Hi! Hope you all are doing well this week! Im opening this week with this story on Iger and Jobs. I found the story and relationship they had fascinating. Iger resigned from Apple's board for obvious reasons in an ever agglomerating world of TMT. I wonder what would be different if Jobs was around. Would Apple have been able to buy Disney? Strategically should they? And reasons not to from 2017 which still apply
1) Work and Culture
This below statement nailed it! I can recall only one company that made me feel good on my last day.
2) Getting distracted? [LINK]
I think this sentence is the key to removing distractions:
The problem, he says, is not technology, it’s our desire to escape what we don’t enjoy in real life, be it a difficult task we’re putting off, or a relationship that’s breaking down.
"If your boss calls you at 7 p.m. on a Friday, is the telephone the problem or is your boss being a jerk? The problem isn't the tech, but the boss.
3) Product Managers pay attention!
4) Surveillance planet
Stat: At least 75 countries are using AI for surveillance purposes, per a new Carnegie Endowment report. Some other morsels: China's Belt and Road Initiative frequently offers loans to other countries that are then used to buy Chinese surveillance products. In the U.S., IBM, Palantir, and Cisco are the most prolific exporters.
5) Loved this from David Perrel’s newsletter on WeWork and Starbucks
WeWork sells workspace, but gives away coffee. Starbucks sells coffee, but gives away workspace.
6) Education and outcome
There is a whole discussion around the rising cost of education and does education really create entrepreneurship. This report from Pitchbook seems to suggest that it absolutely does. Why is this? Does this have something to do with more capital being available in this ecosystem and that leading to this trend. More capital, more investments, more opportunities for success.
7) Wasted Food
7) Nothing upsets me more than wasted food. This is ridiculous and unwarranted. We as a people need to find better ways to get food to people who need it. Imperfect produce is one company that does it. Feeding it to the goats at the end while ok, does not solve the problem of hunger [LINK]
8) Hard to read websites …
The interesting thing about this graph is the comparison to Harry Potter and Moby Dick!
9) Your friendly neighborhood Transportation Networking Company and congestion
Please do not believe your friendly TNC when they say that they are reducing congestion. They are not. They are ruining our cities and making them even worse! Here and here. Pooling helps a little.
"Pooling" is where strangers share a ride-hail vehicle together, being picked-up and dropped-off at different points along the way. Uber and Lyft have heavily promoted and worked to get their customers to pool, and the rate increased from low-teens in early 2017 to about 25 percent in early 2018. But pooling rates have essentially leveled off since then. It appears that most customers prefer the privacy and control of having the car and driver to themselves.
These figures include Via which does mostly shared rides as well as the much larger trip volumes of Uber and Lyft. Includes all five boroughs of New York City, monthly data.
Similar pooling rates are seen in other major metro areas:
22% pooled in urban areas of California (2018 survey)
20% pooled in Boston area (2017 survey)
10) The internal gig economy [LINK]
Me personally I’d love to be in a company that lets me gig around. Only by seeing different problems can one understand and respect perspective
11) Commerce and Content [LINK]
Interesting lessons at the intersection of content and commerce. A fantastic observation on unbundling youtube. While it can be done the reason TV bundles (or even NFLX work) is there is content differentiated not just by subject but also mood. I don’t think, as much as I like comedy, i’llbe able to watch that and only that. These bundles work only in certain cases or at a certain price. The large consideration is discovery. One day existing creators will no longer appeal to an audience and this is where aggregators continue to have lots of power. Curation
12) Technology and the city
I’m taking a class on Technology and cities at Haas and this was an interesting read on scaling cities. Can cities scale the way software does? Can cities be planned to be scalable? Apparently so [LINK]
West and Bettencourt refer to this phenomenon as “superlinear scaling,” which is a fancy way of describing the increased output of people living in big cities. When a superlinear equation is graphed, it looks like the start of a roller coaster, climbing into the sky. The steep slope emerges from the positive feedback loop of urban life — a growing city makes everyone in that city more productive, which encourages more people to move to the city, and so on. According to West, these superlinear patterns demonstrate why cities are one of the single most important inventions in human history. They are the idea, he says, that enabled our economic potential and unleashed our ingenuity. “When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear. Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why the elephant plods along. But in cities, the opposite happens. As cities get bigger, everything starts accelerating. There is no equivalent for this in nature. It would be like finding an elephant that’s proportionally faster than a mouse.”