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Jun 7 2019

📠"I want to die face-first in my typewriter."👩‍💻

#85
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If I had to ask you to read only one article from today, it's the first one below.
ज्ञान
FASCINATING. Explains the spread of ideas, diseases, wildfires, cultural phenomenon, even memes – anything that could be "viral" in nature. Your user adoption?

It turns out there is there's a precise tipping point that separates subcritical networks (those fated for extinction) from supercritical networks (those that are capable of never ending growth).

This one will leave you thinking about second-order consequences for days.
While the article uses cooking as an example, it applies to several industries: ridesharing (Ola, Uber), accomodation (OYO, Airbnb), coworking, etc.

"As friction goes away, we turn from asset ownership to service consumption"

Quite simply: improvements in tech, management and supply-chain efficiency turn line item costs into reliable, interchangeable and inexpensive component parts. This allows the activity to be increasingly standardised and served in-the-cloud.
"That's never happening again. I may lose again. I may not win everything. But I will never fail at anything."

Close-up story on the mental psychology of performing at the highest levels.

What differentiates elite athletes is their ability to grow and learn from stress, rather than be held back.

Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, Magic Johnson all made massive mistakes early in the career in clutch situations. But what separates them is their mental toughening.
Most aircraft carriers trap you in a metal tube and force you to watch old TV and movies. They subtly force consumers to use their own devices but Emirates have a different approach.

They target business execs and position themselves as the main media channel for frequent fliers. For this segment, they control eyeballs for hundreds of hours a year.

Such premium customers are often hard to reach on digital so Emirates is controlling a valuable interface.
This is written for investment firms but it's very relevant to growth-stage startups. As you start to go beyond 30-50 people, the structure of the org needs to change.

For founders, this is the equivalent of telling them that when they grow up, they need to worry about a mortgage and paying bills.

But this necessary evil is not a bad thing if done right.
"There are no miracles. There is only discipline."

I never thought I would draw parallels between Danielle Steel and Isaac Asimov but their sheer discipline in being at the desk day-after-day and just fleshing it out has made them both legends in the industry.

This newsletters subject-line is from this article. Notable read – also for how Steele turns her nose up at millennial "burnout culture".
Hardy Boys meets the internet.

This Reddit community "is a cohort of anonymous, amateur online detectives". Over the years, they have helped solve real-world mysteries and crimes.
Every action of a user generates data. Data is valuable. Often, companies collecting data don't even know how it might eventually be used.

To go from unstructured to structured, data goes through a supply chain of workers labelling and organising this data.

This standardisation increasingly hides what data may be used for. The Alexa in your living room may be used for military surveillance…
First they did it with Yoga. Then turmeric and ghee. And now Ayurveda.

Slowly but surely, the West is taking ancient Indian practices and making them cool.

"I want to die face-first in my typewriter."
— Agatha Christie

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