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Monday, October 5, 2026

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@BrokenMoats

Broken Moats on X

$RBLX no victory laps I gave up my short a long time ago. Felt the stock was manipulated by insiders to gas monetization and trends with smash and grab tactics like grow a garden drops, etc. That policy that drove the stock higher is also their undoing as the comp trends reverse and monetization declines. But the real undoing here is that he company, and I solely would call out the CEO who has majority voting power, that it is their lack of seriousness around safety that is undoing their platform and could ultimately completely unravel their business. Most parents I talk to won't let their kids play on Roblox even if they had in in years past. They are more comfortable giving them a switch to fulfill any gaming time because of the lack of safety concerns. David had a concept and it took off, got scale, built a genuine niche marketplace and network and he continues to squander that opportunity with poor operating efficiency (see costs), awful capital allocation, and some of the worst governance of any company over a $1B I have seen by dismissing the open problems on his platform, then only after issues are very public making half attempts to put in safety controls like age verification that he touts on Bloomberg interviews the day of. Its a shame the CEO has voting control, because if you could remove him their could be potential here at current prices based of the network, cash flow and the ability to dramatically improve monetization with advertising and brand partnerships over time. But you would need a big public campaign directed at parents on Bloomberg that the company is serious on safety and protections and will clean up their user account issues, and get serious on capital allocation (one buying shares to cover dilution regardless of share price is garbage policy - have conviction, buy when its attractive, and stay out when its not). @BillAckman said he was psychologically short after he walked from Herbalife, not the same as making money alongside your conviction but the best shorts are often complicated to fully execute on. But few public companies that feel more satisfaction in going down then Roblox due to their management team and disregard for their users safety
@convequity

Convequity on X

$TSEM + $SOI: positioned on both sides of the biggest shift in AI datacenter interconnect — and Google's new TPUv8i just supercharged the story. Leg 1 — Smarter optics, much bigger chips. Next-gen optical links ("coherent-lite") encode data far more densely than today's IMDD links. But the sophistication has a physical cost: the photonic chip needs roughly 2–2.5x more silicon area per port, because it packs in multiple modulators, splitters, and detectors where today's simpler links need one of each. Factor in that bigger dies yield worse, and you need ~3–4x the wafer starts per port. More area × more volume × worse yield = several-fold growth in SiPh wafer demand over the cycle. Leg 2 — The switch itself goes photonic. TPUv8i connects its chips through an optical circuit switch (OCS) built from silicon photonics — a genuinely new thing. $GOOGL's old scale-out OCS used MEMS mirrors: zero SiPh content. The new one puts a very large photonic die (300–450mm², heading toward 500–800mm² — near the reticle limit) in every pod. That's a brand-new ~10–20% layer of demand on top of the transceiver story, and it scales faster than linearly as switch radix grows from 64×64 to 128×128. The elegant part: Leg 2 forces Leg 1. The optical switch loses 5–10dB of light — 70–90% of the signal is gone by the time it exits. Today's IMDD transceivers can't read a signal that weak; coherent ones can. So every transceiver plugged into the switch fabric has no choice but to go coherent — and coherent means the 2–2.5x bigger chips from Leg 1. Google's switch decision doesn't just create its own SiPh demand; it automatically triggers the transceiver upgrade too. Tower has manufacturing flows for both legs: high-speed modulator + Ge flows for transceiver PICs, AND mature passive flows for the huge fabric dies. Soitec supplies the photonics-SOI wafers upstream either way — it wins regardless of which foundry takes the socket. One more kicker: Celero, the Alphabet-backed startup tipped for Google's coherent DSP socket, has no fab of its own — its companion photonic chip has to land somewhere, and an open specialty foundry is the obvious somewhere. Risks: coherent modulators migrating to InP/TFLN would leak the PIC leg out of silicon photonics; Marvell verticalizing into its own photonics partially bypasses the open-foundry path.

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