What We've Been Following (May 1, 2020)
A new, bi-weekly newsletter from The Takeoff
The Takeoff Community! I hope everyone is doing well on this Friday morning in lockdown. It’s Michael - one of the founders of The Takeoff.
If you don’t mind sparing me a few minutes of your time, I’d love to share with you something new that we are trying this week: a bi-weekly email newsletter called What We’ve Been Following.
What We’ve Been Following is a curated, bi-weekly newsletter brought to you by the founders of The Takeoff. Every other Friday morning, your email inbox will be hit with an email from The Takeoff. In this email: some of the podcasts, newsletters, Tweets, startup news, etc. that we have seen and found interesting over the previous ~2 weeks.
Wait! What about the awesome interviews The Takeoff does with people like Ashley Brasier (Partner @ Lightspeed), Domm Holland (Co-founder & CEO @ Fast), Jordan Odinsky (Investor & Head of Platform @ Ground Up Ventures), and many others?
Don’t worry! We’re still going to bring you incredible new interviews with leading founders, operators, and investors.
However, we’ll also be complementing those interviews with some of the things that we’ve been following over the past few weeks.
Oh, yeah. Speaking of awesome interviews, we’ll be releasing a new interview on Monday with Max Bennett (Co-founder & Chief Product Officer at Bluecore)! Keep an eye out for that one :)
And now, after that incredibly long introduction of What We’ve Been Following… onto what we have actually been following.
(Note: we are currently testing this out. Based on how you (our subscribers) react to the first few Editions of What We’ve Been Following, we’ll determine whether or not we should keep it up)
But first, if you’re looking for a summer internship opportunity, check out these two incredible resources:
Intern From Home - started by a buddy of mine over at Brown, Chuck Isgar, and his co-founder Megan, Intern From Home aims “to connect talented students with unique skillsets with companies in need of assistance for virtual internships”
Simplify.jobs - started by a few Stanford undergrads, Simplify is essentially a common app for job / internship applications; “the goal is to help students navigate through the recruiting process stress-free during this time of COVID-19 and beyond.” I chatted with one of the founders, Michael Yan, the other day and they have big things planned - I’d definitely check out some of the opportunities available through Simplify if you’re still looking for an internship
One Last Thing before What We’ve Been Following …
Speaking of internships, we recently decided to onboard an intern (maybe multiple) for this summer. We know that a lot of students’ internships / summer plans have been canceled, so we want to enable individuals who are passionate about startups / venture capital to join the team at The Takeoff this summer and help promote our mission of inspiring the next generation of startup + tech leaders.
Description can be found, here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gyydgj0SjMnFd0z4K-in4IL4-dGb-SY7/view?usp=sharing (note - there are two different roles)
Application: https://forms.gle/57abXU1dJnQonG3w5
(Applications are open until 2 pm ET on May 9)
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about The Takeoff’s internship opportunities.
Welcome to the first Edition of What We’ve Been Following. Here are a few (mostly) tech-related things that Roshan, Lukas, and I found interesting over the past 14-days.
Books I read
The Alchemist - a good book about finding your true meaning in life, enjoying the journey / process, and doing what you love. The Alchemist had been on my reading list for a while now. I enjoyed the read :)
Thinking in Bets - teaches a lot about psychology, behavioral economics, and game theory. Good read. To be honest, I felt that the book often reiterated ideas / topics I had already learned in Economics classes, Behavioral Economics books, etc.; however, I definitely enjoyed Thinking in Bets.
Podcasts
The Twenty Minute VC: All of Harry’s new episodes are worth listening to. Per usual… I particularly enjoyed the episode from April 17 with Akshay Kothari (COO @ Notion) and Sarah Cannon (Partner @ Index Ventures). Super insightful interview about all things Notion (what the company is building, their recent fundraise, Notion’s desire to keep the team small, etc.), as well as how Sarah’s determination and love for Notion’s product helped her land Index a spot on Notion’s cap table. Rahul Vohra’s and Howie Liu’s interviews are also definitely worth listening to - I’d recommend listening to both of Rahul’s 20VC episodes, if you haven’t already, so that you can gain a better understanding of what Superhuman is building, how they are incorporating “gaming” into their product design / mission, and how the company is able to continue doing 1-on-1 onboarding as the company scales.
a16z Podcast: Favorite episodes I listened to: What the Narrow Waist of the Internet Means for Innovation Today and When Bad Policy = Bad Business Models = Bad Public Health
TED Talks Daily: How to shift your mindset and choose your future and A global pandemic calls for global solutions were both good listens
Venture Stories: This episode is from a little further back than two weeks ago, but it discusses a lot of the implications and impacts that COVID will (likely) have on startups / future startups - What Life and Startups will Look Like After COVID-19
Twitter
The Takeoff’s recent interview guest Domm Holland (Co-founder & CEO at Fast) started an awesome Twitter thread a few weeks ago — replies were awesome and over 200 startups took to sharing their basic info in the thread. Michelle Priest did us all a favor by putting all the responses into a spreadsheet - see here :)
“VC Twitter” has been dominated by talk of Clubhouse — in case you’re wondering what Clubhouse is, Josh Constine wrote an article about it, here: https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/18/clubhouse-app-chat-rooms/. When I started writing this, Josh was an Editor-At-Large at TechCrunch. However, the world changes quickly, and Josh just joined SignalFire as a Principal & Head Of Content - congrats to Josh on the move over to venture! Clubhouse is still invite-only and the app is currently in beta testing (I think my invite got lost in the mail - if anyone wants to share one with me, dm me on Twitter @mspiro3). I’ve been using Clubhouse builder Paul Davison’s other new app Talkshow for a few weeks now to listen to interesting conversations amongst venture capitalists, founders, and more. I am excited to see how large Talkshow and Clubhouse become - I love the concepts!
A16Z co-founder and GP Marc Andreessen, known on Twitter as @pmarca, wrote an essay on why It’s Time To Build. If you haven’t already read the post, you should
Articles, Newsletters, Medium Posts, Etc.
If you do nothing else today, go read John Luttig’s recent post titled “When Tailwinds Vanished.” As Geoff Lewis tweeted, “While most vc principals were jerking either themselves or other vc principals off on clubhouse and feeling chic af to be on a mobile app, Luttig wrote the most thoughtful piece of vc content of 2020 thus far.” Turns out that John was also on Clubhouse the night he released the post 😂😂
Chris Harper (MBA Candidate at Columbia Business School and MBA Associate at Red Sea Ventures) wrote an interesting and insightful Medium post about what’s next in the video conferencing space. Check it out, here: What comes after Zoom? (Chris is an up-and-coming player to watch in the venture space)
Mary Meeker (Partner at Bond Capital) wrote a 28-page report on coronavirus trends. Check it out on Axios, here.
Alex Danco - Debt is Coming — Alex just joined Shopify to work on Shopify Money. Shopify is the present and the future. What they’re building is incredible
Cybersecurity During COVID-19: Q&A with Abnormal Security’s Evan Reiser and Greylock’s Saam Motamedi - awesome Q&A highlighting some of the effects of COVID on technology & cybersecurity, in particular
Favorite New Startup(s) I’ve Seen?
Vinovest: “Simple, modern wine investing” - that’s Vinovest. Investors have increasingly been turning to alternative asset classes in recent years. I chatted with Anthony Zhang (Co-founder & CEO of Vinovest and Thiel Alum) the other day. Key takeaways from the conversation:
Wine, as an asset class, consistently provides higher returns than other alternative asset classes (Over the past 40 years, wine has provided 12.1% annual returns — wine has steadily appreciated)
Wine acts as a strong, safe investment during these unsteady economic times (In Q1 of 2020, Vinovest returned 1.1%, while other equities were down >20% — wine has strong qualities as a hedge)
Soundbrew: “Music streaming that helps artists earn more from their music through direct payments from listeners.” Soundbrew seems to be part of a much larger trend that I have been following: paying creatives directly. Substack falls into this category for writing / curated news. Soundbrew is after the opportunity for music!
Other Things
I wrote up a blog post yesterday about the origins of The Takeoff. In the post, I highlight some of the things that prompted Roshan, Lukas, and I to start The Takeoff, what The Takeoff’s mission is, why we think the problem we are solving is important, and more. Check out the post, here: Origins of The Takeoff
That’s it for the first Edition of What We’ve Been Following!
If you want to join the action on Twitter and see some of the Tweets and threads that other members of The Takeoff Community are following, be sure to follow The Takeoff on Twitter (@_TheTakeoff) and subscribe to our List: The Takeoff.
I’m on Twitter @mspiro3 👋
