Gaurisha Dewan

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 88

publishing houses work more like venture capitalists
No one buys books - by Elle Griffin - The Elysian
The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make n…
No one buys books - by Elle Griffin - The Elysian
exciting about AI is its potential for expanding the number of people able to produce and share useful innovations
Innovation through prompting - by Ethan Mollick
n an industry like venture capital, where many internships and jobs aren’t disclosed to the general public, it also helps to stay at the top of a connection’s mind.
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
Create original research: another approach is to research an aspect of the startup world. It doesn’t really matter what the topic is, as long as it’s interesting, but this is a way to highlight two important skills: research and presentation … [create] a slide deck that slices and dices the market … trace the developments in the market [in your blog].
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
Your online activity can and should extend to reading and sometimes (thoughtfully) commenting on the blogs of the now vast list of VCs that write a blog. These sorts of interactions are just one way to start to engage in a conversation with people in the industry you might one day work with.
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
Assume you will not be able to land a job as a venture capitalist. This is the realistic outcome of trying to get a job as a VC.
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
The main paths into VC are: founder … executive at a fast-growth company in a key industry … banker, lawyer, and journalist …
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
if you were a venture capitalist what would you have to offer the people you invest in that’s so valuable? [What do you know] that nobody else knows? Do other startup folk seek you out for your advice and defer to your opinions?
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
To be a VC in this current era requires greater specialization and domain knowledge than in previous eras … the best way to be prepared, is ultimately to develop a deep area of expertise in a particular field, and become known for that distinctive knowledge.
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
The ideal venture capitalist has an engineering or a sales background. Engineering is useful because it helps you understand the technology that you’re investing in … Sales is useful because every entrepreneur has to introduce a product and sell it … Sales fixes everything.
46 Quotes On How To Get Into Venture Capital
Many data businesses use APIs to make it easy for their customers to get data into their own systems. This is a good idea because it makes it harder for customers to leave if your data is part of their systems. If you can make your data part of a broad ecosystem, that is a good thing.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Data - AVC
Going back to the aggregation model, if you are going to pursue this approach, try to figure out how to make your data as proprietary as possible. Anyone can aggregate so you run the risk of commodification in the aggregation game. If you can create some sort of proprietary advantage, either through exclusive access to the data or through some sort of refinement of the data using your own insights and analytics, that leads to a better aggregation type business.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Data - AVC
I like to think of data businesses in two categories; businesses that aggregate and then publish data and businesses that generate their own proprietary data by virtue of the service they provide on the internet.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Data - AVC
So peer networks are powerful businesses that when constructed well have great defensibility and staying power. The key is keeping the take rate as low as possible and incenting participants to transact with you instead of someone else. If you can do that, you can build a large and sustainable business with this model.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Peer to Peer - AVC
The thing about peer networks is most of the value is created by the participants in the network. The business doesn't do that much. It provides the basic infrastructure so that the market can work. It provides trust and safety and governance. And it provides customer service and support. The participants in the network do most everything else. That means these businesses can and should operate very efficiently at scale.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Peer to Peer - AVC
The purpose of the revenue model in a peer network should be two fold. First it should incent as many participants in the peer network as possible (ie the lower fees the better). Second, it should produce enough revenue so that the business will produce significant profits at scale.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Peer to Peer - AVC
I think the basic fee for participating as a seller in a peer network should be as low as possible. This allows the marketplace to develop as much liquidity as possible. Increasing transaction fees will push sellers out of your market into other ones. The better approach to increasing revenues is value added services that sellers can avail themselves of but are not required to. If these services allow sellers to sell more or if they make selling easier, sellers will adopt them and your take rate can ultimately be much larger than your transaction fee.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Peer to Peer - AVC
They all take a similar approach to revenue generation. They connect one or more people together to conduct a transaction and take a fee for doing so. In Etsy's case the transaction fee is 3.5%.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Peer to Peer - AVC
In many ways, the subscription business model is the most attractive of the "big three" (advertising, commerce, and subscriptions)
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Subscriptions - AVC
The first several years of a subscription based business will typically require a fair bit of funding because the revenues come in over time instead of up front. But once a subscription business reaches scale, it has very favorable cash flow dynamics, as mentioned above.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Subscriptions - AVC
Software is not the only technology oriented business that utilizes a subscription revenue model. Content has also moved from an upfront fee (buy an song or a movie on iTunes) to a subscription model (a monthly fee for Spotify, Rdio, Netflix, or Hulu). And infrastructure is now also sold on a subscription model. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a great example of this.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Subscriptions - AVC
The big gotcha in subscription revenue models is churn. If you churn more than 10% of your customers every year, subscriptions can be a challenging model.
MBA Mondays: Revenue Models - Subscriptions - AVC
As the technology business becomes ever more competitive, with developers building things right and left, with less need for significant investment, and the globalization of the technology marketplace, I wonder if technical innovation is going to become harder to produce and if business model innovation is going to become more important.
Technical Innovation vs Business Model Innovation - AVC
business model innovation isn’t as powerful, maybe a more powerful opportunity to build a new business. If you think of Federal Express, Google, Netflix, these companies were built on business model innovations. Of course, there has to be some technical innovation around the edges,
Technical Innovation vs Business Model Innovation - AVC
We invest in innovation; new ideas, new products, new services, and new approaches to the marketplace that result in opportunities to build new businesses. Over the years, entrepreneurs have been mostly known for technical innovations.
Technical Innovation vs Business Model Innovation - AVC
Pitch-it-myself test: I stop a few partners in the office and give them the pitch to test their reactions. I do the same with my wife. In a sense, I’m getting their cursory opinions and some skewed market feedback, but I’m also testing the pitch, the go-to-market and the top level attractiveness of the company. It helps me think through a lot of the business and test my assumptions
Breaking Down a Typical VC/Startup Diligence Process by @ttunguz
Founders/Team: How do the founders know each other? How do they interact with each other? Are they passionate? How qualified are they? What would it be like to work with them? Business: In some form, I walk through the Business Model Generation framework: value proposition, key activities, key partners, major assets, channels of distribution, customer segments, cost structure and revenue streams. Is the problem worth solving and if the startup succeeds, how valuable would it be? Go to market: Can the company articulate their value proposition simply? Can the team explain how they will go to ma…
Breaking Down a Typical VC/Startup Diligence Process by @ttunguz
Next step is the termsheet — a 5 to 10 pages long document summarizing the most important commercial and legal terms of the deal, e.g. volume of the round, pre money valuation, liquidation preferences, drag along & tag along clauses, anti dilution protection, business guarantees, vesting schemes, information rights etc.
Earlybird’s Investment Process. Since we deem transparency and openness… | by Earlybird Venture Capital | Earlybird's view | Medium
Since we deem transparency and openness among our core values, it is time to shed some light on the most central operational sequence of a VC: the Investment Process. Founders, that’s what you can expect when raising money from us:
Earlybird’s Investment Process. Since we deem transparency and openness… | by Earlybird Venture Capital | Earlybird's view | Medium
The goal of 8-ball was to develop a standardized method of determining product-market fit in early-stage startups. In 2016, Social Capital decided to open-source 8-ball, granting startups access to its basic features.
VCs double down on data-driven investment models | TechCrunch
he new entity, temporarily dubbed CaaS (short for capital-as-a-service) Technologies, will focus on providing data-driven insights to VC firms.
VCs double down on data-driven investment models | TechCrunch
If the bill passes, they'll have broad latitude to fashion remedies for each dominant service, including interoperability mandates obliging walled gardens to install gateways for new market entrants, making it easy for users to leave without isolating themselves from important social relationships.
Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out | WIRED
The DMA lets the commission draft per-service rules to facilitate “interoperability”—connectivity—with new services. This isn’t mere data portability, or downloading a blob containing all the messages you've sent and the photos you uploaded. It’s the ability to leave a service, set up elsewhere, and resume the conversations and transactions you left behind.
Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out | WIRED
The once-common practice of reverse-engineering a rival platform to make an unofficial, interoperable bridge—say, a tool that scrapes your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other messages for a common inbox on a new, privacy-respecting service—have been effectively outlawed by anti-circumvention laws, patents, copyrights, and exotic contract theories like “tortious interference.”
Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out | WIRED
Undisciplined by competition or regulation, platforms are free to slide into “enshittification,” in which the company extracts value from both sides of the two-sided market, relying on lock-in to keep users and business customers from defecting to a rival.
Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out | WIRED
The platform is the canonical form of internet business: a two-sided market that facilitates connections between end-users and business customers.
Big Tech Won’t Let You Leave. Here's a Way Out | WIRED
Do you tip the cashier when all she’s done is ring up your salad? Don’t, and you’re a cheapskate. Do, and you’re a sucker.
Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? | The New Yorker
Etiquette experts studied the so-called guilt-tip boom. The gratuity, like everything else, has gone contactless—the swivelling of the iPad.
Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? | The New Yorker
These are exciting developments, made possible by the transformer architecture, which couples a block of encoders and decoders through a self-attention mechanism. It has become the state-of-the-art approach for self-supervised pre-training in NLP and sequence learning. Put very simply, self-attention enables the model to maintain an understanding of the relationship between every position in the input and output sequences.
Five Predictions for AI in 2023 - by Rak Garg - Rak's Facts
To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.
The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins | Monopoly | The Guardian
In fact, the rules to the game had been invented in Washington DC in 1903 by a bold, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie. But her place in the game’s folk history was lost for decades and ceded to the man who had picked it up at his friend’s house: Charles Darrow.
The secret history of Monopoly: the capitalist board game’s leftwing origins | Monopoly | The Guardian
The past 20 years have seen negative externalities multiply: discriminatory hiring, promotion and contracting; the exclusion of conservative scholars; the suppression of speech. The case for taxing universities is stronger than ever.
Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share - WSJ
Why should ordinary citizens pay a 23.8% tax on capital gains while Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, pays nothing?
Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share - WSJ
The spread of PC”—political correctness—“would seem to be a very strong negative externality, and certainly the 1960s student demonstrations were negative externalities. . . . A full analysis along those lines might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.”
Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share - WSJ
Tax the schools rather than subsidize them.
Harvard Should Pay Its Fair Share - WSJ
Some of those trends have receded, challenging Amazon and other companies betting on online car sales.
Amazon Is a Go-To for Toilet Paper and Batteries. Can It Sell Cars? - WSJ
The company has turned to more corporate partnerships in numerous other business segments in recent months, including a partnership with Meta Platforms’ Instagram for product sales and a logistics deal with Canadian e-commerce company Shopify.
Amazon Is a Go-To for Toilet Paper and Batteries. Can It Sell Cars? - WSJ
Another issue is that Amazon will be trying to get customers to think of its platform for car-buying. The typical transaction on Amazon is under $50, according to a recent survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which studies Amazon customer habits. Only 11% of customers surveyed reported spending $1,000 or more on a single item.
Amazon Is a Go-To for Toilet Paper and Batteries. Can It Sell Cars? - WSJ
Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars.
Amazon Is a Go-To for Toilet Paper and Batteries. Can It Sell Cars? - WSJ