What I wrote last week
How our brains receive messages and some implications
Articles on Business
Bessemer Venture Partners struck gold with their investment in Toast, which went public recently. Their memo outlining the rationale such an investment is worth a read, especially for those who want to learn about Toast, those who want to learn Business and those who wish to go into Venture Capital.
Apple’s power move to kneecap Facebook advertising is working. A pretty biased article if you ask me. This is a complicated and nuanced issue, yet the author focuses more on the alleged impact that the privacy-centric features Apple introduced have on Facebook business. It does mention: “People are opting out of Facebook’s tracking for a reason: they no longer trust the company with their data after years of evidence they should not. But the context of Apple’s power move is important too.” What it fails to convey is that small businesses do have a problem when it relies on a single channel (Facebook, in this case) for survival. The article fails to articulate why it is Apple’s responsibility to take care of Facebook’s interest. Look, I totally agree that Apple does things out of its self-interest as all of us do. Most of the time, Apple masks its true intention with shiny marketing language as all companies do. But it’s strange to side with Facebook and its tactic to use small businesses as weapons in the war with Apple WITHOUT looking at the issue from the consumer perspective.
Google, Battling Amazon, Tries an E-Commerce Makeover to Win Back Advertisers. “Amazon’s accelerating ad business has raised alarms inside Google, prompting Chief Executive Sundar Pichai to assure Alphabet’s board that rejuvenating its flagging e-commerce efforts is a priority, according to former Google executives. He must fix a mess of Google’s own making. The company has rebooted its digital shopping strategy at least four times over two decades and has had five leaders of its e-commerce operations in 10 years, the former executives said. “Google is almost like the living dead” in e-commerce, said Guru Hariharan, chief executive of CommerceIQ, an online-retail service provider. “No one goes there for shopping.”
How IBM lost the cloud. “Over and over again during the last decade, IBM engineers were asked to build special one-off projects for key clients at the expense of their road maps for building the types of cross-customer cloud services offered by the major clouds. Top executives at some of the largest companies in the country — the biggest banks, airlines and insurance companies — knew they could call IBM management and get what they wanted because the company was so eager to retain their business, the sources said. This practice, which delayed work on key infrastructure services for months or even years, was still happening inside IBM as recently as last year, according to one source.“
Narrative Distillation. “Even today, the ability to get strong engineers to work on a problem engineers normally don’t want to work on remains a very strong formula for returns. You can increasingly see other top companies shifting to invest more in their company and founder brands. Product market fit is just narrative distillation for customers. It only makes sense that this same process is as crucial for investors and employees, too. And just as we have spent so many years reinforcing the primacy of founders focusing on product market fit—and the process of how companies converge on it—so too must founders take distilling their narratives for all audiences equally seriously.“
Other stuff that I find interesting
History’s Seductive Beliefs. “Everything has a price, and the price is usually proportionate to the potential rewards. But the price is rarely on a price tag. You don’t pay it with cash. Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, doubt, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, and general bullshit. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead.“
Ditching your commute: worth ~$40K/year in happiness
Our constitutional crisis is already here. “There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump “. A somber yet real read on the constitutional crisis that is unfolding right in front of our eyes.
This embroidery has a great talent in bringing aerial landscapes to life. Check it out!
Stats
Almost 25 million people played golf in the U.S in 2020
TikTok Claims the App Now Tops 1 Billion Monthly Active Users
Minh Quang Duong 