral party here, there's a reason they created this thing. But on first glance it looks like a pretty solid argument that the management at Peleton is seriously flawed. I don't really buy the arguments on why Peleton is a good business and comparable to Streaming somehow.
I do find the arguments around bad governance structures and oversight weird though, as those should have been known before they invested. Doesn't mean they're wrong, but obviously this didn't stop Blackwells from investing in the first place.
> I do find the arguments around bad governance structures and oversight weird though, as those should have been known before they invested.
Likely they knew and saw an opportunity for their investment strategy.
A lot of really good talkers make it up the ranks and those are the ones you will speak to.
It takes a equally skilled but rarer archetype to navigate through the BS.
My point is: it’s a lot harder to find problems than you think. You find out the truth after close.
You absolutely do have a point about streaming, but the presentation argues that Peloton's assets may be valuable to some streaming services ( they are dying and fighting for content now ).
Yes. The Peloton 'model' reminds me of the gym model, at least in the UK.
You always get a bunch of people sign up in 'fat' January for 12 months. They go to the the gym for a few weeks and stop. But continue paying £50pm or whatever for the next 11 months.
Peloton feels similar in that people are made to want the shiny thing in the TV adverts, find that they don't have a room with a view to put the bike unlike the adverts, use it for a few weeks, and then have to see out their subscription. I'm sure Peloton's insider numbers probably show a slower drop off, but I'd bet it's still there.
There's probably a big intersection of those that have bought a Peloton bike as well as joined a gym but rarely used it.
The free alternative of course, is go outside and cycle or run.
I don't know, I have a peloton. I've never been in a gym in my life.
Particularly the lack of churn on subscribers rings true. Their customers are loyal, they feel more part of a community, etc than your random Netflix subscriber.
There's a large addressable market, as seen by Tonal and others coming into the fray.
The counterargument IMO is that fitness is increasingly a fractured market between these home workout things, boutique gyms, budget gyms (Planet Fitness), fancier gyms, country clubs, people that just want to workout on their own...
I worked for a company in a similar situation a few years back. The new CEO was fired in less than year by the old ceo/new chairman
The addressable market section is especially ridiculous. It looks at global wellbeing spending of $4.2T including $600B in fitness. That is not the addressable market for a device that is expensive, tied to a monthly subscription and takes up more floor space than a couch. That's not even the addressable market for running shoes, much less a fancy exercycle or treadmill.
And it sounds like Blackwell understand this, and instead of pushing for Peloton to focus internally on its product and get rid of the extra fat, they want a fast sale to a not-really-smart company. So they can at least get some ROI
People talk about monthly fees being high or fair, thats not it at all, Pelotons prices for hardware and membership or completely fine. What they did do is
* Pouring money into building their own factories (even Apple doesn't do this at their scale, they pay Foxconn)
* Building a full fledged apparel brand
* Hiring way too many engineers, FAANG level org size
* Having their own warehouses and delivery full time employees
No other company does this. I'm not sure what the long term plan was, maybe they become a white label manufacturer for other start ups? It failed, badly
You do not need 14,000, or 11,000, or 3,000 employees to do what Peloton currently does (again, maybe they had grandiose plans in the pipeline). If we want to compare proprietary hardware + Android + online streaming service. When MIRROR was bought out by Lululemon for $500M, they had 200 employees
I have a feeling no one has offered Foley more than $3B for the company, and i'm being generous
Never mind the fact that I’ve maybe seen only 3 people in the real world wearing anything that is Peloton branded (no, the free Century t-shirt doesn’t count).
Personally, I find their apparel to be a little loud and obnoxious, but that’s just me. As a consumer, I don’t see what value they bring to the apparel market. Nothing new, just branding.
Whether or not they were successful is an execution issue.
Considering how strong the brand is I think apparel is a genius idea for growth. It has just been mismanaged due to nepotism.
It’s very high margin and the company is in a great position to market to fitness conscious people. But I don’t see it ever being more than a side business.
The examples I'm referring to are Rode Microphones, Cochlear hearing aids, and ResMed CPAP machines, are all manufactured in Australia (though I'm not sure all of their world-wide manufacturing happens here, they could have other factories).
Would love to get the feedback from people who may have any idea in where and why it sometimes make sense to do your own manufacturing.
My issue with Peleton has always been that the cost for a stationary bike is more than the cost of my road bike, and about the same prices as my mountain bike. From my user name, you may be able to tell... I ride, but how many people want to spend the kind of money Peleton is charging to ride indoors?
They got the early adopters who were willing to pay the price, but they may have run out of consumers. I know of a few people who LOVE their Peleton, I don't know of anybody who doesn't have one that wants one.
Bingo. The growth opportunities at this price point seem to be close to zero. Move the price point by a factor of 5, and maybe (maybe) that changes.
Meanwhile, you can pry my Racermate Computrainer from my cold, dead hands :)
It might make peleton live longer but it would lose a lot of money for their LPs
> In a sense, the pitch here is straightforward. Blackwells does not think that Foley is very good at running Peloton. The stock market does not think that Foley is very good at running Peloton, in that the stock is down 80% from its highs last year and spent last week below its 2019 initial public offering price of $29. (It’s up today.) And Foley does not think he’s particularly good at running Peloton, at least if you believe the quotes that Blackwells selected here. If someone else takes over the day-to-day running of Peloton, or the process of selling it to a better owner (and Blackwells is also pushing for a sale), then Foley will have more money (because he owns a lot of Peloton stock) and also more free time (because he’s not running Peloton). It is no fun to do a job that you’re not good at, particularly when doing that job costs you money. If you can get in a room with Foley, or just lob a PowerPoint deck at him, and explain “hey, everyone is mad at you, you’re not having fun and it’s making you poorer,” that’s fairly persuasive and maybe he’ll listen. He did!
Sidenote: I suggest subscribing to Money Stuff. It’s a free email newsletter, and Matt’s writing is stellar.
Those decisions made absolutely no sense financially, and were immediately shut down once the CEO changed. But when they were decided Wall Street was cheering them on
Is it possible to run a manufacturing business in the US without slave labor somewhere?
Ahem... that's now FAAAN (facebook, apple, alphabet, amazon, netflix)
I'm sorry, I hated to write this, and for what it's worth I didn't know what you meant by FAANG... had to look it up only to find the term has fallen from use.
> A: Finance. Our CFO does 99% of finance. I engage because I want to know how we’re doing. But to say I don’t add value to her operation is an understatement. You can also say the same with technology. Our CTO doesn’t get any help from me. I’ll go sometimes months without talking to our CTO, which as a CEO of a technology company, that’s kind of rare.
Wow...
> ...leadership team who don't trust you ....
When did talking come to mean having trust issues!!?
This looks more like a traditional company than a tech company, which is not helped by it being based in NYC. The CEO and CFO are probably buddy-buddy while the CTO is an outsider "geek."
I also think it can be helpful to self-deprecate a bit as a leader but I'm not sure why all these statements got published in public.
If you have a fantastic CFO, that's great. Just say that. "I'm very confident in person X." or "We have a great team who's been doing a great job." Things like that.
You don't say: "I don't add any value." That makes you sound like an empty suit.
Also the "I haven't talked to my CTO in months" sounds really bad. How the eff are you planning new product launches? Shouldn't the CEO at least be aware of any ongoing issues with current products? Talk about the plan to reduce hosting costs? Anything? WTF
> Peloton has been horribly mismanaged, with unbridled enthusiasm taking the place of disciplined leadership
It could also show apathy and lack of concern because he wants to cash out.
For Amazon though, it's incorrect to refer to them as a bookstore - AWS is a huge portion of their revenue.
On the other hand you have Google and Facebook that people call technology companies, but their core business is advertising.
I think at this point "tech" in "tech company" doesn't mean technology, because otherwise surely Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc would surely be tech companies?
The punch line "we are not a window blinds company; we are privacy company" takes the cake!
Which... isn't a bad business model per se IMO. With the current trend of "self improvement", there are enough people willing to pay lots of money, for everything from gym memberships to individual personal trainers.
The issue is: this is not going to be an exponential-stock-growth-style business model, as many seem to expect. There is no hope for the usual "undercut the competition in pricing and establish a monopoly that can be used for rent-seeking afterwards" VC model, no hope for a make-everyone-filthy-rich acquisition by an established market player, at best this is going to be a steady, "boring" cash cow.
(Note, I don't hold any stakes in Peloton or competitors)
Just have an ear what many employees talk about at the water cooler or coffee machine:
* technology (in the engineering sense): tech company
* software: software company
* something else: ... company (for example finance company)
In other words: Is producing software the actual goal of the company or a means to an end?
* If software is in the opinion of most employees the actual goal of the company: software company
* Is software a means to the end of producing engineering products: tech company
* Is software written for high-frequency trading: finance company or investment company
etc.
The loyalty of their customers is a result of the high-production value streamed and recorded classes and the celebrity appeal of their instructors.
The main problem is that they grew too fast. All the pandemic sales were probably just pulled forward from future sales, not a sign of sustainable growth. They overcommitted and now need to trim back again.
Now, if it turns out Peloton did NOT do those things, then they absolutely deserve more blame for the accidents with their treadmills. I know they didn't have a shield behind the belt, but my treadmill doesn't have that either so I am not sure what the standard is without paying for it.
What is the reasoning behind them sharing this publicly, I wonder?
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/activist-bl...
https://www.blackwellscap.com/pressrelease/blackwells-capita...
So... yes.
This whole report is absolutely scathing, but this particularly stood out to me. I've actually been in a similar situation where a CEO decided he was going to rent extremely expensive office space, in one of the most over the top pricey areas of Los Angeles, simply because it was close to his residence.
This snowballed into other various stupid financial choices, and I was lucky enough to get out before the entire office got fired.
This serves as a very good argument for fully remote companies. Get a corporate we work account for the extremely rare case where you need a physical presence.
The brand is pretty damaged though. They had a short window where the Equinox crowd had nowhere to spend their exorbitant incomes. No shortage of cheaper alternatives exist. I suggest buying a used exercise bike and playing Eye of the Tiger on repeat for 30 minutes.
Infact if you don't have access to Eye of the Tiger you can just sing it to yourself.
Eye of the tiger it's the thrill of the fight, saving money on a used bikes.
I've seen a CEO move an entire company's headquarters because he personally moved to a mansion on the beach, so now everyone needs to commute from the city across a single bridge onto a touristy beach peninsula every day just so CEO-man can walk to the office.
ed: the top comment from yesterday says it better https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272154
Just like FB, Google and many other companies. You can sell majority ownership and still hold the majority voting power due to dual(and triple) class shares.
This is a perversion of common stocks and stockholders rights.
In old days there would be such a thing as preferred stock which at least granted liquidation preferences to those buying preferred.
I am still shocked that the CEO actually listened to the 5% holders and stepped down.
As Matt Levine rightly stated, Peleton CEO could have let the company burn to ground and there was nothing that minority stockholders(which could have owned the majority of the company but not the voting rights) could do.
The 'special' shares have 20 votes per share - could be as low as 3% of the company. It's hard to see why anyone would invest in a company where someone who was deemed incompetent to be CEO but still has a massive control of the board.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-08/peloto...
I wonder if this will be a big issue for companies that look floundering and whose CEO/Founders are seen to be unable to control it - I've seen a few articles about Zuckerburg not being the right CEO for FB/Meta anymore (he also has over 50% of the votes) - if their share price did a few more 25% drops...
It is a step in the refeudalization of society.
But the whole purpose of this presentation is to get them to sell the company at 75$. On the most basic level this looks to me like this investor is salty that they didn't sell when the share price was high and now they want to get some of their losses back. Or is their argument that the CEO made false promises? You don't have to listen to him, the balance sheet is all you need to make your decisions.
There is nothing on Peloton competitors, nothing on the market trend. They rightfully point that Peloton failed to properly forecast market demands but nothing on the future outlook and how Peloton production capacity and stock align with futur predictions. No real analysis of why the company which is profitable would be better able to produce value if it was bought out.
My key takeaway from it is that Foley is bad at PR. Gosh, I hate this deck and I really hate what activist funds are turning finance into.
If the CEO is so bad, how did he manage to create such a valuable company while almost nobody on earth has been able to do it ?
Seeing $PTON so low surprised me as I haven't really been following the news much. I just bought some shares.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink
I haven’t used it personally but I think it could be used for this type of research.
I think the people calling it a dumb treadmill or saying it can be replaced by YouTube and a used exercise bike are clueless.
We’ve recently tried to purchase one of their treadmills and it’s been a complete joke of incompetence actually trying to get it delivered. Combined with this news it does make us nervous about investing even more money into their ecosystem even though the bike experience has been so positive.
It's about as engaging as indoor cardio can be, but if indoor cardio is highly objectionable or boring for someone it's hard to get over that.
they are making an argument for their point of view. They list specific actions and evidence to support their points. They don't claim to be 'unbiased'.
The fetishization of objectivity and being unbiased will honestly be the death of the human species.
It's also doubtful that the addressable market of an expensive treadmill or exercise product is large enough to be worth going after for Apple (even in the bumper year 2021 Peloton turnover was $4bil, not a viable business unit for Apple).
Seems to me that management bandwidth is probably the main issue given Apple’s structure.
Neither are insurmountable for Apple, but then really given the amount of cash that Apple has - very few businesses are out of reach for them.
Putting con-imbeciles on a board is a recipe for disaster.
As a product - there's real value there. If it's been oversold as an investment, that's a different issue.
But millions of people are willing to pay $1000+ as an initial investment, then $40/month into perpetuity. With presumably good gross margin on both.
That's a good business
It all seems like well-earned criticism. As someone with no stake I am happy to see the consumer-hostile behavior of the treadmill murder machine incident be given its own slide.
From past experience with similar attitudes towards fancy gyms, fitness products and basically anything catering to the rich, hot and fit, I can only think of one cause: ressentiment.
You're a founder and your business goes through a few rough years as you build the business and experiment? Wall Street says "quit, give up and sell". What a bunch of Wall Street hacks and they pushed out a perfectly good CEO, really sad. Just so the business could be sold off for a fraction of its' real value to some conglomerate to let it wither away and die.
Overall cost compares pretty well to a gym, PT, or class subscriptions esp if you live in an expensive area.
It does feel like a potentially valuable company that is just being run badly, but also could face competition. It also does feel like a company that could work well within a larger fitness or content company.
> like and dislike about Peloton
Likes: - It's soooooo easy to just get on it and ride. One of the core tenets of habit-building is to make a habit easy to do. I can't imagine an easier way to exercise than sitting on a bike that's a few feet from my bed. - The classes are all high quality. The instructors are charismatic and varied. There are a lot of them and they all have their own personal style. You can find the 2-3 that work for you or hop around. I only actively dislike 1 or 2, but I get why others could like them. - The classes extend beyond the bike. I like taking their stretching classes and my wife takes a strength class nearly every day. - The powerzone classes are great and a perfect example of something that can't easily be reproduced by competition that doesn't fully integrate hardware, software, and content. - People complain about the subscription cost, but $40 a month is less than the ~$100 a month we were spending on 2 memberships to the only gym in a 15-minute driving radius to my house.
Dislikes:
- Delivery was a NIGHTMARE. Just absolutely terrible. It'd take me 30 minutes to type all the pain we went through for delivery. - Literally nothing else.
> Have you guys noticed a decline in the product, software, classes?
Nope, not at all. In fact, they recently added some boxing stuff which is a new class type for them.
TLDR: I love my Bike+ as does my partner. It's well worth the monthly fee (and this document seems to imply that its too cheap!). Is the bike itself worth £2250? Probably not in theory but it is to me.
Further elaboration: The tech is interesting. It's very polished but there is SO much room for additional reporting, functionality etc. I have actually played abit with the unofficial API and theres lots of data available.
Support originally wanted to charge me $250 for replacement and service. A few YouTubes and a second call, the service person admitted that a $5 part would probably do the trick.
It’s taken two full months from that support call to get the shipping notification on that part.
Other than that, though - my experience with the bike and classes has been positive.
I hope they don't sell.
The main strategic error that both companies made, was to assume a certain level of permanence when home-training equipment sales exploded during the beginning of the COVID era. People are now (rightly or wrongly) returning to gyms and buying less home stuff.
I'd love to see the same company acquire both Peloton and iFit, and hopefully preserve iFit's library of high-production-quality workouts and charismatic trainers and perhaps combine it with Peloton's charged competitive live workouts.
> Hiring McKinsey is a clear declaration of failure
I can't not read this as a joke.
Is it so special because it has WiFi?
HN rules forbid shallow dismissal. I would only say, adding a WiFi to a random thingy is a weekend project for any engineering company i've worked in, in the most literal sense. Design injection molding enclosure, add relays, motor VFD, rpm sensor, wifi module, wire & screw together.
I've done few project for sporting goods makers, and even no-name village factories in China with zero marketing probably ship more goods per months than this treadmill sell in a year.
I don’t know, I don’t necessarily agree with the message itself, but I certainly agree with the sentiment.
Whoever made this deck is an asshole.
