50/5 Split and Discord Vote
Record trading day, two new shareholder votes, and a look back at HBR...
Hello Shareholders!
It’s been an exciting week in the markets of KmikeyM. Over 2000 shares changed hands in a single day, which is a new record! The rapid trading caused the share price to drop as low as $1.20 before shooting back up to $7.50 as shareholder Douglas Dollars bought his way into the number one spot with a 12% stake.
Last Sunday was the 17th anniversary of the first trade of KmikeyM. On January 26th, 2008, trading opened at a $1 a share. 23 shares were traded.
Today shares can be purchased for offers starting at $5.85.
🗳️ The 50/5 Split Proposal
I’ve talked before about how I took the job at McDonald’s because I needed a win and a paycheck. Since working there I’ve been giving about half of my income to my partner, Kathryn, as I am still deeply in her debt for her support over many years.
I’ve been surprised at how meaningful Kathryn has found my meager financial contribution. As we kick off 2025 — hopefully a year that will be full of new and exciting opportunities — I’ve come up with an idea I call the 50/5 Split. It’s a bit of a gamble for us both.
You can read about the details and vote here.
The short version is that I will give Kathryn 50% of anything I earn this year in exchange for 5% of anything she earns.
🗳️ Discord Migration Proposal
We’ve been running a free Slack instance for the KmikeyM community for many years. Now owned by Salesforce CRM 0.00%↑ the company announced they will be deleting the 121,000+ message archive if we don’t convert to a paid plan. The cost to run a paid instance would be over $200 per month. So we’re recommending we move to Discord.
This new push from Slack to a paid plan also includes limits on integrations, loss of document history, limits on audio and video calls, and more. After talking about this with the Board of Directors we’re starting to get excited about a switch to Discord, which is designed for online communities and can be better integrated into KmikeyM.
🍔 Hamburger Business Review
We wrapped up the last episode of Hamburger Business Review with Cabel Sasser as a guest on the podcast. Some of you might know Cabel as the co-founder of Panic (where I worked for ten years) and the publisher of fine video games.
Cabel also gave an amazing talk about a discovery he made in his collecting adventures. (Listen to the “Tone Down the Clown” episode for more of that story and how it relates to the burger business.)
I plan to do a more in depth After Action Review1 on HBR season 2 but I wanted to mention how proud I am of what we created!
Zach continues to be the most fun person to talk about the burger business with, on and off the mic. The addition of Chris Higgins as not only producer and editor, but also joining us each week, pushed us to be both more professional and more personal in the season.
And special thanks to all out guests and especially Kriss Knapp who made a new logo for us and custom illustrations for each episode.
🔮 What’s Next
I am always excited in January. I get totally swept up in New Year mania, even with fires and politics raging around me2. I got some good news earlier this month when shareholder Nick Mershon booked us a paid speaking engagement and there is some movement on the bigger projects (that have been years in development) we are hoping to be able to announce soon!
It’s a strange time to be optimistic, but I’m going to blame that on an assumed chemical imbalance more than an interpretation of what is what is happening in the world. I mentioned the idea of being “on tilt” this year in the first Shareholder Poker email. It continues to feel accurate…
Tilt is a poker term for a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a suboptimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming overly aggressive. (Wikipedia)
With the entire world seeming to be on tilt then a good strategy might be to embrace the teachings of Kurt Vonnegut who wrote3, “A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
With the work of HBR S2 over I hope to be sharing more updates more often as we enter this new insane year.
Profitably Yours,
K. Mike Merrill
see the AAR on season 1 here
we are extremely lucky to be located in an area unaffected by the fires in the Los Angeles area, and it’s still incomprehensible to me when I see the damage to neighborhoods I would routinely visit. I can’t even wrap my head around the destruction and how many people we now know who have lost everything…
Kurt Vonnegut, Welcome to the Monkey House (Delacorte Press, 1968)