👉 Last Week - Your retention sucks, Snap's big announcement, Uber + DoorDash merger?, Zoom censorship

What happened on Tech Twitter the week of June 7th - 13th

Jun 16, 2020

Yo! ✌️ I’m Brett! I am a Product Manager, musician, and Twitter power user. Twitter is where all the action happens in the tech industry but it’s not easy to keep up with. I write this weekly newsletter to help people stay informed on the most important discussions happening on Tech Twitter.

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✨ TLDR

📈 Growth experts debated “good retention” - it’s higher than you think because startups are hard.
👻 We’re long Snap again - their announcements last week may position them to dominate the AR platform wars and become the WeChat of the US.
💰xUber exec says DoorDash + Uber should merge - after a failed merger with Grubhub, Emil Michael suggested merging with DD would help the industry.
⚔️Zoom appeases Beijing by censoring activists - Zoom took down an activist’s account and everyone is really worried about what this could mean for China-US relations.

📈 Growth experts debated “good retention”

Lenny shared a new post of his where he asked a group of product and growth experts what they thought good vs great retention looks like for different product categories.

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

🔥 New post in collaboration with growth legend @onecaseman 🔥 A deep dive into what GOOD and GREAT retention look like, for all types of businesses, with concrete recommendations from 20 of the world's top growth experts. Highlights in thread below 👇 lennyrachitsky.com/p/what-is-good…

lennyrachitsky.comWhat is good retention - Issue 29Although retention is widely considered to be the most important metric to get right when building (or investing in) a business, it’s also one of the least understood. Why? Because unless you’re a growth expert or an experienced investor, you’re often relying on anecdotes, dated blog posts, and misg…

The numbers seemed really high.

Seth Miller 📻 @sethmills21

@lennysan @fishmanaf @andrewchen @ibringtraffic @bbalfour @bmrothenberg @chenliw @danhockenmaier @ElenaVerna @far33d @jamiequint @JeffChang30 @kevinakwok @ljin18 @merci @mduboe @npilosof @nicksoman @saranormous @ShaunMClowes if the bar of GOOD is Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat..then everyone else is fucked

They are because, well… venture scale startups are hard.

Andrew Chen @andrewchen

@sethmills21 @bknotts @lennysan @fishmanaf @ibringtraffic @bbalfour @bmrothenberg @chenliw @danhockenmaier @ElenaVerna @far33d @jamiequint @JeffChang30 @kevinakwok @ljin18 @merci @mduboe @npilosof @nicksoman @saranormous @ShaunMClowes @HarperDogApp The reality is that very few consumer social products hit scale (100s of millions of users) and I think a pre-req is to have insanely good retention as @lennysan @onecaseman point out It’s true 99.9% of products don’t get close to these metrics, that’s why there’s so few winners

Fareed Mosavat @far33d

@sethmills21 @joshelman @ibringtraffic @andrewchen @onecaseman @bknotts @lennysan @fishmanaf @bbalfour @bmrothenberg @chenliw @danhockenmaier @ElenaVerna @jamiequint @JeffChang30 @kevinakwok @ljin18 @merci @mduboe @npilosof @nicksoman @saranormous @ShaunMClowes @HarperDogApp Ultimately, what matters is that your retention supports sustained growth. To reach venture scale, usually that means high AND flat. There are exceptions - if you have awesome free acq (SEO, viral) or off-the-chart LTV for those who do retain (FTP games, ENT software)

That said, Lenny points out that it’s ok to have lower retention if you’re just starting out, you have low CAC/marginal costs, or you’re not building a venture scale business. Twitter is a good example of a successful company with poor retention - they make up for it because they have extremely low CAC/marginal costs.

👻 We’re long Snap again

Check out deep dives by Turner Novak and Packy McCormick for more details!

Snap hosted its annual partner summit last week, and what they announced got us all pretty giddy.

The most exciting were Snap’s AR updates. It seems increasingly clear that at least until we see what the rumored Apple and Facebook glasses launches look like in the next year or two, Snap is a frontrunner in the AR platform wars.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

Feeling bullish on @Snapchat's position in the AR platform wars after today's announcements. 👇Thread 1/ AR voice control - essential to be able to use AR glasses. Google & Apple are the only major players with voice assistants - not anymore.

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

2/ Snap ML - there are still a lot of difficult ML problems to solve to get AR right. Allowing outside devs to upload their models to Snapchat exponentially increases their speed to execute compared to others using internal teams. Genius move.

Snapchat @Snapchat

For the first time, you can bring your own machine learning models into #LenStudio with SnapML. Start creating your own AR experiences powered by ML at https://t.co/0iHhiAXT7l #SnapPartnerSummit https://t.co/xVDsIxctLi

Brett Goldstein @thatguyBG

3/ Local Lenses - the AR platform war is about owning the digital content layer over the real world that developers build experiences on. Snap just announced the first large scale deployment of this layer.

Snapchat @Snapchat

Introducing Local Lenses—a shared AR world built right on top of the physical one! #SnapPartnerSummit https://t.co/gz8SIqRlBq

A lot of people were also raving about the Snap Minis launch, which essentially expands the HTML5 Snap Games platform to include third party apps like Headspace.

Josh Constine -SignalFire @JoshConstine

Snapchat mimics China's WeChat with its new Minis -- embedded mini-apps for Headspace meditations, buying movie tickets via Atom, & more. Snap is now the teen operating system

Though Facebook has tried and failed to make in-message apps a thing, Snap may have some success here given the fact that messaging is where users are spending most of their time in Snap. If it ends up working out, Snap minis could enable Snap to become an “everything” app like WeChat is in China.

Turner Novak @TurnerNovak

@mishaley @dtrinh Incentives. Facebook makes too much money from feed ads. Messaging was always a side feature to suck users back into the feed. Snapchat’s core product is messaging. Content, Snap Map, etc are ways it monetizes the messaging network, but this is even closer to thst core use case

💰 xUber exec says DoorDash + Uber should merge

Former Uber exec, Emil Michael commented on the Uber + Grubhub merger that didn’t end up happening. Emil points out that while Grubhub isn’t an ideal asset, the food delivery industry does need consolidation.

Emil Michael @emilmichael

(2) While @Grubhub is not an ideal asset given its antiquated technology and business practices, it is the only asset in US food delivery available for sorely needed consolidation. @Uber cannot afford DoorDash at the moment and @Postmates is way overpriced (sorry Tiger Global).

Interestingly Emil suggests that an Uber + DoorDash merger could be a solution but would only work if DoorDash CEO Tony Xu became the CEO of the joint company.

Emil Michael @emilmichael

(5) That merger could only happen if @Uber's market cap grows significantly AND, I believe, the CEO of @DoorDash becomes the heir apparent of the combined company. Making @Uber/@DoorDash a founder-led company again would be a *fantastic* thing in my view. FAAUNG?!?

Click into the thread and read the whole thing.

⚔️ Zoom appeases Beijing by censoring activists

In a first-ever event, Zoom suspended the account of an individual hosting a Tiananmen Square commemoration event.

DELIAN Asparouhov @zebulgar

so maybe it's not such a good idea that we allow a core piece of our remote work infrastructure to be run by china... chinese government creates huge artificial advantages for their local tech companies over foreign ones, maybe we should do the same...

cnbc.comZoom suspends U.S.-based activist’s account after Tiananmen Square commemoration eventZoom confirmed that it suspended the account of Humanitarian China to “comply with local law,” prompting accusations that the firm, which is based in the U.S., has bowed to pressure from Beijing.

Zoom was silent for several days until it came out saying it would “try to do better.” Despite the statement, there’s much to worry about.

Ben Thompson @benthompson

If Zoom failed to anticipate that the Chinese government might wish to have Chinese participants blocked, why on earth should anyone believe they have anticipated how they will handle a request for for a backdoor or eavesdropping capability? blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020…

With Tik Tok also getting into similar trouble, it’s looking like the much of America’s new communications infrastructure has ties to Bejiing.

This presents an interesting challenge for the tech industry as well as American Homeland Security. Taiwan banned Zoom for security concerns - at what point does the US, a country valuing free markets, do the same?

Given the speed of innovation happening in China, I believe there will be many more Chinese (or Chinese influenced) tech companies competing with homegrown companies in the US to come.