Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 143)
Apple Design, Netflix's advantage, Lemonade's S1, Masterclass and a lot more ...
Hi All,
This past week I wrote about Uber’s acquisition of Postmates. This is definitely an interesting move for Uber but I don’t believe it will, today, solve Uber’s fundamental and underlying problem - Unit economics. I can’t recall specific numbers recently but I’d wager that the Unit Economics is still negative. Eats can very well be a different beast and I think Uber is in the right direction to solve their Unit Economics issues … IF AND ONLY IF, everything (competition elimination, light autonomy - which exists, trends of “eating out”, cloud Kitchens not balking at margins) works out)
I hope you like it and needless to say I’d love your thoughts. Knowledge builds on knowledge! Here are three more super interesting reads on the same topic
An Uber Move | Uber+Postmates = All-Stock No-Brainer | Uber wants to lose less money on food.
As always, if you liked this please click that cool looking blue button below ;)
On Passwords - Did you know that One out of every 142 passwords is '123456'?
From 1.000.000.000+ lines of dumps, 257.669.588 were filtered as either corrupt data(gibberish in improper format) or test accounts.
1 Billion credentials boil down to 168.919.919 passwords, and 393.386.953 usernames.
Most common password is 123456. It covers roughly 0.722% of all the passwords. (Around 7 million times per billion)
Most common 1000 passwords cover 6.607% of all the passwords.
With most common 1 million passwords, hit-rate is at 36.28%, and with most common 10 million passwords hit rate is at 54.00%.
Average password length is 9.4822 characters.
12.04% of passwords contain special characters.
28.79% of passwords are letters only.
26.16% of passwords are lowercase only.
13.37% of passwords are numbers only.
34.41% of all passwords end with digits, but only 4.522% of all passwords start with digits.
On Apple, Design, and Big Sur
Apple’s Big Sur has huge implications for design. Materials and dimensionality have made their way back into the product interface. This is a huge deal. Here are someexamples from Dribbble
In Chapter Three of Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland "taught Steve the reality distortion field." The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it.
Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. This pattern seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics in which real wage growth is closely tied to labor productivity changes. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. According to Baumol's cost disease, services become more expensive than goods over time. Not all services rise with the same rate however, as can be seen below with the CPI of the Bureau of Labor Statistics
COVID-19 reads
Travel in a post covid world. How technology will keep us safe. The most major thought that comes to mind is 1) How much longer is an already arduous process gonna take? And 2) Am I still really safe? Flying During COVID-19 - Safety Technology at Airports
Reads this week:
Facebook was the king of the IDFA (and the Google Advertising ID equivalent on Android): it was the linchpin around which its app install business in particular was built. The company could understand when a user spent a certain amount in a game, for example, look for users that were similar, and then display an app install ad for that game, and measure how effective it was. In fact, over the last few years, Facebook has simply asked advertisers to specify what return on ad spend they are hoping to achieve, and Facebook does all of the work of figuring out how many ads to display to which users — the entire process is automated.
This part of the business is going to change a lot. Apple was quite clever in their approach: instead of killing the IDFA, which could be construed as anti-competitive, particularly given Apple’s expanding app install ad business (which is expanding beyond App Store search ads), Apple is simply asking users if they would like to be tracked, and letting them render the IDFA useless. Notably, Facebook has declined to even show app install advertisements to the 30% of U.S. iPhone users that turned off their IDFA of their own accord — and now it is opt-in, instead of opt-out.
On self evaluation. Word. Take Ownership Of Your Career
"You need to be in the driver seat of your career. You need to be a hunter versus a gatherer. Don't go to your manager and say, 'I'm not getting career development.' You need to come to them with ideas – This means being very proactive about networking within your organization. I have always respected the people who ask 'hey, can I grab coffee with you this afternoon? I'd love to understand your function better."
More on Substack : Substack's Core Growth Loop
Absolutely agree with this one. Substack is marketed by the users who create content! (me included!)
Substack's primary growth loop is what we call a User Generated, User Distributed content loop within Advanced Growth Strategy program.
New Creator Joins
Creator Creates Content
Creator Distributes That Content
Other Creator's See Creator Is Using Substack
New Creator Joins
How contrarians think. Hard to distill a single though so read the whole thing! It is worth it! How Contrarians Think: The Early Days of Square, Yelp & PayPal with Keith Rabois
Work and hobbies : Hiring Based on Side Projects: Unfair, But Good For the World
A tangential note that I always talk about. Don’t expect your job to teach you new skills (if they do that is great) but your growth is in your hands and your hands alone
Masterclass? Yes please … Why MasterClass Isn't Really About Mastery
Great read on MasterClass - Credibility not Education. In fairness to schools, a lot of them do offer “credibility”. Some classes are taught by industry folks (And they are the most interesting since they are likely to be less “theory” based”)
Masterclass is selling the LeBron James poster we put on our bedroom wall, not the skills coach we hire to train us three times a week. And they’ve learned that adults aren’t so much different from our 11-year-old selves: we love to be inspired by the greatest humans on this planet.
Lemonade’s Big Bet to win the insurance market. The S-1 Club | Is Lemonade more than another SoftBank growth-machine?
Lemonade mentions its desire to capture customers as they "graduate" from a renters' policy to a homeowners' policy. The ability to pull this off is arguably Lemonade's biggest bet: homeowners' insurance is more lucrative but also much more competitive. It's also a market that tends to incentivize bundling, which may limit Lemonade's ability to make inroads. As we mentioned, the company has a pretty limited product set at the time of filing.
Why Apple Is Pulling Away From the Competition
When the iPhone was unveiled in 2007, Steve Jobs claimed that Apple had a five-year head start against the competition. He ended up being mostly right. By 2012, Samsung and Google were shipping credible iPhone alternatives, thanks partially to ruthless copying that led to time in the courtroom.
With wearables, my thinking has been that Apple has a lead that is closer to 10 years. This estimate reflects not just software or hardware advantages, but also the byproduct of Apple controlling both items and its resulting achievements with custom silicon.
As time passes, Apple has been facing less competition in wearables. This is remarkable considering how Apple Watch has already ushered in the next paradigm shift in computing. We are seeing the future today. Yet most companies either don’t see it or even worse, see it but are unable to respond.
Giving Apple a 10-year head start against the competition with wearables may end up giving too much credit to the competition. Excelling in wearables requires a corporate culture, product development process, and business model that few companies other than Apple possess. In many ways, Apple was built to excel in wearables. Apple should probably get used to being its own toughest competitor.
Buy your way in … A Startup Is Selling Referrals for Jobs at Facebook, Google, and Amazon
Candidates fill out a form listing their desired companies and the amount they are willing to pay per referral — usually between $20 and $50, according to Kim — and upload their resume. Verified employees at the listed companies, known as “vendors” on Rooftop Slushie, can view their resume and asking price, then decide whether or not to accept their offer. Facebook and Google referrals, according to Kim, are the biggest sellers.
Tech reform : 'Abolish Silicon Valley' vs. 'Always Day One': Who's Right About Fixing the Tech Industry?
Our perspectives are certainly complementary when it comes to investigating the problems with the industry. I think our approaches differ because I have less confidence in the system as a whole. While I agree that the tech giants are too powerful, I’m skeptical of calls to break them up without implementing wide-ranging structural changes. What, after all, is the goal of breaking them up, beyond the prospect of restoring competition?
Not that restoring competition is bad; I just don’t see it as sufficient to fix the skewed incentives. Silicon Valley has inherited — and subsequently magnified — many of the problems of the broader economy, meaning that we can’t address Silicon Valley’s shortcomings without considering the larger context.
An old read from Paul Graham on nerds. This make so much sense for education generally anywhere which is why I am bullish on edTech and unbundling education.
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.
Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
Content, spend and what it means and how it is different from pre-SVOD. Content, Cars, and Comparisons in the "Streaming Wars"
In 2019, Netflix will spend around $15B in content, about 60% of which will stay on the service indefinitely as they are owned, self-produced originals. This means that in 2020, Netflix consumers will not just have $18B in 2020 content spend, but they will also have access to the $8.5B or so of content produced in 2019. In fact, they get more than $15B when one includes almost all the Netflix originals owned to date (such as Stranger Things). In other words, Netflix’s total content offering is growing at several times the rate of its actual content spend.
This library accumulation also helps defend against “free” (i.e. bundled at no incremental cost) and lower cost competitors. If Netflix is outspending Amazon by $5B a year, it’ll have an incremental $25B in content after five years. Compared to Apple, Netflix will have $60B more content in 2025. Sure, the perceived value of content may be depressed by ecosystem subscription giveaways, but access to the world’s largest ever library of content for $15 a month is still a lot of value irrespective of whether one can cobble together some equivalent portion for free via Amazon Prime and by buying an iPhone.
Thank you for reading, stay safe, be well!