Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 151)
This week : Stress,YC Demo Days, Beautiful PC's, Product Managers as GM's, College in India, homesteading, NYT's turnaround, How the Apple App Store should change, Capital Markets, Wikipedia, and more
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.
This past week I came across a few interesting random reads. Did you know that sound can be used to pick a lock? Crazy right?
On Stress
We all hate stress. Stress however is a muscle like anything else. You got to stretch this muscle and research shows that intermittent stress is good for you. I think this goes back in a lot of ways to being outside of your comfort zone. If you are able to do that often you will definitely grow
Products this week
A couple of weeks ago YC held their S20 Day1 and Day2. Some really cool startups. I really see a new trend here for vertical job offerings. This speaks to the next phase of Market Networks where its a combination of Marketplace, Workflow, and Network.
Here are the vertical jobs based offerings which I found interesting:
Lume Health: Lume Health is building a Glassdoor for hospitals, aiming to help nurses make the right choice when searching for jobs. The company integrated the predictable aspects of a jobs board, while also building out a platform of verified reviews from nurses that can speak to what an office or hospital was really like from the inside.
Toolbox: An application and labor marketplace that connects general contractors on construction sites with qualified laborers. The service is currently live in New York City and drove $88,000 in GMV in July, a figure that it expects to rise to $102,000 in GMV in August. Toolbox can help some workers find full-time jobs, or plug in shorter work to fill demand gaps. And, Toolbox thinks that it can snag 25% of the total spend. That’s a big take.
Charts of the week
Revenue of fast food chains from Visual Capitalist
Tweets this week
Mortgage Delinquencies in 2020 compared to 2008
Beautiful PC’s
Worthy reads this week:
From the article:
To further illustrate his point, Hogge poses this hypothetical: “It’s all about picking the right outcome and the metric that best points to success. Let’s say a PM at Pinterest is looking to deliver a phenomenal pinning experience, even if no one is explicitly paying for it. So what’s the business outcome? They might be looking to increase the number of daily active pinners,” he says. “But tying the PM’s comp to an X% increase in that behavior and calling it a day would likely be a mistake. Dig deeper. Why do you want to increase daily active pinners? Because that increases the LTV of a user. So even if a PM’s responsibility seems attenuated from revenue, if you dive into the whys you eventually can trace it back to an outcome you want to deliver to the business, while still keeping the customer experience in mind.”
I love interviews with founders. Here is one from Mario at the Generalist with Rishi Mandal. Life is about the choices you make and here is a person who’s made brilliant choices based on advice he has received. LOVED THIS READ. If you read one read this week, let this be it. The Prologue | Rishi Mandal on Building the Future 🏃🏽♀️
From the article:
The first is that it’s not enough to work hard. You have to be lucky. Most summers, we would return to India. I remember sitting in the back of a rickshaw when I was 12 or 13. It was a brutally hot day, 110 degrees outside. We were going to see a movie to get out of the heat. The man on the bike, pedaling in front of us, was old. Rail thin, tanned. My dad said, you see this guy? He works hard as hell. He wakes up at the crack of dawn, putting his body on the line. Then he goes to bed and starts again. So it’s not enough to just work hard. You have to be lucky too. And being born in Silicon Valley? You won the lottery. You have a responsibility to pay it forward.
It was probably twenty years later that his advice really hit me. I think of it a lot, now.
The second piece of advice was this: the plan is always useless, but planning isn’t.
In many ways, I grew up in a typical Indian household. From a young age, we were expected to think about our careers and what we wanted to achieve. I remember when my parents would ask me questions about my plans for the future I’d just respond, what’s the point of this? I’m fifteen years old. But my dad explained to me. The plan is useless. Planning is never useless. The point was to build frameworks and think systemically. For anything I do now, I think about it that way.
Homesteading the Twittersphere – alexdanco.com : A great read from Alex Danco. This all goes back to building a personal brand. When its not your bread and butter you can offer this for free and build your personal brand at the same time. By writing this newsletter my own personal brand has really helped me in so man ways
From the article:
We’re pretty lucky. Every day we open up Twitter and can plausibly expect for some gem to show up, like Kevin Kwok on Figma, or Turner Novak on Pinduoduo, and expect to read them for free. In certain slices of the new knowledge economy, particularly in financial analysis or in business strategy, you can get a mediocre product for a price, but the very best products are free. Someone wrote it down and shared it; not for money, but for something else.
The sad state of affairs of the privileged. How are you supposed to compete if you did not learn in an English medium school? (Yes we have schools where the medium of instruction is a local language!)
MERIT colleges, national track India, & privilege blindness
I see top tier colleges in India (or even abroad) as having the following distinct characteristics. They are -
Tough to get in to or have a high selectivity in intake: Less than 10-20% (in many cases <1%) of students who apply get in to these colleges
Either based in a Metro and / or is Residential in nature: Elite colleges are usually residential in nature, the exceptions being SRCC / St Xavier’s and their ilk located inside a Metro. These have a mix of day scholars and boarders. There isn’t a single elite college in a city that is attended only by day scholars. And similarly outside of the top 7 metros, there isn’t a single reasonably well-known city-based college, with a large day-scholar population.
National / All-India intake: the student body is from across all states in India. There may be a skew towards certain regions (specifically metros) but on the whole there isn’t a single region that is not represented (The North-East typically gets the least representation).
English-fluent students: Graduates of these institutions are fluent in English. Not all of them speak perfectly but almost all of them, if not all of them, do written English well, and are conversant with aspects of Western culture.
Interesting learnings from NYT’s outgoing CEO, Mark Thompson.
Key takeaways : You have to shake things up, believe in the mission and your product is what you sell (a consumers WTP). Never compromise on that!
From the article:
So we said, “Why can’t we be the first successful general-interest, premium news provider and prove willingness to pay?” We did the research. And we broadly, significantly underestimated in the early research what the opportunity could be. What we didn’t know in 2012 was how rapidly Netflix and Spotify and others were going to habituate users to paying for premium content and how much easier it was going to be for users on their smartphones, particularly, to quickly subscribe and unsubscribe. But around the world as a whole, this process of habituation’s only just begun.
How to Increase Your Attention Span | by Marta Brzosko | Better Humans
Can’t say I haven’t struggled with this. Sometimes there is so much overload - emails, notifications, calendar reminders, slack messages, popups that it gets very hard to focus!
From the article:
Very politely, he asked me to put my phone away. “The owner of this place is a little eccentric,” the man said. “He has over 600 pubs across the U.K. All of them have a no-devices-allowed policy. If he catches someone breaking the rules, he closes the pub.”
I almost couldn’t believe that someone could be so strict — but I obediently put my phone away. Then, I resumed journaling — and what I intended to be a few short notes turned into an hour-long session.
Because the phone wasn’t available, I got immersed in writing.
This allowed me to notice a few fantastic things. First, when a distraction was out of the equation, sustaining focus wasn’t hard at all. Second, the longer I was in it, the more effortless it became.
Finally, the thoughts I put on paper that afternoon were different quality to my usual. They surprised me. This wasn’t the superficial kind of writing I felt stuck in so many times before. That afternoon, I went deeper and discovered thoughts I didn’t know I had.
New media platforms are enabling a new creator type: Digitally Native Vertical Creators
Digital Native Vertical Creators. A classic case of modularization. Even if you take a simple example like Substack. They have made it so simple to have a running newsletter and email campaign. No more multiple tools to publish, distribute, and collect $
From the article:
I believe the same thing will happen with DNVCs. Covid-19 has lifted the entire DNVC market at a rate that’s unsustainable. But when Covid-19 restrictions are finally lifted, the entire ecosystem will move forward from a new level. We’re already seeing signs of new levels when looking at the below iOS download data courtesy of App Annie that I pulled for Cameo and Bandcamp, which are two enabling platforms that Second Measure showed declining revenue for from their Covid-19 peaks.
If you have been confused about the rising stock market and the rising unemployment claims how does one account for the dissonance? How some of that is actually related to WFH : Is WFH affecting the S&P?
For professional investors, it's worth understanding that while information flow is the lifeblood of performance, it's also somewhat controlled and restricted in an office setting. Lots of websites are blocked at offices; your information universe is limited to sources and channels deemed worthwhile by some compliance officer and knowledge manager working in tandem. With a Bloomberg Terminal you are clearly not going to be missing any major news but there is also some corporate filter keeping you away from dark corners. There's also the socializing filter of not wanting to have coworkers walk by and see you just scrolling Twitter or Facebook if those sites happen to be allowed. Consuming information in the office was a very specific thing, with norms and systems developed over the decades. That specific information flow drove markets.
Rethinking the App Store – Stratechery by Ben Thompson : A good read on why the App Store has challenges today, how and for what kind of products Apple should modify their policy.
From the article:
Payment Processing: This is where the marginal cost/cross-platform distinction comes into play:
If your app experience is contained to the iPhone and has zero marginal costs, you can only use in-app purchase at Apple’s rate (30% currently).
If your app experience is cross-platform and has zero marginal costs, your app can simply be a login page at launch, with the assumption you are paying elsewhere; if you wish to offer payments, you have to offer in-app purchase at Apple’s rate.
If your app experience has marginal costs, then you can offer either a webview for purchase or an in-app purchase at a new Apple rate (~10%) (keep in mind that marginal costs means something discrete; simply needing some indeterminate amount of more server capacity doesn’t suffice).
There will still be edge cases here, particularly when it comes to determining what is an iPhone-only experience, as opposed to a cross-platform one; Fortnite, for example, can be played cross-platform, but I would still classify it as an iPhone-only experience (I would be okay with simply assuming that all games are iPhone-only experiences). What makes these edge cases far more tolerable, though, is that they are arguing about who gets what share of zero marginal cost goods, as opposed to driving folks who need to pay for what they provide out of business.
Brilliant read from Bill Gurley on accessing public capital markets 1) IPO’s 2) Direct listings 3) SPAC’s. This clearly explains the “pop” in IPO prices. As mentioned in the article direct listing could not earlier raise capital, now they can (as of August 27th). There is also a counter view on this from a16z and I honestly am torn between both points of view.
Interesting take on the future of AR/VR and Digital Sign Management and Worldscaping. A/R VR will be real world crowdsourced scrapers : Digital Sight Management, and the Mystery of the Missing Amazon Receipts
With hundreds of millions of users, MyFitnessPal is the most popular calorie counting app in the world. One reason why it succeeded is because it had the most complete food database. It was too expensive and time-consuming to get nutrition data from manufacturers, so they crowdsourced it:
[Founder Mike Lee] realized that MyFitnessPal would only truly scale if he called on his users to help [populate its food database] — in other words, crowdsourced it by enabling MyFitnessPal’s users to input and check data. The alternatives were to get the data from open food nutrition databases or directly pipe it from food manufacturers. However, there wasn’t a comprehensive open database of barcodes that MyFitnessPal could tap into and getting the data from food manufacturers was far too much work. Besides, if their own users entered the data then MyFitnessPal would own it. One of the defining characteristics of so-called “social” software — like Facebook and Twitter — is that the value of the business is almost all derived from the amount and quality of user data in its databases. MyFitnessPal is no exception, so Mike Lee was very smart to go the crowdsourcing route. Everything its users enter into MyFitnessPal’s food database belongs to MyFitnessPal.
MyFitnessPal’s economic moat was, and still is, its food database. Like so many other “web 2.0” and early smartphone apps (Foursquare, Google Maps, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Waze, etc.) it exploited and gamified users’ labour to amass data that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult to collect. Now they own that data, it’s nearly impossible for competitors to catch up – what community will put in the million hours required to reconstruct MyFitnessPal’s food database when they could just… use MyFitnessPal?
Great read on Wikipedia’s history and why they don’t do ads. As a Wikipedia lover and supporter I am so glad this wasn’t like the hardcopy encyclopedia where you had to be a rich kid to buy the Encyclopædia Britannica:#10 Why Wikipedia doesn't do ads?
Thank you for reading. Stay safe! Be Well!