Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 154)
Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 154)
This week : Amazon's profits, App store ratings, Masa Son, Fundraising, Verticalization of Zoom, Decomplicating problems, Self driving and retail, Fintech and COVID, Quibi, Amping up a company
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.
QUICK NOTE : I won’t be publishing for the next couple of weeks (or maybe just the net week!). Instead I am going to spend time on thinking through this newsletter and figure out how best to make this more valuable. If you have any suggestions reply to this email! I’ll send out a note next week with my thoughts and of course I’d love to hear your feedback.
This week I’m starting off with 10 secrets of success from Bob Bowman (Michael Phelps coach) The article is long but here are the principles as a TL/DR.
#1 – HOW YOU THINK IS EVERYTHING:
#2 — DECIDE UPON YOUR TRUE DREAMS AND GOALS.
#3 – TAKE ACTION:
#4 — NEVER STOP LEARNING.
#5 — BE PERSISTENT AND WORK HARD:
#6 – LEARN TO ANALYZE DETAILS:
#7 – FOCUS YOUR TIME AND MONEY:
#8 – DON’T BE AFRAID TO INNOVATE:
#9 — DEAL AND COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE EFFECTIVELY:
#10. BE HONEST AND DEPENDABLE; TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
Products this week
Brief news : Just the facts in brief
Discovery assist : Getting in front of customers is the hardest part which First Round is now helping with …
Tweets this week
Pretty much what I expected as well when I wrote about Apple’s bundling strategy
On hiring your first PM:
Charts this week
From the Visual Capitalist, the 88T world economy in one chart
If you are at all interested in UBI the link has a table which was great!
Worthy Reads this week
A good read from Ben Evans on where Amazon’s profit comes from and it really isn't where you think it comes from : Amazon's profits, AWS and advertising
How Apple developers game you for positive rankings/reviews with latent value sensing: Apple: how app developers manipulate your mood to boost ranking
From the article:
Conversely, developers know when not to ask: a news app won’t solicit reviews from someone reading a story about death and destruction. The person who keeps getting their password wrong will certainly not be asked. This helps to prevent negative scores from becoming public, raising the overall average. “We call it latent value sensing,” says Michael Sikorsky, chief executive of Robots and Pencils, which helps businesses in the mobile economy. “When you think you’ve got someone into a dark corner of the app, that is not the time to ask for a review.”
From Packy M on Masa. The bull and bear case. I am definitely a bear case. Masa is definitely one of the most gutsy people around and a super optimist which cannot be discounted :
From Masa Madness:
Ultimately, I think that Masa is just an unrelenting optimist. Optimism is an incredibly important characteristic in an entrepreneur. Only an extreme optimist would lose $69 billion, then fly to California with a sketch and a dream, convince Steve Jobs to do a deal on spec, convince a bank to loan him $20 billion, and create a legitimate challenger to Japan’s biggest telecom company.
A Playbook for Fundraising by Marc McCabe on Lenny Rachitsky’s blog. Great read overall.
In Defence of the Humanities by Elena Shalneva
From the article:
Because, once again, the real purpose of education is not to acquire skills. It is to develop the mind. Fill it with knowledge, yes—but also charge it with fire, like a torch, so that, long after we have left the student bench, the mind still gleams and glares and throws a challenge to the maddening mysteries of the world.
A couple of articles on the verticalization of Zoom and video API’s as a service. This reminds me a bit of every product having a workflow built in (Figma, Jira etc). I think the vertical play is interesting but does every single app need to have video capability and is that demand really THAT different that a zoom call can't do it? One case I can think about is dating apps, maybe healthcare? Either way really cool articles by JJ Oslund below:
The “Verticalization” of Zoom. How startups are building the future of… | by JJ Oslund | The Startup
Unbundling Zoom. A closer look at the APIs fueling the… | by JJ Oslund
From Nat Eliason, a great read on how to uncomplicate things. Most of us follow a path in which we obfuscate the basic facts and blame the problems on complexity. As product people we know how to break down product problems into the smallest atomic execution unit to ensure that there is no wasted effort or learning. As Nat suggests break down the problem, and then decide if its really that complex or not.
From : Decompliation: How to Find Simple Solutions to Hard Problems
Common human problems have simple solutions. Our errors in judging complexity come when we treat daily human problems as tail end knowledge work problems, believing tweaking our diets to be as complex as building a Falcon 9 rocket.
It’s on us to recognize when we’re being over-influenced by artificial complexity, to go through the decomplication process, and then to use our a priori reasoning to arrive at the better, simpler, solution.
This week on David Perell’s blog was this great read on the 2nd and 3rd order effects of Self Driving cars : Self-Driving Cars and the Future of Retail — David Perell. Adrienne Alyzee has captured the impacts well and this is one smooth read.
Given Palantir’s recent S1 filing, here is Scott Galloway’s take on Palantir. Mario Gabriele covered the S1 in Palantir and the Chaos Dance and I think that he has articulated it very well. The traditional moats may not exist but what I think Scott Galloway is missing is that lot of federal dept. workers are not going to be replaced even if the administration changes. The “moat” here is the sunk cost which of course isn't gonna last forever but there is something to be said for the incumbent especially in large contracts. The “foot in the door” strategy is brilliant. I am skeptical still if Palantir is truly a product company.
Trends and the COVID effect on fintech from Anish Acharya : Charting the COVID Effect on Fintech
One of the coolest ones is Pattern Day Trader. Hell even I have been trading stocks having NEVER done it before!
From the article:
Day trading has typically been (rightfully) left to professionals who spend their careers understanding stocks and making shrewd timely bets around events. But this year, retail investors were much more apt to make short term bets on the market—and trade much more frequently. Obviously, day trading and options trading thrive in periods of high volatility, which explains some of the interest and spikes. Another possible culprit is the fact that sports (and, by extension, sports betting) and casinos were closed for a large part of the year. As a result, trading options became the closest thing available to gambling. In any case, whereas options and short term investing by retail traders was previously on a steady decline in comparison to long term strategies of “buy and hold,” the pandemic seems to have sparked a resurgence.
Qubi and the entertainment value curve by Ravi Mehta. This was an interesting read for me given my own take on Quibi a couple of months ago. Some of the recommendations are pretty much the same as what I came up with but the way Ravi has articulated the Social Value and Production value is interesting. Some of the ideas I was suggesting would take Quibi up the curve or down the curve. The key is Quibi can’t straddle the fence the way YouTube or TikTiok have done. They need to find a point on the curve that they can own. Alas I think this is not going to happen
From : The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn't:
If I were in Quibi's shoes, a few questions come to mind for their present quandary:
How might we… make content more shareable?
How might we… make the app feel more alive?
How might we… make the audience part of the creative process?
How might we… spark conversation between the audience and the A-list community of storytellers, actors, and artists Quibi has assembled?
The recommendation is .. sound. But I think Quibi is run by a CEO who understands production value MUCH more than he does Social value. I can almost bet you that he has never used TikTok much less seen a TikTok video so he probably doesn’t get it.
Frank Slootman (SnowFlake’s CEO) on Amping up
Literally a brilliant articulation. I have seen this so many times. B players end up becoming C players and any left over A players leave. This should be anathema to any company
From the article:
Mediocrity is the silent killer. Organizations are not getting killed by their C players. Everybody knows who they are, and performance eventually is addressed. The people who kill organizations are your B players. It’s the scourge of the enterprise because there are many and they are generally accepted. Often, they are seen as not bad enough to fire, but not good enough to keep. They are the ultimate passengers.
B players need to be pared: they either become A players, or they become C players and get flushed out. You can help by raising standards, by refusing mediocre outcomes. Channel your inner Steve Jobs.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe. Be Well!