Hi All, Hope you all are having a great week! Here are 12 things to read/think about this week!Â
1) The horrors of unsubscribing
I found the below on someoneâs LNKD feed and while intended to be funny, this experience is definitely accurate of badly run sites who donât really pay attention to the small details. If your users mark you as spam, youâd end up spending 10x in getting removed from spam lists (such as Spamhaus blocklist) in addition to losing your user forever. Just donât!
2) The App-erating system for smartphones [LINK]
I guess I coined a new term! âApp-eratingâ system. Superapps are like operating systems except they are an app!Â
The major question in my mind is : Why havenât superapps been created in the US? There is heavy smartphone penetration, there is demand, these apps all exist as separate apps today (Uber, Messenger, Netflix, Paypal/Venmo/Square). It isn't the lack of capital either ..perhaps its privacy?Â
Whichever company figures this out in the United States (pre-regulation at that) will stand to make a killing. You already have the users, marketing costs less or is virtually non existent, you have the platform cornered so that makes it easier for a platform play.
3) Jealousy in a social media world [LINK]
An interesting view from Rene Girard on jealousy and how the internet breaks down âjealousyâ barriers. This is a good reason why Social media makes more people miserable!Â
âThe Internet brings people closer together. Is that a good thing? Not really, in Girardâs view: the internet decreases the effective distance between us and the role models that we imitate. When you see your role model mediator on Instagram every single day, or have the ability to comment directly on a strangerâs post or tweet with an effortless comment, or have the ability to share things and read what others have shared with zero friction, in each of these cases your effective peer set is enlarging: itâs putting everyone up on the same flat surface. This abolition of distance is messing up our ability to desire things in a healthy wayâÂ
4) A conversation with Marc Andreessen. This had so many good nuggets of information on tech, startups, the valley ecosystem, unit economics etc. [LINK]
5) The âillusion of controlâ [LINK]
The psychologist Ellen Langer coined the phrase in 1975 to describe âan expectancy of personal success probability inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant.â Experimental evidence for the illusion goes back at least to 1965, when one research team found that college-educated employees of AT&T asked to press buttons to illuminate lights had the tendency to believe they had more control than they actually did, even when the lights lit randomly, and even when they used pen and paper to track their results.
In another study, done in 1992, a group of Israeli college students was found to be more willing to bet on dice, and to bet bigger, before they rolled than after, reflecting the belief that they had control over their rolls. Such a preference for prediction over postdiction had been observed before, but this study also found that the preference grew stronger when the students were threatened with an electric shock if they guessed wrongâevidence that stress amplifies the illusion of control
Langerâs work showed that the illusion is also intensified by âskill cuesâ: circumstances that make people feel like theyâre engaged in acts of skill rather than luck. Such cues include competition, choice, and familiarity with the task at hand. Therefore people will tend to overestimate their prospects in a game of pure chance even more than usual if they face a nervous-looking opponent, or if they pick rather than get assigned a lottery ticket, or if theyâre given the chance to familiarize themselves with an apparatus thatâs simply spitting out random numbers.
Or, I might add, if theyâve toiled over complicated mathematical equations to back up their decisions
6) Tumblrâs TumbleÂ
This is old news of course but yet a very interesting topicâŠÂ
$1.1B to a rumored $3M sale. How low can one go? The question to ask though is which company today (that has high valuations) will be the one most likely to be like Tumblr and end up the way they did. Letâs start off with an industry perhaps? Rideshare (Lyft or Uber)? Meal Delivery(Postmates)? Fintech(take your pick)? Gig economy(Wag?), Real Estate (We Company)
My money is on the We Company for many reasons. Do you disagree? If so why?Â
7) Empowered or feature team? [LINK]
This was a brilliant article on âFeatureâ Product Managers who just mindlessly ship something rather than serious outcome based product. Glorified project managers, if at all that. If you are just a facilitator, or donât have engineering resources, or donât have an outcome (a clear metric that ties to a company topline then you are a feature PM. Nothing wrong with this lots and lots of companies need these kind of PM. This is a strong reason that you are likely to see roles such as âDirector IT Product Managementâ as a âProduct Manager. No you are not a product manager, you are an IT Analyst. Period. Please lets not conflate the two.Â
8) Culture eats strategy - Ken Iverson [LINK]
Imagine if you will, a leader in tech that can do this? Work loyalty is broken so badly but can it be repaired? Should it be repaired? The main question I ask is this : Is this kind of loyalty a necessity given todayâs transient workforce, way overpaid CEOâs (just google it), shoddy management practices from âleadersâ? We no longer live in a world limited by the 50 square miles that we once did. We no longer live in a world where skills are fungible. They are not, however âmanagementâ in a lot of cases is still in the manufacturing world!Â
9) The flywheel effect [LINK]
Growth is a serious flywheel business and once it takes effect you are golden. This article describes the various ways in which flywheel effects compound competitive advantages!Â
10) Amazon Alexa and computing paradigmâs [LINK]
Strategically the value of owning the next possible computing paradigm is not lost on Alexa given that they donât own any kind of hardware platform yet. They are counting on âvoiceâ as the paradigm rather than the device form factor. In other words, every device, will be a computing device and they want to be on it, irrespective of the form factor. They even have Alexa-enabled chips now.Â
11) âWealth workâ [LINK]
On demand models have given rise to a new âservantâ class. As the article has compared this to the relationship in the 19th century where you lived with the person that you were serving, the thing that comes to mind for me is that back in the day, one was less like a âservantâ than one is today with the gig economy. It is pretty sad!Â
12) Slack and the gap [LINK]
Slack fills communications gaps. Slack serves the purpose of an exception handler when collaboration features are not built into a specific workflow/product. Can it forever? Iâm bearish on Slack honestly since I think it has made working life worse. Now I have email, comments in a bunch of tools, Slack, and god knows what not to check. The features to turn off notifications, create reminders, etc are really broken. Slack is an excuse to with little friction âdumpâ something on someone. Slack is great at being a shared reference with groups.Â