BC BUSINESS
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If you’re a Startup trying to compete with a Megacorp—the 800-pound Gorilla in the space—you need to understand the tax inherent to being a Gorilla

And then you need to make that tax work against the Gorilla—with your product's positioning & features

A thread on Gorilla taxes👇🏾

 1/
Collaboration Tax

Getting two or more product groups at a megacorp to collaborate on creating a seamless end user experience is the hardest problem in computer science.

(I am not joking)
Examples of Collaboration Tax:

Calendly exists because the Gmail team & Calendar team haven’t worked together on creating a more seamless experience for that use case.

Loom might succeed because the Gmail, Video, Meet teams at Google are probably too busy with their own goals.
The takeaway for startups:

If you can create meaningful value by seamlessly integrating features of two or more distinct Gorilla products, you will typically have a lot of runway before the Gorilla can get its act together and eliminate its Collaboration Tax.
2/
Denominator Tax

Once a Gorilla’s product reaches massive scale (i.e. the denominator for its metrics gets very large), the pressure of OKRs & incentives will often force the Gorilla’s product teams to prioritize breadth of usage more than depth of usage.
Examples of Denominator Tax:

Google Docs, which needs to work across a tremendous breadth (basically everyone) vs. Dropbox Paper, great for engineers & product people

Coda/Notion/etc. benefit from both the Denominator Tax (more focused) & the Collaboration Tax (more integrated)
The takeaway for startups:

Attack the Gorilla’s product by first tackling high-value verticals or use cases that won't meaningfully move the Gorilla’s “raw numbers”. The Gorilla won’t attack back even if it is well aware of your existence (and is losing some business to you).
3/
Novice User Tax

A Gorilla has a lot to lose if its products appear to create friction for its novice users. The friction might be pricing, a steeper learning curve, seeing advanced features, etc. That's why a Gorilla’s products are typically quite suboptimal for power users.
An example of Novice User Tax:

There’s a high demand for Superhuman because Gmail doesn’t offer an interface that’s optimized for power users of email.

(Note how Gmail itself launched & grew as an email service for power users vs. the leading email services at the time)
The takeaway:
Consider positioning your product as a power user alternative to an existing Gorilla product.

This has two distinct benefits
1) Association: users will easily grok what your product does
2) Differentiation: your target users will readily try & promote your product
~BONUS~

The User Retraining Tax, a corollary to the Novice User Tax:

Getting a Gorilla to significantly revamp its UI is the second hardest problem in computer science.

The massive user backlash from UI revamps ensures that the revamp happens too slowly, too late, or never.
4/
Business Model Tax

A Gorilla will often find it hard to change or augment its business model or pricing model with an entirely new one, especially if its current model provides high margins and scale.
An example of Business Model Tax:

Twitter primarily has an advertising business model (with high margins & scale), so it will find it difficult to adopt an additional business model that helps its creators monetize natively within Twitter.

Enter Substack, Patreon, etc.
5/
Dogma Tax

A Gorilla will convert a belief—which may have been valid at a certain point—into long-lasting dogma whose validity fades with time.

Examples:

Google Hangouts (everything in the browser) vs. Zoom

Microsoft (mobile is for serious business) vs. iPhone/Android
While these are the main ones, Gorillas face other such taxes e.g. PR tax, Regulatory tax, Infra tax, Bundling tax

That’s why strategy isn’t just a big company thing

Shrewd strategy is vital for Startups competing against Gorillas

Strategy+Speed➜Success

All the best to you👍🏾
Back to the top of this thread: https://t.co/eMf1ZpXzFl
Footnote:
While this thread is addressed to Startups, it's equally relevant for the people working at Gorillas, in 2 ways:
1) You can use the vocabulary here to name & tame your org's taxes
2) If you're competing against another Gorilla, play against its taxes just like a Startup
Some of the points in this thread are related to Counter-positioning, my favorite of Helmer's 7 strategic powers:

"A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business."

https://t.co/bJTtjnzqpD
If you liked this thread, you might also like some of this👇🏾
https://t.co/smxNmSpOwx
Also check out this thread on product strategy
https://t.co/th9ciAKnik
At some point, a Gorilla becomes its own biggest customer. This means that, despite its various advantages, it cannot be as much in synch with its real customers' needs as you can be as a Startup.

You are left-of-𝑥, Gorilla is right-of-𝑥. The framework:
https://t.co/NhHy911Cwp

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Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
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A thread of resources for aspiring & new Product Managers:

(should also be useful for Eng, Design, Data Science, Mktg, Ops folks who want to get better at PM work or want to build more empathy for your PM friends ☺️)

(oh, and pls also share *your* favorite resources below)

👇🏾

1/

Product Management - Start Here by @cagan
(hard to go wrong if you start with Marty Cagan’s

2/

Tips for Breaking into PM by @sriramk
(I’ve recommended this thread in my DMs more often than any other thread, by a pretty wide


3/

Top 100 Product Management Resources by @sachinrekhi
(well-categorized index so you can focus on whatever’s most useful right

4/

Brief interruption.

It’s important to understand your preferred learning style and go all in on that learning style (vs. struggling / procrastinating as you force a non-preferred learning
INTERNET
Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
@shreyas
Why does Your Manager’s Manager (YMM) request a deck/doc during a meeting, says it’s urgent, and then doesn’t respond for days after you create & send it?

Or, why does YMM often respond with trivial feedback (e.g. formatting) & not substantive feedback?

Answers in this thread👇🏾

Have you set an entirely new password on a site & said to yourself: “surely, I’ll remember it becos this site is so important for me”. Have you then gone on to forget that password the very next week?

Me too.

The reason for YMM’s odd behavior & my password optimism is the same.

That reason is the Focusing Illusion, first described by Daniel Kahneman.

The Focusing Illusion:
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

When YMM asked you to create that doc as one of the follow up actions during the Product Review, YMM fell prey to the Focusing Illusion.

Trust me, YMM had no intention of making you do busywork.

YMM truly believed that it was very impt & urgent to create that doc & review it.

This was YMM’s conception of how much of their future time was appropriate to spend on the item for which they requested that doc (Item A):
FOR LATER READ
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Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
@shreyas
A surprisingly high % of stupid arguments & fights on Twitter are rooted in a tiny number of fairly obvious fallacies.

Stupid arguments & the fallacies that feed them, a thread:

Fallacy 1/

Just because it’s true that all squares are rectangles, you argued that all rectangles must be squares. (And you did it with so much swagger.)

Example of Fallacy 1

X says: Successful people aren’t afraid of hard work.

Y argues: That’s BS. I work 90 hours a week at Tech Co and am still stuck in this dead-end job.

Fallacy 2/

Just because you found an exception to a general pattern, you argued that the entire pattern is false.

Example of Fallacy 2

X says: Venture capital is useful for startups.

Y argues: Not true. Foo’s startup took VC money and they crashed & burned.

Z piles on: I agree with Y. In fact, Bar’s startup did not take VC money and it’s worth a bajillion.
ARGUMENT
Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
@shreyas
🗓️Recap of March 2021 content

Includes:
Solve THE problem
3 types of product leaders
Levels of product work
Getting work done
“I don’t know”
Good people, bad managers
Customer segmentation
LinkedIn Envy
On communication
Important definitions
Life-changing books
& much more..

👇🏾

A story that often plays out when we are not rigorous enough about the importance of the customer problem our product


The 3 types / hats / modes of product


An extremely important observation about product


A thread on getting work
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Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
@shreyas
Standing on the cusp of 2021, life can be exhausting.

No matter where we look on social media, we will find people who seem wealthier, luckier, prettier, healthier, more popular, smarter, happier than us.

As highly ambitious people, what are we to do?

A solution to consider👇🏾

The solution, in three words:

Aim for Mediocrity

Here’s what I’ve done for years now:

1) Aim to be mediocre at most things.

2) Celebrate this mediocrity.

3) Then focus on excellence at a few things.

4) Make sure those few things align with my passions, my strengths, and what the world needs.

contd.👇🏾

5) Work hard at those few things for long periods of time.

6) Find rewards in the act of getting better, not in immediate external feedback.

7) Get clarity on what rewards really matter.

8) Trust that those rewards will come.

9) Tweak my approach as I learn more.

An acceptance of our mediocrity is a ticket to freedom.

Very few smart & ambitious people recognize this.

This isn’t about giving up or "being a loser".

It’s about recognizing that very few of the things that bring us lifelong anxiety actually matter, when all is said & done.
LIFE

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1/ Vanna’s a widow maker... waging war with her & Gary is exhausting... we were able to take a textbook short at 3803 and take a profit On half at 3771. We will look to add more in a similar way on tomorrow morning’s likely vanna rally again... looking for exuberance once again


2/ in that 9-10am CST window. The growing chorus of bulls emboldened by Vanna’s continued support the last few days gives me confidence that this opportunity will be there again. W/Gary & Vanna behind them the retail exuberance is rising to a fever pitch. This is exactly what we

3/ want to see. But what happens when their backup is gone?? Who’s going to buy this market at these increasingly higher levels this week. Better yet who’s going to buy it @ lower levels when they are forced to sell next week? Not Vanna. She’ll be @ the beach. It ain’t cool bein’

4/ no Jive Turkey so close to Thanksgiving (OpEx)... Bear Steepening of the yield curve took a breather yesterday & so did the stair steps, which was a bit discouraging, no 2 ways about it. But those pressures are far from over. But... remember w/ Vanna still at 1/2 force SPX was

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The wealthiest person I know prints millions out of thin air in the real estate business.

This is what he does...

A thread.

He finds a distressed retail plaza. Let's say 50% of the space isn't leased.

On a 300,000 sf plaza that might mean 150k square feet is vacant.

If asking rent is $8 per square foot per year, that means the building has a "potential revenue" figure of of $2.4MM.

So in this retail center 50% is leased and 50% is vacant. So the actual revenue, right now, is $1.2MM.

Most retail leases are whats called "Triple Net" or "NNN". This means the tenant pays the taxes, insurance, maintenance and CAM (common area maintenance).

They basically pay all of the landlord's expenses (except debt service on any loans he/she has, of course).

Commercial properties are valued based on something called a "cap rate".

The equation is:

net operating income / (cap rate) = value

The cap rate is a %.

Think about it as the return on your money, annually, as a percentage, you spent to buy a property.
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MaMaMia \U0001f1ec\U0001f1f7\U0001f1e8\U0001f1fe\U0001f1e6\U0001f1f2 SupportGreekProducts
MaMaMia 🇬🇷🇨🇾🇦🇲 Support...
@MaMaMia73189983
Following @BAUDEGS I have experienced hateful and propagandist tweets time after time. I have been shocked that an academic community would be so reckless with their publications. So I did some research.
The question is:
Is this an official account for Bahcesehir Uni (Bau)?


Bahcesehir Uni, BAU has an official website https://t.co/ztzX6uj34V which links to their social media, leading to their Twitter account @Bahcesehir

BAU’s official Twitter account


BAU has many departments, which all have separate accounts. Nowhere among them did I find @BAUDEGS
@BAUOrganization @ApplyBAU @adayBAU @BAUAlumniCenter @bahcesehirfbe @baufens @CyprusBau @bauiisbf @bauglobal @bahcesehirebe @BAUintBatumi @BAUiletisim @BAUSaglik @bauebf @TIPBAU

Nowhere among them was @BAUDEGS to find
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Peter Apps
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@PeteApps
Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

President of Arconic's French arm accepts customers were 'deliberately and dishonestly misled' over fire classification of cladding panels, as he is asked about email saying failed fire test must be kept 'VERY CONFIDENTIAL'


The most interesting point of this morning's evidence came right at the end of the session when Claude Schmidt was grilled about an email his colleague Claude Wehrle sent regarding the serious failure of polyethylene-cored ACM panels when bent into a cassette form in March 2010

Remember: Arconic in 2004/5 tested its ACM PE panel when bent into cassette and when bolted to a wall with rivets. The cassette version failed spectacularly, burning 10 times as fast. But Arconic dismissed this as a 'rogue result' and drew no distinction in its marketing...

... simply presenting the panel as a 'Class B' (the rating for the rivetted panel, and the required standard for many European countries). Skip forward to 2010, and this email chain.

Mr Wehrle, the firm's senior technical member of staff is told about a trend in Spain and Portugal where clients are demanding more fire resistant panels, and warned that with this type of panel "our prices are no longer in the market"
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Pratik Sinha founder of ALT news is trained comrade! He is working on Communist agenda!

Thread

How many fact check he has done about any left party?No he won’t do it!
He will do fact check of Congress and few other non Left parties just to tell the world that he is unbiased!

Mukul Sinha, father of Pratik Sinha was Comrade and her mother is also comrade. They were active member of left parties!

Mukul Sinha tried to pleased Musl!ms after 2002 Riots with his fake evidence for huge donation from Musl!m Countries.


Mukul Sinha contested Gujarat Assembly elections in 2007 from a Muslim-dominated seat Shahpur in Ahemdabad, but got just 255 (0.44%) votes, losing his deposit. 😂🤣

In 2012, Sinha contested as an independent candidate from Sabarmati in Ahemdabad, and lost again, securing just 1860 (1.23%) votes!🤣🤣

As per affidavit in 2007 he had total movable asset of Rs.23,82,309

But shockingly In 2012 he had huge hike in movable assets! He has Rs.1,08,65,799 movable assets as per affidavit.
(this information are available in affidavit. This is not privet information)
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RISHI ASHTAVAKRA(DEVAL)

Those who are well versed in our ancient scriptures must definitely have come across the name of Ashtavakra Muni. Who was he and what is the story behind his body getting crooked from all sides.

Muni Asit was the son of Pracheta Rishi.


He was childless and this caused a lot of worry to him. But an Akashvani assured him that he should go to Shivji to get all his
worries nullified.

So he along with his wife go to Shivji and after paying him obeisance start singing Shivji's praises.

He describes Shiv as the one who is beyond any other thing, whose glory has no words to describe. After this the couple stands with folded hands in front of Rudradev. The strotras sung in praise of Shiv possess magical qualities even today.

Shiv gets satisfied by them soon and is ready to grant a boon.

Shiva told him that, he very well knew what the Muni desired. He then gives him the "Sansaar Vijay' mantra and asks him to keep reciting it. The Isht devi would come at an appropriate time and fulfill his wish.

Asit Muni kept reciting this mantra for hundred years. The Devi appeared and granted him the boon of a son as a Shivansh. A son was born and was named as Deval. He grew upto be a great scholar well versed and a handsome young man. Asit Muni got him married to Ratnamalavati.
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Ashta Siddhi is mentioned in Patanjali Yog sutra and can be obtained by very few through countless years of practice and devotion to all eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga.

Siddhi can loosely be translated as accomplishment or a special power or unusual skill.


The eight Siddhis are:

1. Anima: Reducing one’s physical self to the size of an atom.

2. Mahima: Expanding one’s physical self to infinite level

3. Garima: Making one’s physical self so heavy as immovable by others

4. Laghima: Becoming almost weightless


5. Prapti: Being able travel anywhere in the Universe

6. Prakamya: Can know & understand what is going on in one’s mind. Can understand other person’s min.

7. Ishitva: Possessing title of Bhagwan

8. Vashitva: A seeker can subdue any person/thing

(Hanuman Jayanti is coming)


Hanumanji not only possessed all eight siddhis, but was also blessed by Sita mata as “Ashta Siddhi Nau Nidhi Ke Daata”.

When Hanumanji first reaches to Lanka on his mission to find Sita, he makes use of anima so as to be discrete in enemy territory.


He uses it again when he approaches Sita mata for the first time – reducing his size to that of a schoolboy, to avoid scaring her. He uses mahima to outwit & overpowers
the demons.
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1) “Eliminationism” is a term you need not just to become familiar with, especially in today’s American rush toward authoritarianism. This will be a long, illustrated thread explaining what it means, how it works, and why Donald Trump is now our Eliminationist in Chief.


Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by “eliminationism”? Here’s the academic definition:


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Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.


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Here is the detailed information of about strategy,

Entry time : 9.30 - 10
Exit : Upto you

Strategy :
Sell weekly ATM CE & PE at almost equal price
For ex : Sell Nifty 17250 CE at 50 and Nifty 17250 PE at 48 so it will become short straddle

Buy monthly ATM or near ATM CE & PE at matching price (5-10 points diff should be fine) as hedge
For ex : Buy Nifty 17250 CE at 150 and Nifty 17300 PE at 155 so it will become long straddle.

Weekly Short straddle + Monthly Long straddle

Adjustment:

• If you feel slightly bullish/bearish then no adjustment needed
• If Nifty moves 50 up or down and sustain then just simply roll up or down half of qnty and keep rest of the quantity. If market goes up or down further then roll up or down rest.

• If Nifty moves one side or about to breach BEP then add equal amount of lot. This can balance tested side. For ex: If I bought 17300 CE 4 lot as hedge then add 4 lot so you will have only one side risk . Note: Remember to keep SL at cost price (only for additional lot bought)

Capital requirement:
2.2 L for 4 lot
Adjustment requires additional capital upto 1L

Note : High risk high reward strategy, please don’t execute until you fully understand. Kindly do paper trading or backtest.
RR : 1:1
POP : 45-55%
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