A compendium of what our partners read each week, highlighting macro industry trends, our investment focus areas, and general personal and business strategies.
News About Our Portfolio Companies
• Adaptly partnered with Blue 449 to drive 21.9M Facebook video views
• Phonelisten CEO Lauren Leto’s thoughts on the promising future of phone numbers
• Where brands and influencers meet, by Fohr Card
• Snaps founder Vivian Rosenthal discusses tech, communications and the future
• Who’s winning the Social Media war? Social Flow CEO Jim Anderson discusses
• Grovo providing inclusivity training for managers and leaders • Kanvas enables users to turn photos into works of art with free editing tools in their SDK
Industry Trends
• AirBnB CEO says its IPO is ‘half-way’ ready + tax agreements with 275 governments
• Walmart offers discounts for online orders picked up in stores
• Tesla pick-up truck in two years + the 22 year old at the heart of self-driving cars + Apple receives CA permit to test self-driving cars
• Jeff Bezo’s annual letter + Amazon’s look at Whole Foods
• Where American income has grown the most over the past 25 years + Americans spend 2.65 billion hours on taxes each year
• Android overtakes Windows as internet’s most used operating system + IBM and Microsoft re-making themselves
• The anatomy of a successful IPO + a dearth of IPOs…not the fault of red tape?
• When CEO’s don’t win awards, they make more acquisitions
• The future of agriculture in cities
• The Netflix generation
• A counter to the convertible notes debate
Artificial Intelligences
• Visual intro to machine learning + the arrival of AI + the boundaries of AI emotional intelligence
• Dark secrets at the heart of AI
• Bezos says AI to fuel Amazon success
• Google’s neural networks aiming to get smarter
• Jobs and robots: evidence from US labor markets
• The future of humanity is to merge with technology
Commerce
• The retail revolution: From Zombie malls to Bonobos
• How Spotify curated the ultimate playlist for brand growth
• What’s happening with retail and fulfillment jobs
• Reflecting on Adam Dunn (Bonobos CEO’s) post on e-commerce four years ago
• What big stores can learn from small stores given 92% of retail purchases are still made in person
• Why the fashion industry brought vertical commerce back into style
• Retail store closures on pace to surpass number of store closures in the Great Recession of 2008 + 89K retail jobs lost since October
• Nike no longer the top brand amongst teenage boys
IoT Software Stack
• Amazon allowing Echo’s microphone tech to be built into other companies
• Adam Marchick, CEO of Voice Labs, on voice tech • IoT is real despite skeptics
Work Platforms
• Google entering the hiring space
• Gig work driving employees to want more flexibility in the office or at home?
Content and Experiences
• Instagram now has more DAU than Snapchat with 375M DM users + social media usage by age + Snapchat users open app 18 times on average per day
• Digital media valuation
• The first decade of AR
• Google Daydream VR
• Facebook launches augmented reality Camera Effects developer platform + a beta version of Spaces, its social VR platform
Blockchain Beyond Currency
• Global blockchain innovation – US lags, Europe and China lead
• Blockchain in energy sector
Health
• Apple working on glucose monitoring on iPhones
• The biggest US health insurer is hiring a blockchain director
Business and Personal Strategy
• 10 behaviors to achieve happiness
• How to manage your time
• Toxic mental habits to give up
• The art of one sentence product descriptions
• Generic VC/PE reference questions
• How to write great investor updates + what it takes to fund your business
• How to avoid the ‘keeping up’ trap
• Learn these 9 tough skills
• Why deep breathing relieves stress