Business
From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb. An interesting story from a former employee at Airbnb on the culture and how full-time staff and contractors are treated differently.
Instacart Faces Turbulence After Pandemic Boom in Grocery Delivery. Covid-19 might be a great business boost initially, but for some companies, the pandemic may expose their flimsiness and fragility. Fast is shutting down after raising millions of dollars and riding the wave of Covid. Instacart is another firm whose future looks bleak. Merger talks went fruitless. IPO plan was put on hold. Valuation plummeted. The market that Instacart is in is tough, not only because of the competition, but also because of the unit economics. The $24 billion valuation as of now may likely be looked back as a fond memory in a few months’ time.
Amazon to Spend Billions on Space Launches as SpaceX Ramps Up Satellite-Internet Service. Amazon is authorized to launch more than 3,200 satellites into orbit by 2026, but it must have at least half to be operational by then. The thing is that it hasn’t sent anything up yet.
Banks Weigh Using Zelle to Challenge Visa, Mastercard. Some banks are in favor of curing the fraud issue first while others want to expand the current scope of Zelle beyond P2P payments. I am firmly in the first camp. Fraud is rampant on Zelle and a real serious threat to the service. Why enlarging the scope when such a threat hasn’t been properly addressed?
Octahedron Capital compiles quarterly reports of trends and interesting observations. Here is the latest report.
Other stuff I found interesting
Earth is a desert planet compared to these ocean worlds in the solar system. “Our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size. Consider Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth’s moon. Scientists recently used 20-year-old Voyager data to find even more evidence that Europa has twice as much water as our planet. Even tiny Pluto may have an ocean nearly as large as Earth’s.”
Deep Roots. “When you realize you can’t connect one dot without a million other dots entering the picture, you realize how impractical it is to predict what the world will look like in the future. The craziest events – good and bad – happened because little events, each of which was easy to ignore, compounded. Innovation in particular is hard to envision if you think of it happening all at once. When you think of it as tiny increments, where current innovations have roots planted decades ago, it’s more believable – and the range of possible outcomes of what we might be achievable explodes.”
Shanghai’s stunning fall from grace. I am very glad my country didn’t follow what is going on in Shanghai. Am I nervous that we live with Covid nowadays? Yes. But what is happening in Shanghai is just awful. Folks are forced to shelter at home and take rations from the government for an extended period of time. Yes, we had stay-at-home orders in the US but we still could go out and buy groceries. The draconian measures from the government just doesn’t seem to make sense. I get it. They do not want to lose face and admit mistakes, but it’s just horrible to sacrifice others’ lives just for that
Stats
Credit card late fees in the US hit $14 billion in 2019
March Madness Final drew 18.1 million viewers
US teens spend 30% of their daily video consumption on Netflix and YouTube each
Advertising employment gained 3,200 jobs in March 2022
On average, US households spend $148 on groceries in 2022, up from $142 in 2021, due to inflation
Minh Quang Duong 