The Takeoff's 2020 Wrapped, Robinhood Snack's Top Trends of the Year, and More
Weekend reads and listens for the first weekend of 2021.
Welcome to The Takeoff, a newsletter and podcast helping students and young professionals learn more about startups, tech, venture capital, and more. In this newsletter, we share content that our team found worthwhile over the past two weeks. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe below, share it with friends, and give us a like by hitting the ❤️ button!
Hey everyone 👋
Happy New Year and welcome to the January 2nd Edition of What We’ve Been Following, our bi-weekly newsletter highlighting some of the newsletters, podcasts, blog posts, tweets, startup news, and more that our Team found interesting over the past few weeks.
If you missed the last Edition of What We’ve Been Following, published on December 19th and written by Michael, be sure to check it out, here.
New content since the last What We’ve Been Following newsletter from Dec 19.
(Podcast) Michael chatted with Joshua Rahn (Co-Founder & Managing Director at Oceans). Oceans is a new, NYC-based early-stage venture fund.
(Podcast) Michael chatted with Job van der Voort (Founder & CEO at Remote). This episode was a masterclass on the future of remote work and distributed teams.
What’s coming up.
(Podcast) Next Monday, we’ll be releasing a podcast episode with Eric Glyman (Co-Founder & CEO at Ramp)
(Mini Deep-Dive) Michael has been diving deep into a fast-growing, super exciting space over the past month or so. His post will be released early this year. I learned a lot from reading it and am extremely excited for its release.
And much, much more!
The Takeoff’s “2020 Wrapped”
We recently tweeted our most popular interviews from 2020, and here we’d like to share some of our favorite quotes/learnings from our top Newsletter Editions this year:
Jeff Morris Jr. on advice for students interested in breaking into VC: “I've seen people create fantasy startup portfolios, where they give themselves a certain budget to spend on startups and stack rank companies and allocate those assets accordingly. I think trying to simulate or get real-life experience in investing is really important because it's a skill and something that requires a lot of time and mistakes, quite frankly.”
Henrique Dubugras on selling being a learned skill rather than an innate one: “When I started our first company Pagarme, I thought that sales was this innate skill; either you know how to do it and you're schmoozing people kind of like a car dealer salesman, or you're nerdy and smart, and you can't be both. It turns out that sales is just a skill like any other.”
Anu Hariharan on important traits of founders: “Number one is grit. You cannot get caught up by tough days because the only thing that's going to be certain as you scale a startup is that no day will be perfect. There'll be good news, bad news, good news, bad news every day. It is a complete roller coaster.”
Ashley Brasier on students reaching out to investors to build a relationship: “I would say that conversations should always be a two-way exchange of information. If I were a student, I would think to myself: ‘what am I going to offer the investor in this conversation to make it valuable for them.’ What I notice when talking with students is that students have the ability to share information about trends that people their age are seeing, that as a 30 or 40 year old investor you might not see.”
Delian Asparouhov on finding a job that you intrinsically enjoy: “The people who are best at their jobs don't think about their job as a “job,” it's just what they want to do when they wake up.”
This interview didn’t make the cut for most popular, but below is my personal favorite piece of advice from The Takeoff in 2020:
Saam Motamedi on advice for aspiring venture capitalists: “There are a lot of firms, and there are a lot of investors at those firms, and as such, the business is more competitive than it's ever been. So if you're thinking about building a career in venture capital, then the question becomes, "how do you set yourself up to be successful when you are working in venture capital?”
What We’ve Been Following
(Notes) Lei Zhang (Hillhouse Capital) gave a lecture at Columbia Business School in 2015, and the notes available on MarketFolly.com are packed with knowledge and advice.
(Blog/Notes) 20 Lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
(Podcast) The team at Robinhood Snacks whipped up their top three trends from 2020.
(Blog) Erik Torenberg highlights an opportunity in education and gives a call to action for startups in the space.
(Blog) Hunter Walk, a former guest on The Takeoff, shares his concerns regarding venture-backed mental health & addiction startups.
(Podcast) Morning Brew’s Kinsey Grant sits down with SexTech entrepreneur Cindy Gallop to discuss an industry we’re all familiar with but may not know the business side of –– adult entertainment.
(News Curation) Michael’s old boss Ali Afridi is building a platform/newsletter that helps share venture-focused content.
(Blog) Lenny Rachitsky gives us his 2020 Year in Review. Hopefully, in 2021 The Takeoff’s subscriber chart looks a bit more like his!
(Fundraising) Dave Portnoy and Barstool Sports are raising funds to help small businesses get through COVID.
(Fundraising) David Bromberg (my roommate!) and Alex Banning, the founders of Open Water Accelerator, are raising a rolling fund to invest in GenZ founders.
(Other) Good news, gamers! This ten-year-long study found no link between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior later in life.
(Other) Epic is on its way to making Fortnite more than just a game by improving Unreal Engine and giving more functionality to Fortnite Creative Mode, making Fortnite more of a platform and giving it some sandbox functionality similar to Minecraft and Roblox.
Great thread on Zapier’s SEO and content strategy
Chamath “Warren Buffet” Palihapitiya
Tech Investor Stephen Curry (SC30 Inc.) shoots 3’s for 5+ minutes without a miss
An interesting piece of knowledge from Harry Stebbings
I recommend re-reading this timeless Naval thread as we enter the new year
That’s all for today’s Edition of What We’ve Been Following!
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We have some amazing interviews lined up to be released in the coming weeks! Let us know your feedback by shooting us a tweet or DM on Twitter (@_TheTakeoff).
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Written by: Roshan Chandna (Co-founder at The Takeoff. Junior at Washington University in St. Louis. Prev. Investment Analyst Intern at Octahedron Capital)