Worth reading – after all this is the man in charge of nearly 40% of US eCommerce as well as AWS (Amazon Web Services) – the infrastructure most start-ups run on.
A gem – Bezos has given $42m of funding for a clock – The Clock of the Long Now – on his ranch that will tell time accurately for 10,000 years.
“The upcoming arrival of services like Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and Peacock is increased competition, but they are still small compared to linear TV … In our view, the likely outcome from the launch of these new services will be to accelerate the shift from linear TV to on demand consumption of entertainment. Just like the evolution from broadcast TV to cable, these once-in-a-generation changes are very large and open up big, new opportunities for many players.”
Seriously interesting article on Calouste Gulbenkian and negotiating.
If you haven’t heard of him he was the richest man in the world in the 1950s by virtue of negotiating “5%” royalties on Middle Eastern (especially Iraqi) oil developed by western companies.
Lessons include never put all demands upfront but make demands step by step, often right at the last moment.
Make agreements so complex that non one will dispute them later.
“An S-1 is meant to be a bland financial document, but WeWork’s took a different direction. With Adam’s encouragement, Rebekah became unusually involved in the artistic presentation of the document. “The traditional approach to producing an S-1 is bankers and lawyers hashing this out, but the process was continually usurped by Rebekah’s involvement,” one executive said, echoing a sentiment expressed by multiple people who worked on the project. “She treated it like it was the September issue of Vogue.” “
A fascinating piece on how the nutrition of the world’s plants is changing because of climate change.
“Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.“
We previously pointed out that it was looking bad for these products.
Now work at New York University has established the first link between cancer and vaping nicotine in mice.
The usual provisos hold – results in humans might be different – but …
“Out of 40 mice exposed to e-cigarette vapor with nicotine over 54 weeks, 22.5% developed lung cancer and 57.5% developed precancerous lesions on the bladder. …
… None of the 20 mice exposed to e-cigarette smoke without nicotine developed cancer over the four years they studied the mice, researchers said.“
