On culture – “part of daily life at Netflix with a daily Circle of Feedback and annual written and live 360 Assessments, in which you meet with the team to get ripped apart.“
Bessemer Venture Partners are famous for publishing their anti-portfolio.
Recently they took to learning from their success and published a series of memos from some of their most successful venture investments.
“One pattern that consistently emerges is that Bessemer’s best investment decisions centered on people. In retrospect, the early products themselves are barely recognizable today. Rather, passionate, analytical and relentless founders zigged and zagged their way to that elusive “product-market fit”, and these memos provide a glimpse of those winning entrepreneurs before they were famous.“
“It took nearly a century for the flush toilet to approach 80% household penetration. Electricity took 30 years to get to 80%; Refrigerators 20 years; cell phones 15 years; Social media 12 years.“
Brilliant article on the monopolistic power of food delivery businesses especially as they begin to vertically integrate and merge around the world.
“Losing money to acquire market power, or to steal from investors, is a form of counterfeiting, because it drives honest competitors that have to generate a profit out of the market“.
A great presentation and separate post about a huge eCommerce business you probably haven’t heard of, founded only in 2015.
Its success is down to a team buying feature, social integration, gamification and live streaming.
These features have led to a daily active user (DAU) to monthly active user (MAU) ratio, a measure of engagement, of almost 50% – the highest, by some margin, among peers.
An interactive table of the tech world’s most valuable patent portfolios.
This chart shows the top 20 companies overall. Clicking through it’s possible to rank by industry.
Usual suspects at the top but interesting to see companies like Cirrus Logic and Sonos making it.
For an explanation of how the Pipeline Power score – which takes into account the value rather than the raw quantity of patents in a portfolio – is derived click here.
NB Sadly the data is slightly dated (from 2017) but likely still very relevant.
CMA have published an in-depth report on competition in online platforms and digital advertising in the UK.
The dominance of these platforms is clear – as the chart shows Google has market power in the entire vertical chain which takes 35p for every £1 of advertising spend.
Lots of interesting charts inside – some to come in future snippets.
Since 1958, it has been a driving force in the creation of weather satellites, GPS, personal computers, modern robotics, the Internet, autonomous cars, and voice interfaces, to name a few.
This fascinating and thorough article, or more precisely a self describe “collection of atomic notes”, attempts to explain why DARPA works in search of creating a private sector funded “ARPA”.
The section on program managers is worth a look as the characteristics described there are also those that make good investment analysts.
A chart that is one possible explanation for Tesla’s dominance.
When compared to direct competitors like Jaguar, Mercedes, Audi and Porsche, Tesla models 3 and S have almost 2x the efficiency which translates directly into savings.
Comprehensive report with loads of stats on “whatpeople in the UK are doing online, how they are served by online content providers and platforms, and their experiences of using the internet, alongside business models and industry trends.“
71% of all online time is spent on mobiles now, yet half of over 75 year olds don’t use the internet at all.
39% of online time by adults was spent on Google or Facebook owned sites, and these two control 79% of UK online ad revenue.
This dataset tracks the flow of talent in AI around the world.
The chart shows the top 25 institutions for AI research.
“The United States has a large lead over all other countries in top-tier AI research, with nearly 60% of top-tier researchers working for American universities and companies. The US lead is built on attracting international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI researchers working in the United States having received undergraduate degrees in other countries.”
