Vivek Wadhwa: “With exponential advances in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), computing, sensors, and synthetic biology, not only have costs dropped, but cutting-edge innovation has now been globalised. Today, there are many better places to build world-changing technologies than Silicon Valley. One of these places is India, where you can hire top-notch talent for less than 10% of what it costs in the Valley, and pathology data needed to train machine-learning algorithms is available in abundance. While San Francisco is the global centre of AI development due to positive network effects, technology leaders such as Sam Altman say that India cannot build complex AI technologies. However, what I have seen in India leads me to believe that Silicon Valley’s advantage will not last long and that its insularity, arrogance, and overconfidence may be its downfall. As AOL founder Steve Case has long been arguing, the rest of the world is rising.”
Economist: “There are signs that the so-called “founder premium” may be waning in a world in which capital is no longer cheap and investors prefer jam today to jam tomorrow. The Economist has analysed the performance of the publicly listed software firms in the Nasdaq Emerging Cloud index produced by Bessemer Venture Partners, a VC outfit. From 2018 until the end of 2021, the share prices of founder-led firms in the index outperformed the rest by a half. Beginning in 2022, however, that gap disappeared. To understand why, consider that founder-bosses in the index invest more money in research and development, expand their teams faster, deliver higher revenue growth—but generate less cash. During the tech boom of the past decade, a founder’s success depended chiefly on their ability to set a bold vision, raise funding from venture capitalists, gobble up talent and get a head start on possible rivals. Investors now demand greater attention to costs and a speedier path to profits. What are founders to do? One option is to temper their lofty ambitions and reinvent themselves as fastidious stewards of capital.”
The Generalist: “Danny [Rimer] believes the best founders attack their mission with a sense of destiny, operating as if they were put on earth to pursue their specific dream. Examples include Figma’s Dylan Field, Discord’s Jason Citron, and Glossier’s Emily Weiss. All impressed Danny with their drive – and have gone on to disrupt their respective industries. In evaluating a startup, investors often assess the company’s “total available market” (TAM). This is reasonable enough: how can you assess a startup’s potential if you don’t know the size of its opportunity? Danny argues that focusing on TAM is a distraction that discourages VCs from backing truly disruptive companies – many of which may not have a clear market yet. Etsy, for example, appeared to have a small market, but Index Ventures backed the firm anyway. Today, the e-commerce giant is valued at nearly $8 billion.”
Pratik Bhadra (my Netcore colleague) on Inbox Commerce: “Once the undisputed digital marketing workhorse, over the past decade email marketing has faced a period of stagnant innovation. While email often drives as much as 30% of overall e-commerce revenue, it’s been relegated to being a cash cow with little to no marketing innovation focus. A transformative shift is now on the horizon, poised to revolutionize email marketing. Its potential impact can be likened to the game-changing introduction of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) in 1992, which allowed multimedia files to be embedded within emails. Inbox commerce, powered by Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for Email, radically enhances the email experience for shoppers and retailers. Inbox commerce enables brands to build interactive experiences that foster two-way communication with consumers while removing the need for redirects and landing pages, reducing friction for the shopper and shortening the email conversion funnel.”
Molly Graham: “Work whiplash — where your momentum was going at a great pace and in a clear direction and then you either slammed in to a wall or got quickly jerked in a new direction — is one of the worst feelings as an employee, in my opinion. It is demotivating and demoralizing. And it happens all the time in companies that are going through rapid change. The context around the person is changing so fast that it takes a lot of proactive management to help folks stay connected and ensure that everyone is swimming in the same direction. As a manager or leader, helping people not be lost — not waste time and energy — is one of the most important things to spend time on. It ultimately means revisiting, regularly, the basics of management. Do the people that work for you know what their role is? Do they know what’s expected of them in that role? Do they know how they fit in to the larger context? Do they know how to move work forward?”
