I’m not going to litigate the SEC’s unproven allegations on Twitter, and as you can imagine, there are new considerations to what can / should be said publicly after the litigation process starts. However, I would like to address 5 key questions I’ve seen. 1/10

SoFi was founded in 2011 by 4 students who met at Stanford

🎓 The goal was to decrease the student debt burden by giving out lower rates than federal standards

💸 SoFi’s rates ranged from 5.99% to 6.5%, undercutting federal and privates rates which ranged from 6.8% to 16%

By September 2012, SoFi was reported to have commit over $ 200m in loans

📈 This increased to $ 450m by April 2014 and its borrowers reportedly got on average $ 9,400 in savings by refinancing their

💸 Today, SoFi wants to help its customers with every “financial” step of their journey, providing:

· Student loans

· Medical loans

· Home loans

· Renters insurance (powered by $LMND)

· ETFs

· Stocks & cryptos

· Credit card

· Auto insurance (powered by $ROOT)

& more!

⏱ It has also understood that time-pressed and convenience-seeking young professionals value the following elements:

· Speed

· Choice

· Content

· Education

And $SOFI thus turned itself into a convenient, affordable, transparent and user-friendly financial platform

This means that SoFi’s wants to be a “one-stop-shop” for its users

💸 Enabling it to cross-sell its different products and reduce its Customer Acquisition Cost

Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

https://t.co/PgyhgOhFAl

1/

While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/

Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and

Neuenschwander makes a good, but incomplete, point. To the extent that Apple has the same interests as its users, it uses its app store monopoly to lock out bad apps (to the best of its ability).

4/

But when Apple's interests diverge from its users' interests, the prohibition on sideloading apps actively harms those users' privacy and security. Think of how Apple caved to Chinese state demands to remove working VPNs from the Ios app store to facilitate mass surveillance.

5/

How Amazon makes money?

[ Amazon's business model decoded😃]

@dmuthuk @unseenvalue @FI_InvestIndia @Vivek_Investor @drprashantmish6 @caniravkaria

🧵👇

1/ A person named Jeffery earns 100 dollars per month and has an expenditure of 120 dollars monthly. He has a very good reputation in the society. So, he takes a loan of 1k dollars for a month and this 1k cash is invested in new business ventures.

2/ For the next month, he pays his liability back by taking a loan from another person for 1.5k dollars. The loan of 1k is paid back and the remaining 500 dollars are invested in another business venture.

3/ By the end of the month, he earns 150 dollars through his old and new business ventures but has a total expenditure of 200 dollars. He again is in a deficit of 50 dollars. To pay back his 1.5k dollar loan, he takes a loan for 2k dollars

4/ This cycle goes on and on. Jeffery keeps on taking bigger loans to repay the previous loan and the leftover extra loan is invested in bigger ventures which produce more expense than income.

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.