But I feel you and it can be one of the most interesting ways to enjoy your time off: reading articles from Ben’s List 🙂
Check out my Selected profile to dive into previous posts and (re)discover around 300 articles that made it to my weekly selection.
This week is a short post since it’s my last one before we take a break and return on August 19th. We cover marketing, venture capital and startup astronomy.
Strategy
Choosing Your North Star Metric
“Whatever companies choose as their guiding metric, all energy and brainpower will flow in that direction. This can be hugely effective — it has worked wonders for companies like Airbnb, Netflix, and Uber, especially early on — but it can also be dangerous. By maintaining a laser focus on a single metric for too long, teams risk short-term thinking, missing new opportunities, and sacrificing the user experience.”
Venture Capital
The future of VC is decentralized
“VC is a relationship business… this is why industry folks tend to be so resistant to process and tooling. And yet we shouldn’t forget that the relationships in VC are governed by numbers. The relationship between a VC and a founder is governed by the cash and equity.”
Startup cities in the Entrepreneurial Age
“Each day, more than two new unicorns emerged globally during 2021. There are now 1,601 unicorns and $1B+ exits of which 1,071 still private unicorns. The combined global value of tech companies has ballooned to over $35 trillion, of which $18T from companies founded after 2000, and $10T from companies founded after 2010. The rate of innovation is accelerating.”
Marketing
Virality deep-dive: Virality vs. Network Effects
“Network Effects and Virality are often confused in the online content world, possibly because the two often occur together and, in such cases, end up reinforcing each other. Network effects and Virality are, however, completely different. There are many products which have network effects but are not viral. Conversely, many viral products do not have network effects.”
Network Effects – A product with network effects gets more valuable as more users use it. They are achieved only after a certain critical mass is reached but can prove to be a very strong source of value and competitive advantage beyond that point.
Virality – A viral product is one whose rate of adoption increases with adoption. Within a certain limit, the product grows faster as more users adopt it. There are many products that exhibit virality without exhibiting network effects.
TED Talks Are Coming to Clubhouse
“‘For nearly forty years TED has brought the world’s preeminent ideas, imaginations and voices to audiences,’ Stoetzel said in a statement. ‘This partnership will bring those minds into a dialogue with the millions of creators who make up the Clubhouse community.'”