@Nigella_Lawson Now that Twitter has Bookmarks, I bookmark it. Has that feature rolled out in the UK yet? I also bookmark it within my browser's Bookmark This Page into the appropriate folder. : )

"🛠️ OPEN BUSINESS IDEAS 🛠️

Below a list of business/product ideas I had or read

I believe EVERYONE should have a blog.

→ It helps you clarify your thoughts.
→ It helps you land better opportunities (jobs).
→ It helps others (we all have something to share).

Just start with the focus on sharing what you know and helping others 🙌

Today I create a small Project in Reactjs and learn the concepts of Lifecycle In React
✅Mounting
✅Updating
✅Unmounting

#altcampus #reactjs #CodeNewbie #learning
#Coding #frontenddevelopment

Nobody talks about failure in Silicon Valley, yet 90% of startups fail.

Why?

3 yrs ago, @neerajberry and I shut down @Sprig, which raised $60M from @GreylockVC + @socialcapital & grew to $20m revenue.

Then, it all fell apart.

For an honest story about failure,

**Read on**

In 2013, I was @lyft, envious of how fast it was growing!

What about @lyft for food?

We looked @Postmates + thought:
- the food arrived sloppy / restaurants don't care about delivery
- it took forever (1hr)
- too expensive

We struggled through product iterations until we found "magic":

3 taps and $15 for a healthy meal delivered in 15 min

To make it possible, we had to run the restaurant ourselves; it would be expensive but worth it

We recruited @n8keller, Morgan Springer + @mattkent as founders

We launched and had immediate success. The buzz was unbelievable. Within months we were on track to do $1M revenue/year.

Our Series A was a hot round. I did 4 partner meetings on the same day. Raised $10M.

Great investors, great team, off to the races - @omal and @simonrothman

2 challenges arose:

1) Govt. SF health + planning made our lives hell. They didn't like our innovations. We had to bribe officials ("lobbying").

2) Gross Margins (GM). As we grew, our burn rate grew too. We were losing money on every meal. If only we could get to critical mass.

1) Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'm going to walk you through "The Kelly Criterion".

2) In 1956, John Kelly published a paper titled "A New Interpretation of Information Rate" in the Bell System Technical Journal.

3) In the paper, Kelly described a simple and elegant way for investors to strategically allocate capital in the face of uncertainty.

This is what is now known as the Kelly Criterion.

4) The approach is easiest to understand with an example.

I'll keep it as realistic as possible:

Imagine that you walk into an antique store one day. Due to the persistence of the salesman there, you buy an old lamp from him.

5) You take the lamp home. You rub it. Out comes a genie. Nothing unusual.

What happens when a neural net tries to write rhyming lyrics?

Apparently, an ode to defunct Swiss chemical company Alusuisse.

The fine rhyming work of @mark_riedl's Weird A.I. program
https://t.co/TAOIWBr7RI

Rhyming is super hard, especially in English where threw rhymes with through but not dough, and the emphasis patterns are all over the place.

There's lots of AI poetry but there's a reason it doesn't tend to rhyme

.@mark_riedl's algorithm has a part that chooses rhyming words, scoring them according to their similarity to the song's theme.

Here, "Uzbekistan" was the closest rhyme it could think of for "saucepan" given cakes as a topic.

Good job, AI

There's a subalgorithm that has to come up with lines of a given number of syllables.

Occasionally it gives up and returns a line that's way too short. Another subalgorithm chooses from several candidate lines & often prefers the short lines.

So you get

au-u-u-u-u-u-u-gust

The subalgorithm that has to generate the rhyming lines often gets desperate, especially when the subalgorithm that chose the rhyme handed it something like "welp" or "alusuisse".

It will sometimes resort to making up words entirely

10 fast-growing companies you've (probably) never heard of.

Thread 👇

1/ @Cubii

Ultra-portable elliptical trainer.

Why the 📈?

-Part of growing workout @ home trend
-Super small (fits under a desk or table)
-Proprietary tracking app
-Smart "fit while you sit" branding
-Sizable community of Cubii users

2/ @undraw_co

Open source illustration library.

Why the 📈?

-1000s pro-level illustrations
-As illustrations replace stock photos, demand for illustrations=📈
-Part of growing open source media libraries (music, images and icons)trend

@unDraw_co 3/ @flodeskinc

Email service provider that focuses on design.

Why the 📈?

-No-frills UI
-Appeals to Shopify stores
-Attractive email templates
-Designed for ecommerce marketing

@unDraw_co @flodeskinc 4/ @pushpay

Venmo for church donations.

Why the 📈?

-7900+ churches use it
-Disrupting cash donation baskets
-Taps into cashless payments meta trend

In 2009, an unknown investor from Russia came out of nowhere to make one of the greatest late stage venture bets in the history of Silicon Valley. Why did FB choose an outsider to lead our Series D round? Here’s the inside story:

2 years earlier we famously raised from Microsoft at $15B valuation. That turned out to be a mistake because it set us up for a painful down round. By 2009 growth had slowed and the financial crisis crushed advertising. “Smart money” bids for our Series D were coming in at $3-6B.

We had a high bid at $8B from a respected valley firm, and we had a wildcard bid from Yuri Milner/DST who offered to top any other bid by 20%. We initially chose the reputable firm at a lower price, but they refused to drop a ratchet provision so we decided to give DST a chance.

Yuri understood 2 things that nobody else could see at the time: 1/ He had seen virtual currencies in Eastern Europe and China, believed FB could make money this way. 2/ We were offering secondary shares at 40% discount to preferred, DST was the only firm who valued this.

Yuri not only offered to clear the highest bid by 20%, he also offered to let Zuck vote all of his shares including any secondary shares purchased from early employees. This allowed Zuck to consolidate his voting power.

67 Lessons on Marketing Strategy

Inspired by the conversation between @mkobach and @rachelmercer

Notes 👇

What is Strategy?

• Strategy is defining the problem you are trying to solve and the plan to get there
• Many people put strategy on the backburner
• Without strategy, it's hard to know if what you are doing is successful

What is Strategy? (Part 2)

• Strategy is like running
• You can't just start running
• You need to decide where you are going to run to and if you have the stamina to get there

What is Strategy? (Part 3)

• Strategy is the rock, pebbles, and sand in a jar story
• Is it the new shiny object (eg. TikTok) a rock?
• Or is it unnecessary and just taking up space you don't

What is Strategy (Part 4)

• Strategy is the foundation for which success can spring from
• The strategy is the GPS, the destination is tactics
• No right way to do strategy