Video of the week:
Honorable mention:
Podcast of the week:
Investing City Podcast - Business Lessons with Bluegrass Capital
Article of the week:
Great profile on Amazon and Jeff Bezos from New Yorker. Ring-fence 30 minutes for this. Excerpt:
“Silicon Valley is filled with product companies. Google invented two products—a spectacular search engine and a set of algorithms for matching people’s online behavior to ads—that today deliver eighty-five per cent of its revenue. Facebook invented (and acquired) addictive social-media products and then basically imitated Google’s ad-matching algorithms, and gets ninety-eight per cent of its revenue from those products. Amazon is a process company. Last year, it collected a hundred and twenty-two billion dollars from online retail sales, and another forty-two billion by helping other firms sell and ship their own goods.”
Honorable mention:
50 Ways to be ridiculously generous - and feel ridiculously good.
Statistic of the week:
Number of living languages spoken per country in 2019
🇵🇬Papua New Guinea: 840
🇮🇩Indonesia: 710
🇳🇬Nigeria: 524
🇮🇳India: 453
🇺🇸USA: 335
🇦🇺Australia: 319
🇨🇳China: 305
🇲🇽Mexico: 292
🇨🇲Cameroon: 275
🇧🇷Brazil: 228
Honorable mention:
20 companies produced more than a third of all CO2 emissions b/t 1965-2017.
Top culprits:
Saudi Aramco 59bn tons produced
Chevron 43.4bn
Gazprom 43.2bn
ExxonMobil 42bn
Natl Iranian Oil Co 36bn
Quote I’m reflecting on this week:
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” - Aldous Huxley
Honorable mention:
“Change how you see and see how you change” - Buddha
Book recommendation of the week:
The Hard Thing about Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
Great memoir from one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known VCs/founders with some great insights
Start-up of the week:
Revel - moped sharing platform started recently in New York that just raised a $28M Series A. I’m not sure whether the unit economics on the sharing mobility platforms are that great but investors still seem to think excited about it!
Tweet of the week:
Lots of useful stuff buried in the replies to the thread:
Honorable mention:
Image of the week:
Honorable mention:
Question of the week:
Ask yourselves this:
“‘Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?…'
“…Unless I feel like I’m working on the most important problem that I can help with, then I’m not going to feel good about how I’m spending my time. And that’s what this company is.” - Mark Zuckerberg
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