Dozen Worthy Reads đ° (No. 144)
Covers : Ed-Tech, Slack, Deepfakes, LuluLemon+Mirror, Gold, and Marketing Leadership.
Hi All,
Half the year is over! I generally like do a look back every quarter and figure out the answer to the question : âWhat did I learn this quarter?â This quarter has been a slight bit light on the âlearningâ but I have written 8 articles so far . My goal being 20 in 2020.
This past week I wrote about Jio. If you donât know Mukesh Ambani, not only is he an astute and shrewd businessman, he is also the person who owns Antilla, an extremely expensive (and garish) house in Mumbai, India valued at a rumored $1B. Well thats only 200 $5M Palo Alto houses. I say that because he was to do an MBA from Stanford in 1980 but withdrew to help his father build Reliance which at the time was a âsmall but fast growing enterpriseâ. Interesting, and super successful character for sure!
As always, please click the little (big?) blue button below and help me out :)
I thought Iâd start with 3 things that I laughed hard at over the past few weeks:
Streaming Prices:
UberPro - Get $20 of Uber Eats credit for $10 via @ProductHuntÂ
From the PH Link:
"The Man who Gamed Uber" on the my first million podcast.
tldr he found that Uber pays out $20 referral credit to US based customers, but orders in India only cost like <$1, so he just has teams of people signing up in India using your referral code.
We can't send mail more than 500 miles - An old one that a friend forwarded:Â
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. "Come again?"
"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."
On Traveling : Window Travel with WindowSwap. Weird but cool?Â
I landed up in Hyderabad, India
On Better products : From Nir Eyalâs LNKD post
If youâre building a product that requires repeat engagement, you have to answer this question: Whatâs the habit youâre trying to create?
Answer these questions:
1) Whatâs the psychological itch that your customer or user seeks to scratch?Â
2) Whatâs the external trigger that prompts the user to action?Â
3) Whatâs the key action and how can it be made simpler?Â
4) Are you scratching the userâs itch and yet leaving them wanting more?
5) Is the user investing in the product by making it better with use?
Any good examples of habit-forming products that come to mind for you?
On Ed-Tech businesses from Tiago Forte:Â
On Exec Ed at HBS : So thenâŚThats what a live online class is gonna be. A room and a bunch of âzoomâsâ From LNKD
COVID Reads :Â
Benedict Evanâs COVID presentation on trends : Presentations
The Post-Covid-19 Agenda for Technology and Media Companies.
Where there will be sustained increased demand. Reactivating and re-acquiring customers. Acceleration adoption.Â
Dozen this week:
If you read one this this week, read this article from Ben Thompson on Tik-Tok. Most of us take this quite lightly but this is extremely serious. China is and always has been about one thing : Propaganda. Tik Tok is well suited to delivering algorithmic propaganda
The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTokâs algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography, without anyone â except perhaps the candidate, now indebted to a Chinese company â knowing. You may be skeptical this might happen, but again, China has already demonstrated a willingness to censor speech on a platform banned in China; how much of a leap is it to think that a Party committed to ideological dominance will forever leave a route directly into the hearts and minds of millions of Americans untouched?
Again, this is where it is worth taking China seriously: the Party has shown through its actions, particularly building and maintaining the Great Firewall at tremendous expense, that it believes in the power of information and ideas. Countless speeches, from Chairman Xi and others, have stated that the Party believes it is in an ideological war with liberalism generally and the U.S. specifically. If we are to give Chinaâs leaders the respect of believing what they say, instead of projecting our own beliefs for no reason other than our own solipsism, how can we take that chance?
Brand versus performance marketing
Wes Kao â The Law of Brand vs. Performance Marketing
âIf you could only prioritize brand or performance, what would you pick?â
Why is Gold Valuable? â Of Dollars And Data
Yet, despite its shiny exterior, it is intrinsically worthless. Outside of its limited uses in electronics and dentistry, gold only has value in human society because it is gold and not something else. This explains why over 80% of annual global gold demand is for jewelry and investment purposes and not for industrial use. We spend most of our time using gold as gold and not as a conductor of electricity or as a replacement for your pearly whites. Â
Some cool nuggets from a conversation between Jeff Morris Jr. and David Perell.
To pick just 1:
Career Loops are path-dependent: What people think they want to do at 22 can (and probably will) be very different from what they want to do at 30/35/40/45/50. How can we make the process of saying âI want to take 6-9 months off to figure out a new field that Iâm passionate aboutâ easier?
The Slack Social Network : is this going to be a long term competitive advantage?Â
This discussion on best of the breed is old. Most companies especially with SaaS tried best of the breed and ended up with so many products leading to âbest of the breedâ fatigue (or will soon). Also at the time product quality wasn't what it is today where the mediocre solution is just âgood enoughâ. It is way better than âgood enoughâ and hell yes MSFT knows that!
This is what Slack â and Silicon Valley, generally â failed to understand about Microsoftâs competitive advantage: the company doesnât win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
Slack Connect is about more than chat: not only can you have multiple companies in one channel, you can also manage the flow of data between different organizations; to put it another way, while Microsoft is busy building an operating system in the cloud, Slack has decided to build the enterprise social network. Or, to put it in visual terms, Microsoft is a vertical company, and Slack has gone fully horizontal:
Also From AkrInvest : By James Wang | @jwangARK
Though first to market with a business chat program, Slack has been crushed by Microsoftâs Teams app. Teams has more than 75 million daily active users (DAUs) compared to Slackâs 12 million. Using its old play book of copying and bundling, Microsoft seems to have vanquished yet another startup.
Not so fast. While Microsoft has been integrating Teams with Office 365 and adding features like video conferencing, Slack has been building Connect for the last four years. Connect takes the Slack model of shared channels a step further, allowing up to 20 organizations to collaborate inside the same Slack channel, closing the communication gaps between and among large teams just in time for a world working remotely at home.
Contrasting the difference between Microsoftâs and Slackâs strategies, Ben Thompson of Stratechery wrote: â...while Microsoft is busy building an operating system in the cloud, Slack has decided to build the enterprise social network. Or, to put it in visual terms, Microsoft is a vertical company, and Slack has gone fully horizontal.â
We believe no company has succeeded in building a truly social network for businesses. Perhaps the closest is Bloomberg in the finance industry. If Slack were to replicate its success across industries and organizations - a big if - it could become the most impactful social network since Facebook.
A Generalist vs Specialist : Being A Generalist Does Not Maximize Your Career Path
I hear this from others all the time. "Oh, I already know that." But have you actually tried to do it?  Once you try to do it, you realize the depth of nuance that exists and how much there is to learn. There is nothing that highlights that your knowledge is actually surface level than trying to do it.
Deepfakes Are Becoming the Hot New Corporate Training Tool
From porn to corporate training : Where deep fakes are headed? Your learning videos ..
De-Escalating Social Media â Nick Punt
I never post about Twitter but it has become such a toxic cesspool that I enjoyed these options. The question is why donât we have these options?
The Future of Fitness: lululemon Buys Mirror
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the Lululemon of them all? Brilliant read on how Lululemon can make Mirror work in its favor. In the long run can 1+1=2Â
Why Are Rich People So Mean? | WIRED
The rich asshole syndrome. I saw this quite recently when someone I know got a bottle of expensive wine and spent a lot of time informing the rest of us of the remaining 200 bottles that this person had purchased. Now that's success, right?Â
With what Iâd spent on my one-way ticket from New York to New Delhi, I could have pulled a few families out of the debt that would hold them down for generations. With what Iâd spent in New York restaurants the year before, I could have put a few of those kids through school. Hell, with what Iâd budgeted for a year of traveling in Asia, I probably could have built a school.
Crossing the Canyon: Leading Your First Marketing Team â Reforge
The move from optimizing a channel to leading a multi-channel team is difficult because it's basically a totally different job requiring both new abilities and new knowledge of channels you might not have ever run yourself. Being an expert in one channel will earn you ownership of a single channel, but it won't guarantee your success as a team leader. In fact, we've observed that the best single-channel executors often have the most difficult time transitioning to running a multi-channel team. It's not just another step on the ladder; it's a vast canyon to cross with multi-faceted challenges requiring incredible personal growth. And usually, no one explains this to new team leaders, so they don't realize what they're walking into and they are not equipped to succeed.
Why Marketing analytics tools fail miserably. You cant expect a person to do something that makes they look bad!
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well!