I saw a thread this week about how there was not enough talk about @canva + @MelanieCanva...let's change that! Canva just announced they raised $200M (valued @ $40B)- a long way from starting w/no business experience + getting rejected by 100+ investors🧵

1/ Melanie Perkins was born in Perth, Australia & is one of the youngest CEOs of a $1B+ tech start-up. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that she was of Malaysian + Filipino + Sri Lankan descent! #asianpride
2/ 2007: Melanie used to tutor her college students on how to use design programs such as Photoshop & InDesign but most of them struggled. That's when she realized the need for online + collaborative + easy-to-use design platform.
3/ From her mom's living room, Melanie + partner (now hubby!) Cliff Obrecht hired freelancers to build a Flash website for their idea, Fusion Books, where students could collaborate in designing their yearbooks.
4/ 2011: Melanie spotted an opportunity for venture funding when Bill Tai, who had backed TweetDeck and Zoom, came to Perth for kitesurfing. They ambushed Tai with a pitch for what they called the "Canvas Chef" in a dinner that he hosted but left without any capital.
5/ Melanie started learning to kitesurf and became a frequent visitor to MaiTai, Tai's unique retreat for investors. With the help of Google Maps co-founder, Lars Rasmussen, she met Cameron Adams, an ex-Googler who became their co-founder.
6/ They raised $3M seed including a matching grant from the Australian gov't to keep the company in their home country.
7/ Canva was first launched in August 2013 to select tech blogs and users. When it was made publicly available, it gained ~50,000 users in the 1st month.
8/ 2014: Canva raised another $3M from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures. ~ 600,000 users & 3.5M designs made on their site.

2017: The company announced that it had already gained a $1.86M net profit after only launching five years earlier.
9/ In another round of funding in 2019, they raised $70M from General Catalyst and other investment companies and another $85M a few months later. Company's valuation rose to $2.5B.
10/ As of now, @canva has more than 60M monthly active users across 190 countries, expecting to exceed $1B in annualized revenue by the end of 2021 & double their workforce in the next year (females make up 42% of workforce). Go @MelanieCanva! #girlcrush

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https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.

https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x