Hi All,
Hope you all are doing well! It looks like the world is starting to open up again. Fingers crossed. This past weekend i decided to do a fridge spring cleaning (I am completely against food waste of any sort and to be clear and I don’t waste food unless something goes bad). I generally look at the date labels to understand this and on a pack of cheese I just could not read the label without taking a photo and zooming in. That got me curious about Date labels and I never realized that they are not mandatory except for infant formula.
Does Federal Law Require Food Product Dating?
Except for infant formula, product dating is not required by Federal regulations.1
For meat, poultry, and egg products under the jurisdiction of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), dates may be voluntarily applied provided they are labeled in a manner that is truthful and not misleading and in compliance with FSIS regulations2. To comply, a calendar date must express both the month and day of the month. In the case of shelf-stable and frozen products, the year must also be displayed. Additionally, immediately adjacent to the date must be a phrase explaining the meaning of that date such as "Best if Used By."
Confused by Date Labels on Packaged Foods?
On use dates this note from FDA was great : Food Product Dating
What Date-Labeling Phrases are Used?
There are no uniform or universally accepted descriptions used on food labels for open dating in the United States. As a result, there are a wide variety of phrases used on labels to describe quality dates.
Examples of commonly used phrases:
A "Best if Used By/Before" date indicates when a product will be of best flavor or quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.
A "Sell-By" date tells the store how long to display the product for sale for inventory management. It is not a safety date.
A “Use-By" date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality. It is not a safety date except for when used on infant formula as described below.
A “Freeze-By” date indicates when a product should be frozen to maintain peak quality. It is not a purchase or safety date.
It all started with this piece of cheese! (and I might be blind ;))
Softbank and Masa Son
From an article that reported on Softbank’s WeWork writedown.
...The tech conglomerate has poured more than $13.5 billion into WeWork, one of a string of troubled bets by CEO Masayoshi Son…
That could have been 135 100mm bets. Isn't that what VC’s are supposed to do? I get it that there is 100B to blow up … err invest but is this a selection problem or a size problem or both? We have too much money, we have to invest, and now because every single second this money lies undeployed it costs.
The thing though is Masa Son is fearless. He might lose in the short run but in the long run I bet he will win.
On Privacy.
Privacy is one of those things that most people say “they don't care about”. Let’s try this : would you share your internet browser history with just anyone? Probably not. Of course we’ve already sold a lot of this and today it's used to target us (and discriminate as well and while it is philistine behavior it isn't the worst yet) Every signal will be used against you - your driving habits, your food, the steps you take, regular checkups etc. This will be used against you. And once it's out there there is no bringing the cat back inside the bag. I also wonder if privacy is a rich man’s problem
On bald people … who’d have thunk? Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Why Shaved Heads Lead the Pack
And (image credit Business Insider) that seems like it's true at least in Bezos' case.
On learning … It is in your hands
Naval Ravikant wrote: "The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet… The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”
More quotes? Here you go : Navalism — Quotes & Perceptions by Naval Ravikant - Noah Madden
COVID-19 related notes/articles
This infographic from Simpliflying on post COVID19 travel : [REPORT] The Rise of Sanitised Travel
Groceries from Subway? Why not! The prices are quite reasonable actually!
Doctors and Trust. We place implicit trust in our doctors because we don’t know better. While applicable to organizations, I do also think that we are constantly bikeshedding in our personal lives as well (See Law of Triviality for more details) and the article Doctors are now social-media influencers. They aren’t all ready for it.
“If you are a doctor and you’re popular and people look to you for guidance, and you believe your expert opinion without any kind of research to substantiate it outweighs that of the guidance from the CDC and WHO, you’ve crossed the line,” he says.
And this week’s dozen worthy reads:
CB Insights read on 14 D2C companies : Direct to Consumer Companies & Models l
What is interesting and somewhat common to all of them are:
Start with 1 or a low number of SKU’
Social media (free or paid) acquisition
Online to offline (this has to do with customer acquisition costs without question) since when free social (or influencer social) or paid social becomes expensive and doesn't work well then you need to find customers in other places. Problem is there are no *other* online places
This leads to obviously a large portion of the gross profit being eaten (well … gobbled) up by SG&A (well only selling in these cases)
The only way to survive this is to bump up either order size or order frequency or product price ( most of them can't do that)
Order frequency is hard to bump as well. Not gonna need to shave 4 times a day.
So that leaves order size which means increasing SKUs (kind of like honest company)
(Almost all) D2C companies are likely going to fade into the night after boosting Facebook's ad revenue. The ones that survive have likely gained a large “address book” that they can sell to an acquiring company or to public markets. Loyalty though is zilch. More so among millennials. Sure you can create a brand (and loyalty along with that) as Marketing has so aptly taught us. What marketing missed was you can and will kill loyalty when a safe and cheap alternative option exists. Price elasticity is high (Crest decides to charge $10 a tube, market alternatives are ~$2)
Brand signals fade in a me-too world especially one that is more led by search rather than branded keywords (look at your last 10 searches on Amazon. How many of them were for brands v. Products?)
An amazing read on Substack (the platform on which this newsletter is produced)
Explaining a16z's Investment in Substack
In addition to community discovery might become important
Substack is to authors/writers what shopify is to indie sellers
Subscription does have a fatigue limit (how much news can you consume a week? How many Ben Thompsons can you read in a week? We all -or at least me - wants to read more but time is hard to come by
Product : Six rules for collecting customer feedback : Customer Feedback: How to Collect and Analyze Feedback [2020]
When it comes to customer feedback you receive about your business, you can expect there to be a similar pattern. Your customers are more motivated to tell you when they are very happy or unhappy about your product. However, this doesn’t mean that your customers only love/hate your product. You’ve probably got a large group in the middle who think your product is “fine.” These customers typically stay silent. Remember, they could also have useful feedback for you. If you’re smart, you’ll find ways to tease out their feedback.
An operating system for life : The Munger Operating System: A Life That Really Works
Another thing of course is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well, every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something, and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion. That is a very good idea.
Wartime churn reduction strategies: Wartime Churn Reduction Strategies for SaaS: Quantified in $'s and %'s
Life and business lessons from Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More and Academic Economics: Strengths and Weaknesses by Munger
The best answer I ever got on that subject – in three tries – was from George Schultz. He said, “Charlie, the way I figure it is if we stop trading with China, the other advanced nations will do it anyway, and we wouldn’t stop the ascent of China compared to us, and we’d lose the Ricardo diagnosed advantages of trade.” Which is obviously correct. And I said, “Well George, you’ve just invented a new form of the tragedy of the commons. You’re locked in this system and you can’t fix it. You’re going to go to a tragic hell in a handbasket, if going to hell involves being once the great leader of the world and finally going to the shallows in terms of leadership.” And he said, “Charlie, I do not want to think about this.” I think he’s wise. He’s even older than I am, and maybe I should learn from him.
On startups and working for them or founding a company. The 2x2 was brilliant
Deciding Which Game To Play - Amrit Singh
You should ask yourself how risk-tolerant and ambitious you’d like to be in this next game you play. Each combination of the two factors comes with a set of responsibilities, externalities, and lifestyles. Many people oscillate between low and high-risk profiles over their career arch, depending on circumstances. That’s totally okay. It’s good to know where you’re at and the risk level you can currently afford.
It’s no longer optional to have good design. Word
Investing in Figma: The Decade of Design
Figma puts all the pieces together, and into more than the sum of those parts. What used to take four or five discrete tools can now be done end-to-end in Figma, the single source of “truth” for product design and design systems. But it’s not just a design tool that solves a problem, it’s a multiplayer system for collaboration: designers, developers, marketing teams and end users work in a continuous fashion in Figma, drawing mockups, building prototypes and testing with real users through several iterations. Their community has taken off with a product-led virality that I haven’t seen since GitHub — extending beyond product designers and into product managers, marketers, and engineers.
How autonomy is changing construction : Robots, AI, and the road to a fully autonomous construction industry
From computer vision systems and drones to robots walking and roving through construction projects, Built Robotics and a smattering of other companies are working in unstructured industrial environments like mining, agriculture, and construction to make autonomous systems that can build, manage, and predict outcomes.
Speaking of news. Where fake news goes to live and thrive after it uh well dies : Covid hoaxes are using a loophole to stay alive—even after content is deleted
Fascinating the amount of AI being used in healthcare : AI in Healthcare: 90 Startups Making Noise in the Industry
WeWork Throwback - Hard to believe this was just a year ago : How Does WeWork Make Money?
Thank you for reading, stay safe and be well!