Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 150)
This week : H1B, Politics and CEO's, permanent skills, Newsletters, WOM coefficients, Warren Buffett, Open protocols, Jim, The digital divide, Apple App Store, Startup failures, and media networks
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things I read the past week or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on. I can’t believe that I’m on edition 150! That means I have consistently done this for 3 years now. You all are to thank for my consistency. So thank you for keeping me on my toes! If you liked reading this please consider sharing this :)
Antitrust or Anticompetitive? Last week I wrote about various examples of possible antitrust cases and if I think they have merit. If you haven’t read it, I’d love to hear your comments
On tweaks :
I loved this really short article from Jay Acuzno on tweaks. This simple lesson below is applicable for work, health, food, exercise. Basically ANY habit
Tiny tweaks. Done consistently. That’s how every single person can affect change in their work.
On the H1B program
An interesting look at the H1B program and the discrimination that H1B holders face. I can definitely say some of this is true from folks that I know. You can’t really advance your career because you are so beholden to your green card application.
CEO’s today can’t just sideline the “political” discussion. CEO’s have to take a stand and not consistently act or behave in line with that.
Charts this week
From Visual Capitalist on the Coffee supply chain
Where Will the Next Billion Internet Users Come From? These are the next set of countries where tech innovation will be useful and differentiated experiences can help build interesting products.
Tweets this week
Wonderful summation of India’s history with the internet. I remember the VSNL connection and dial up modem with the annoying sound all too well.
Worthy Reads this week
Expiring vs. Permanent Skills · Collaborative Fund
A great read from Morgan Housel on permanent skills. This really goes back to what doesn’t change, doesn’t get old. Listening is a key skill which should be a permanent skill
From the article:
Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt.
Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill.
But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance. When several previous generations have worked on a skill that’s directly relevant to you, you have a deep well of relevant examples to study. And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, the payoffs can be ridiculous. Anything that compounds over decades usually is.
A good read from Byrne Hobart on newsletter economics, and bundling I see value in some form of bundling. There have been two models to make this work, one is what I call the medium model. AYCE content. You pay $5 and you get the whole lot of articles written by anyone and the substack model where you pay per content creator. Granted there are LOTS of people in the world willing to pay for premium content but in order for this to work in favor of the writer the content has to be niche and the point of view has to be extremely insightful. I think we’re going to see some newsletter subscription fatigue (for both free and paid newsletters)
From the article:
And this is a good counterpoint to the newsletter-skeptic argument about newsletter fatigue. Yes, many people spend entirely too much time reading newsletters—but that means there’s a market for compressing their two hours of somewhat indiscriminate, redundant reading into ten minutes of tightly-focused reading instead. For sub-enterprise price points (i.e. under about $500 a head), the cost of a newsletter in time is bigger than its cost in dollars. To put a little more math on it: paid readers open my newsletter about 75% of the time. At 10 minutes per newsletter, 250 issues a year, and a 75% open rate, that’s about 31 hours of reading per year. At the current US minimum wage of $7.25, the opportunity cost in time is almost exactly in line with the price of a subscription to The Diff.
WOM (Word of Mouth is hard to measure). An interesting way to measure this from Yousuf Bhaijee : The Word of Mouth Coefficient — Reforge
Word of Mouth Coefficient: The WOM Coefficient tracks the rate that active users generate new users via word of mouth, similar to how ARPDAU tracks the rate that active users generate revenue.
For example, if the denominator of your WOM Coefficient is WAU (weekly active users), and the coefficient is 0.1, that means every WAU generates 0.1 new users per week via word of mouth. Or in simpler terms, for every 10 weekly active users, they will generate 1 new user via word of mouth.
A great read from Matt Stoller on Warren Buffett
From the article:
I tried very hard in the book to get Buffett into every single chapter. Buffett was for many years one of the major investors in John Deere. John Deere not only holds a monopoly over tractors and farm equipment, but exploits its power by forcing farmers to return to its manufacturers in order to repair its products, essentially blocking people from repairing their own equipment. John Deere even says that the only thing people buy when they buy a John Deere tractor is a license to run the machine.
And John Deere has become one of the largest farm credit companies in the United States, and so they are now lending out money to farmers to buy John Deere equipment.
A case for open protocols and not platforms. I am not sure that having just protocols will truly solve the problem of filter bubbles and fake news.
From the article:
A protocol-based system, however, moves much of the decision making away from the center and gives it to the ends of the network. Rather than relying on a single centralized platform, with all of the internal biases and incentives that that entails, anyone would be able to create their own set of rules—including which content do they not want to see and which content would they like to see promoted. Since most people would not wish to manually control all of their own preferences and levels, this could easily fall on any number of third parties—whether they be competing platforms, public interest organizations, or local communities. Those third parties could create whatever interfaces, with whatever rules, they wanted.
Social media is a “proof” of X system.
From the article:
Social networks are therefore not only signaling distribution (and amplification) networks – they also allow users to prove their signaling messages.
The creative proof-of-work is just pretext and helps to boost your post. What’s more important are the additional proof mechanisms that social networks provide. In the case of Instagram those are photos and location tags.
Instagram is essentially “pics or it didn’t happen”-as-a-service.
Great read on the structure of networks and why Jio is poised to win. Offline to Online is much easier. Amazon was online to offline (Whole Foods). This is similar to Walmart and groceries. Store format is an advantage for grocery deliveries. Labor in India is cheap(er) and so there are structural cost advantages baked in for Reliance
A great read from The Margins on the digital divide
From the article:
But let’s go back to my original point. The divide between Silicon Valley and the rest of the country is wider it has ever been. Half my Twitter is people looking to angel-invest their millions in apps, and the other is reporters documenting the latest lows America has hit. This doesn’t bode well for the country, and will become a political and social flashpoint sooner than later. It surely is not sustainable. If the tech industry wants to enjoy its relative welcome, it should do more. This doesn’t necessarily mean working on pro-social, civic-minded enterprises, but also fighting for policies that can bridge the gap. Even when those policies can mean a haircut here or a trim there. We all need to do more than tweet good wishes and promote our companies here.
How testflight is used as an “app store” to the app store; and also as marketing tool
Used correctly, TestFlight is also an incredible hype machine. Clubhouse, the hottest app in Silicon Valley, is still TestFlight-only even after months of use and buzz. Clubhouse founder Paul Davison said the app hasn't gone public yet while the small team tries to finish it, but keeping the app exclusive also solves a separate problem. "We think it's important to grow communities slowly, rather than 10x-ing the user base overnight," Davison wrote on Clubhouse's blog last month. "This helps ensure that things don't break, keeps the composition of the community diverse, and allows us to tune the product as it grows." If Clubhouse tried to put its app on the App Store without allowing everyone in, Apple would reject it out of hand. (Just ask the folks who built Hey.) TestFlight gives Clubhouse a way to control growth and to keep hold of its own narrative as long as possible.
A good read from Ben Evans on the Apple App store and how things will change going forward.
From the article:
Second, I think Apple is going to have to make fundamental changes to the payment model. Epic only has margin at stake, but Spotify can’t pay at all, it’s a direct competitor, and there’s no user benefit at all to Apple’s policy, just confusion and annoyance. The EU is now pursuing two separate competition policy cases against Apple: one over the App Store, with Spotify a complainant, and the other over Apple Wallet and Apple Pay. This second one is instructive: the EU is taking the view that Apple has a monopoly of payment on the iPhone. Market definition is everything. I-am-not-a-lawyer, but I don’t see how Apple can win on Spotify (or Kindle), and I don’t think it should.
Reid Hoffman on startup failures
From the article:
While failure is often the default state for startups, it is neither inevitable nor is it necessarily the end of the story. If you are able to bring yourself to look failure in the eye, you can take steps to maximize your chance of success. And even if you fail despite your best efforts, if you behave ethically and demonstrate that you’ve learned from the mistakes you might have made along the way, failure is definitely not the end. In fact, it may be the beginning.
A great read from NFX on media networks. The OG of content like ad units is craigslist. The article slices and dices media networks and provides a nuanced view into the evolution of media marketplaces. Very interesting and insightful
If you can get your ads to look like content to your audience, so much the better from a business perspective.
Craigslist is the best example because the content IS ads. It simplifies the operation of the marketplace dramatically. Genius, right? It’s no wonder that newspaper classifieds were the financial backbones of the newspaper industry for so long — they were free content for the newspaper that people paid them to list.
With classifieds, people pay you to give you content. That simplifies nearly everything. The advertiser and content creator are the same thing. We call Craiglist a utility media marketplace.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well!