What I wrote last week
Apple’s financials through charts
Amazon’s financials through charts
Business
Hungarian Refugee Founded Car-Parts Maker Linamar in Canada. An amazing entrepreneurship story from an immigrant who slept on train station benches and had only a few dollars to himself. The so-called American Dream is not exclusive to America. It can happen anywhere if people have the will
Losses Mount for Startups Racing to Deliver Groceries Fast and Cheap. Food or grocery delivery market is competitive and cut-throat. If you don’t have the scale, you’ll have to spend lavishly in the beginning to acquire merchants and users. Hence, every order is a money loser. Surely, new comers add to competition for the incumbents, but how long the new comers can persist and compete is another matter
Why Japanese Businesses Are So Good at Surviving Crises. “Many companies are stuck in short-termism, focusing on a strategic plan for five years,” he says. “But a lot of Japanese companies think about 100 or 200 years from now and envision the kind of future they want to create. During the tsunami disaster, the key mindset of executives was: We have to empathize with others. And companies ought to do the same thing now, during the current crisis, empathizing with those who are suffering and trying to figure out how to help.”
Google Is Searching for a Way to Win the Cloud. It’s mind-blowing to me that Google has been spending much of the last three years on bolstering its reliability, yet there were still issues. It goes to show how difficult it is to build a service such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
Inside Spotify’s Joe Rogan Crisis. After Twitter, Facebook and Google, Spotify is another organization that has an unenviable task of dealing with content moderation. The Joe Rogan show is hugely popular and draws eyeballs which equate to money for Spotify. However, that puts Spotify in a bind because his controversial content is opposed by some employees and influential artists. Facebook, for example, has poured literally billions of dollars over the years into content moderation. I wonder how much the urge to strike a balance of business and, let’s say, civic responsibility will cost Spotify. More important, whether they will be able to strike that balance at all
Other stuff that I find interesting
Cracking a $2 million crypto wallet. A fascinating story with a happy ending. I was too close to losing my cryptos once. Luckily, I remembered my password and did my utmost to ensure that I won’t be in the same situation again. At least that’s what I think.
Scientists Are Racing to Understand the Fury of Tonga’s Volcano. 10 million tons of TNT are just unfathomable to me. It’s amazing what Mother Nature can do. We are just too small and there are a lot to learn. This volcano eruption is one example
Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy. Whether you agree or disagree with the previous administration’s policies and ideology, the fact remains that Operation Warp Speed helped bring the much needed vaccines to the world. For that, it’s a success
Rafael Nadal: The ‘tough love’ that shaped a 21-time Grand Slam champion. The man with the most Grand Slams in history started his journey under a strict mentorship from his own uncle who taught Nadal the value of hard work and discipline.
Stats
Amazon bought 20% of all clean-energy purchases by global corporations in 2021
FTC reported that $770 million was lost to frauds initiated on social media in 2021
There were 9 million credit card non-prime originations in Q3 2021, up 75% YoY
Minh Quang Duong 