Hi All,
Maybe I should ask ifĀ you remember me ;)?
Happy New Year!Ā The common variety jokes are around the 2020 vision theme, so keeping the theme in mind .. May you have 2020 vision in 2020!
It has been a few weeks since I AWOLāed and for good reason. I was traveling for both work and pleasure. While I went back to India, where I grew up, what was interesting to see was the use of technology and smartphone penetration. I was literally the only person not using PayTM at smaller stores. Serious FOMO! I experienced Ola (Uberās India competition) and Uber (who is still price cutting) and I tried every mode of transport. Couple of observations : 1) Uber tended to be cheaper 2) Flagging an autorickshaw (if one was in sight) instead of a booking app was on average ~30% cheaper 3) Ola has OTPās (one time passcodes) which Uber is NOW touting as a āsecurity featureā like they came up with it! Food was heavenly - including the apps to order such as Zomato, deeply discounting the cost of delivery plus food (BOGO specials) etc. The only winner being the Indian customer. VC Firms : 0, Indian customers : 1. I highly suspect this will not end well for the VCās!Ā
That being said, here are this weekās reads! I had collected some year end summaries (which I had planned to publish earlier, but that didnāt happen) which Iād like to start off with ā¦
TIME came up with a list of best inventions in 2019. What struck me was HOW much we as a people managed to do in 2019.Ā Ā
This list of 52 things I learnt in 2019 from Tom Whitwell was definitely enlightening. One of the coolest was āA man who bought the personalised number plate NULL has received over $12,000 of parking fines, because the system records āNULLā when no numberplate has been recordedāĀ
LNKD comes up with a list of big ideas (or have for the past couple of years). A lot of these are interesting but the predictions overall are flaky-ish. Nevertheless a good read
Alex Dancoās lookback list covers 5 things that, in retrospect, are things that you look and say WTF were we thinking?Ā
David Perellās list of coolest things was interesting as well. The dollar store openings one (Four new dollar stores will open in the U.S. every single day of 2019) was, well, eye opening. This obviously points to one thing, a greater divide between the rich and the poor
For those of you interested in the startup ecosystem the annual State of Startupās report from First Round is always a great read. Some interesting facts but nothing that surprising
Protocols not platforms : This article goes to the heart of the matter. The internet was meant to be open and not a bunch of closed walls. The article also suggests some approaches as to how you might achieve protocols and not platforms. Imagine a world in which an @hotmail user can only email another @hotmail user. Weād have 20 different email addresses, converge on one or two and those providers would be the winner. While that may still sound true (gmail anyone??) the fact is that there are still options for email. Not so much for the Twitters, the Facebooks etc
Another one from First round on how to build your product team at every stage. Interesting approach and if you think about it, this is almost like hiring generalists v specialists. This just goes one level deeper and talks about generalist v specialist product managers (Growth PM, SEO PM etc are the types of PMās that are āspecialistā)Ā
This article speaks about the age old argument between why startups are āfastā and incumbents/larger companies āslowerā. Risk capacities for a startup (and reward for the founders) far outpace any larger company. Why risk salary when you donāt have to?
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The biggest takeaways from a coach who coached a 101 CEOās in 2019
Morning Brewās referral program and how they used referrals to grow their newsletter. Good insights into what it takes to build a referral program
A good read from a16z on video first commerce. We are going to be shopping on video apps such as Tik-Tok. Isnāt this QVC/HSN for the internet? Yes .. almost .. but the only difference here is that ANYONE can become a seller. Selling is disintermediatedĀ