What We've Been Following (June 12, 2020)
A bi-weekly newsletter from The Takeoff
Hey everyone — welcome to the fourth Edition of What We’ve Been Following, a curated, bi-weekly newsletter highlighting some of the podcasts, blog posts, tweets, startup news, and more that Roshan, Lukas, and I found interesting over the past two weeks.
If you missed the last edition of What We’ve Been Following, written by Lukas, you can check it out here.
You can find The Takeoff on Twitter @_TheTakeoff.
Companies & Projects 🚀
Advise Forward. A buddy of mine who recently graduated from Cornell is working on something that I think can be helpful for a lot of The Takeoff’s subscribers. Advise Forward is a platform where a team of recent grads give advice on topics such as job recruiting, internship recruiting, and starting new projects in exchange for optional donations to a charity focused on COVID relief efforts. If you have an upcoming job interview or want to learn more about a specific industry, Advise Forward can be a great resource for you to learn from people who were recently in your shoes.
Loom. Remote work is making video calls and communication more and more important for businesses. Loom lets employees send short videos — rather than messages — to coworkers to get important points across and communicate. Sequoia led Loom’s Series B this past fall.
Books 📚
The Design of Everyday Things. I just finished reading this book. It gives a great understanding of how many of the things we use are designed to be used and how even when individuals make mistakes / struggle to use certain things, it is usually the result of a lack of intuitive guidance, rather than the fault of the individual.
Culture Code. A good read on how to get culture right, why some teams succeed while others fail, and more related to organizational psychology, team building, etc.
Start with Why. This book had been on my reading list for a while. I finally got to it late last week. Simon Sinek goes in-depth on how focusing on “why,” rather than “what,” can make individuals / businesses successful. Super brief overview: People don’t buy products / have brand loyalty because of “what” companies do, they do so because of “why” companies do what they do.
Barbarians at the Gate. Good read to learn more about LBOs, M&A, etc. The book explores KKR’s acquisition of RJR Nabisco.
Podcasts 🎙
Invest Like the Best: Ben Thompson - Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators. Ben Thompson joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy to discuss Aggregation Theory and many of his other concepts / ideas. This is a super insightful podcast episode — Ben and Patrick dive into a variety of topics related to Spotify’s recent actions in the podcast space, Netflix’s business model and production habits, why a high churn for Shopify is actually a positive signal, the difference between aggregators and platforms, and more. This has been one of the most insightful podcasts I’ve listened to in a while.
The Twenty Minute VC: It’s Time To Talk About Drinking, How to Stop, The Impact It Has, How Life Changes Post-Alcohol, and The Biggest Misconceptions on Drinking. Harry is joined by Ryan Peterson (Founder & CEO at Flexport), Justin Kan (Founder at Atrium), Matteo Franceschetti (Founder & CEO at Eight Sleep), and Steve Schlafman (Investor & Coach at High Output) to discuss their old drinking habits, how they stopped drinking, and how stopping drinking has influenced their life / work.
a16z Podcast: What We Can’t Reveal We Can’t Heal. Conversation between a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz, Shaka Senghor (author and advocate for criminal justice reform), and Terry Brown (former Palo Alto police officer) on policing, police brutality, media’s coverage of recent protests, and more.
Twitter 🐦
Octahedron Capital, an SF-based technology investment firm, put together a list / deck highlighting some of the firm’s learnings from Q1 2020. You can check out the thread, here. Our co-founder Roshan Chandna is currently interning for Octahedron — if you have any questions related to their findings / learnings, feel free to shoot him a dm on Twitter.
“What I wish I knew when I was younger.” Drift CEO David Cancel tweeted a 25-part thread on some of the things he wishes he knew when he was younger. A lot of great advice and insights from David — definitely check it out! You can see the thread on Thread Reader, here.
Articles, Newsletters, Blog Posts, Etc. 📝
CX Report. John Maeda gives a brief (13.5 minutes) talk about what he’s found related to “how industry is transforming itself, digitally.”
Where Did you Go to School. This post is a few years old, but I think it is important to bring to light, nonetheless. One of my bosses from last summer, Richard Kerby (GP at Equal Ventures), compiled research on the lack of diversity in venture capital. For the past few years, Richard has been working hard to increase diversity in venture capital. The graphic below shows his findings on the Racial Breakdown of venture capitalists (in 2016 and 2018). Richard’s research also led him to find that “40% of venture investors have attended Stanford or Harvard. Just TWO schools!” You can find the data behind Richard’s research and findings, here.
Adidas and Allbirds team up to make environmentally friendly shoes. Allbirds and Adidas are teaming up to make high performance, sustainable sneakers. The companies hope to use one another’s strengths to create high-performing shoes with low carbon dioxide output. The Allbirds Wool Runners and Adidas Ultraboost 20 are my two favorite sneakers — excited to see what products the collaboration produces!
Anxiety in product development. Blog post by Andre Schweighofer on tactics for product managers to handle stress / anxiety in their jobs, breaking down different common patterns of anxiety’s effects on PMs.
A16z launches the Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund. Nait Jones is leading a16z’s new initiative — focused on investing in underrepresented and underserved founders. Super excited to see how the Fund and program helps promote diversity among founders and startups!
Other Things… 💡
Medium launches Newsletters. Medium just launched a Newsletters function that allows Publications to start a newsletter, giving the newsletter a “name and description.” The launch of this new feature comes just days after Barack Obama wrote a short post on Medium titled, “How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change.” Don’t worry, Substack. We’re here to stay — at least for the foreseeable future 😁
That’s it for the fourth Edition of What We’ve Been Following!
If you want to check out any of our founder and investor interviews from the past two weeks, click on one of the links below:
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