Dozen Worthy Reads š° (No. 148)
This week : Silicon Valley/India Caste issues, Oatly, TSLA, Mastering Growth, ARM, AI's long tail problem, Velvet Ropes, Writing Tips, TikTok, and the construction industry.
Hi All,
Hope you all are well! Iād like to start off with a quick moment of silence for people of Beirut during this hard time. As always if you liked this please tweet, share, or subscribe. Thank you :)
To give you an idea of scope of the explosion this graphic from VisualCapitalist is eye opening.
On S&P and crises from VisualCapitalist
How the S&P performed during Major crises. Aināt the worst weāve seen:Ā
On Silicon Valleyās āIndia Casteā issue : Silicon Valley Has a Caste Discrimination Problem - Horrible, horrible, horrible!Ā
But she soon learned that caste discrimination didn't respect borders, and for 18 years she has faced discrimination at the hands of higher-caste Brahmin Indians who have established powerful cliques within many of Silicon Valleyās biggest companies. She has hidden her identity and even used fake names to get work.
āYou see the social seclusion within your colleagues. They don't want to eat lunch with you, they don't smile back at you, they do not have longer conversations with you,ā Maya told VICE News. āIf I use my real name, I get excluded from the interviews.ā
Tweets this week:
From the Economist : Google searches and trends. Retweet via Andrew Chen
Cool Products this week
Marketing videos for $700 a pop with the model included! -Ā Piqls
Mac Quadra : macintosh.js - A 1991 Macintosh in an app - for Windows, Linux, and macOS
SMS Marketing examples SMS Marketing Examples
COVID-19 reads this week
The Great Distancing by Scott Galloway
From the article:
Itās overwhelming to try to fathom the pain, despair, and loneliness tens of millions of households are struggling with right now. And we didnāt need to be here. America is about generosity, grit, innovation, and a willingness to sacrifice for one another and future generations. Thereās nothing wrong with America that canāt be fixed with whatās right with America. However, at this moment, our nation has never been less American.Ā
Our optimism and technology will not replace sacrifice. In order to, again, embrace life and each other, we need a great distancing.
Reads this week
understanding - nabeelqu by Nabeel QuershiĀ
From the article:
Most people are not willing to do this -- looking stupid takes courage, and sometimes itās easier to just let things slide. It is striking how many situations I am in where I start asking basic questions, feel guilty for slowing the group down, and it turns out that nobody understood what was going on to begin with (often people message me privately saying that theyāre relieved I asked), but I was the only one who actually spoke up and asked about it.Ā
This is a habit. Itās easy to pick up. And it makes you smarter.
Is TSLA a tech stock or a fashion product?
From the article:
Itās helpful to think of the various functions enabled by ECUs as similar to the standalone devices people owned before smartphones: a walkman for listening to music, a VCR for watching movies, a pocket calculator, etc ā each with its own computational power and logic. Smartphones subsumed all that into one device with centralized compute, powerful operating system and software defined apps. A similar transformation is starting in automotive.
7 Principles To Mastering Growth by Brian Balfour. An old one but still on point and probably even more so today
From the article:
Every time Iāve hired for a role I inevitably get a swarm of applications with a couple years of experience that say they āknowā CRO, Traditional marketing, Facebook Ads, Content Marketing and some other combination of 5 + things. The applicants claim they are generalists, and theyāre proud of it. Sounds great on paper, but as soon as I dig in I typically find they are ok at a lot of things, but amazing at nothing.
Being āokā at a variety of things, is far less valuable than being amazing at one.Ā
Why is that?
Anyone can learn the surface layer of a subject. But going deep requires you to solve problems where the answer isnāt in some hacktics blog post. You never experience this as a generalist. The best way to get better at solving problems, is by solving more problems so in the process you actually build the skills that will enable you to go deep on something else.
When I hire, I will take someone who has become amazing at one thing over a generalist any day of the week because if they got great at one thing, the probability of them becoming great at another is a lot higher.
The owner of WeChat thinks deepfakes could actually be good - MIT Technology Review
From the article:
Tencent says itās already working to advance some of these applications. This will likely spur its competitors to do the same if they havenāt yet, and influence the direction of Chinese startups eager to be acquired. As a member of Chinaās āAI national team,ā which the government created as part of its overall AI strategy, the company also has significant sway among regulators who want to help foster the industryās growth.
Shot in the ARM - Digits to DollarsĀ
From the article:
Finally, add to this to the rise of RISC-V, an open source alternative to Arm. At its heart, Armās IP is basically software, so a few U.C. Berkeley professors realized that they could build chips on āfreeā software and created this new open source project. Because working with Arm pained so many customers, RISC-V has been growing steadily for years. Today, every major chip company has at least a few RISC-V projects kicking around inside. These range from science projects to full blown investments in the RISC-V ecosystem. Comparing the two architectures is beyond our scope here, suffice it to say that RISC-V is at least āgood enoughā and ranks as a credible threat to Arm, albeit not an existential threat at this stage.
The Long-Tail Problem in AI, and How Autonomous Markets Can Solve It - a16zĀ
From the article:
Building AI systems today is increasingly a problem of coordinating large-scale and widespread data-collection efforts. Tech giants have always solved this problem through good old-fashioned command and control. But, central planning can only go so far. There is now an opportunity for startups to coordinate human energy at an unprecedented scale by building technology that better harnesses market forces. To do that for AI, we need to build what Iāll call Decentralized Autonomous Hiveminds.
Launch strategies by Gaby Goldberg
The Value of a Velvet Rope: Effects of Hype and Exclusivity on Launch Strategies
From the article:
It has some psychological ground, too: according to Rene Girardās mimetic theory, we tend to want things simply because other people want them. Human desire is not an autonomous process but a collective one ā this is how we decide what we care about. On top of this, life inside the velvet rope is, well, pretty good. Thereās a real, psychological fulfillment of being āinā with the crowd and stoking envy among those around you. The idea of being āinā is an economy in itself: streetwear drops, exclusive social clubs, and now, as weāve seen, viral consumer social products, which weāll be focusing on for this piece.
A Founder's Guide to Writing Well ā 8 Writing Tips | First Round Review
From the article:
The Gunning Fog Index measures the readability of your text by counting words-per-sentence and syllables-per-word. The output of the GFI can be interpreted as the age at which your reader could have left formal education yet still understand your writing.
I often think of this passage by Churchill, as highlighted in a blog post I read years ago (words of three or more syllables are in blue.) The GFI is 9.8 years ā meaning your average 5th grader could understand Sir Winstonās speech.
Fintech Scales Vertical SaaS - a16zĀ
From the article:
Lowering CAC while increasing LTV makes a direct, inside sales go-to-market possible where it previously wasnāt, meaning SaaS companies can acquire new customers that would otherwise have been too expensive. At >$5,000 average revenue per customer, vertical SaaS companies can afford to hire an outbound inside sales team instead of relying on less costly channels, like word of mouth and paid acquisition.
In fact, fintechās potential to dramatically increase LTV means that vertical SaaS companies can offer their SaaS product for less (or even for free) to wedge into an initial customer base that may be otherwise reluctant to digitize, before layering on fintech products as the main monetization lever. For example, Silo, an operating system for wholesale food distributors, currently doesnāt charge its customers for its software, which has allowed it to successfully land customers in a market historically resistant to adopting software.
Oatly: The New Coke by Nat Eliason
From the article:
Letās define āmade for humansā in the most generous way possible. When I hear āmade for humans,ā I assume it means the product is designed specifically for human consumption, and that itās beneficial for our health or at least not hurting us.
If it just meant ādesigned for human consumptionā then it would include cigarettes, alcohol, and heroin, which isnāt what I think Oatly is going for. There has to be an implied health element to it. There are a number of ways we could define āhealthy,ā but the most generous is to consider something healthy if itās not demonstrably harmful to your health from normal consumption. A Greek salad with olive oil is healthy. Coca-cola is not.Ā
So is Oatly designed for human consumption? Definitely. Is it healthy? Definitely not
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TikTok and the sorting hat by Eugene Wei : TikTok and the Sorting Hat ā Remains of the Day
From the article:
The answer, I believe, has significant implications for the future of cross-border tech competition, as well as for understanding how product developers achieve product-market-fit. The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.
My Life Pouring Concrete by Michael Humeniuk
From the article:
Men work construction jobs because they need the money. But they also take pride in their daily work product, and the more general fact that they build and fix the concrete world that we all need. Thereās usually a strong work ethic on display, too, even if it doesnāt always manifest itself as what many of us would describe as professionalism per se.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well!