👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter Last Week - Sep 15
Get a job at Google, book recs from the smartest people, Jack Ma's hologram's guitar solo
Yo! Here’s what happened on Tech Twitter this week.
As always, reply with feedback and forward to friends!
Reading that Changed Your Life (via @rivatez)
Riva Tez shared a piece of writing that changed her life and Paul Graham flipped it into a question for the rest of Twitter.
So. Many. Amazing. Book. Recommendations.
If you had to pick one thing you've read that changed the course of your life, what would it be? (ht @rivatez for the question.)
if I had to pick one piece of writing that changed my life path, it would probably be this. you can’t read this and not wanna work on the mind/computers. sometimes when I can’t sleep (like now) I re-read it:
@paulg @rivatez Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, which motivated me to drop out of a PhD for Wall Street, and then motivated me to write my own memoir.
@paulg @rivatez Upside of Stress, Why We Sleep, The Score Takes Care of Itself, The Little Kingdom, Vision of the Anointed.
@paulg @rivatez Ender’s Game.
“Wait, the _kids_ are in charge? Not the adults?”
It gave me license to act with much more agency. (I think.)
@paulg @rivatez Guns Germs & Steel. The Mystery of Capitalism. Banker to the Poor. Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. Don’t Make Me Think. Biographies of Milken and Buffet. Godel Escher Bach. Foundation. Dune.
@paulg @rivatez Well, recently it was Dealers of Lightning. It re-kindled my interest in focusing on building something valuable & hard vs simply opportunistic. It was exciting to internalize how folks tackled some really hard, fragile, & valuable ideas—in pursuit of making something possible.
The Battle for SEO (via @andrewchen)
Watch Andrew Chen, Keith Rabois, and others debate how much startups should rely on SEO.
TIL if you tweet anything negative about SEO, all the consultants come out to argue with you. But I stand by my point- SEO shouldn’t be the primary channel for a startup, it’s something that kicks in a few years in after you get paid/viral/unscalable channels to work first!
Andrew Chen @andrewchen
@rabois @andrewchen it's "out of favor" because it's hard, but still valuable, which makes it awesome.
we've got a handful of companies gobbling up longtail SEO funnel right now
Insightful Tweets
If you want to make lots of money, don't start a company.
Just learn to code, work at Google, and retire with $20M.
As every major institution melts down, we build the alternative.
Woke capital → cryptocurrency
Woke K-12 → homeschooling
Woke undergrad → MOOCs, ISAs
Woke medicine → quantified self, medical tourism
Give people the power to technologically exit a broken, woken society.
I haven’t written anything long form for a while, but maybe I should write about how men take advantage of other men in our industry.
Three reasons people think lean startup and minimum viable products (MVPs) are garbage.
1. They think MVP means build something instead of learn something.
2. They think a MVP means broken or incomplete.
3. They don’t want to believe that they could be wrong about their ideas.
A silicon valley startup raising $5m can hire maybe 10 engineers. A Nigerian (or Indian/Chinese) startup raising that amount can hire 100 engineers. This will soon start to show in product iteration speed as skill levels across the world balance out.
I’m noticing this trend of aesthetic accelerationism on social platforms.
Legitimate aesthetic identities like ‘e-boys’ or ‘momfluencers’ or ‘VSCO girls’ become parodied to the point of abstraction. Is this culture now?
Interesting Tweets
Twitter's annual revenue:
2019: $3.6 billion (estimate)
2018: $3.0 billion
2017: $2.4 billion
2016: $2.5 billion
2015: $2.2 billion
2014: $1.4 billion
2013: $665 million
2012: $317 million
2011: $106 million
2010: $28 million
2009: $0
If you could buy secondaries of any private company right now, who would you pick?
My picks: Webflow, Stripe, and Reddit.
21x since the IPO in 2015
Shopify traded down (5.7%) today (down $21.75/share).
Their IPO in May 2015 priced at $17.00/share.
They lost more market cap during one day of market volatility than the entire company was "worth" ~4.5 years ago.
Pretty nice run!
Brianne @WorkLifeVC Kimmel @briannekimmel
Founder friend recently hired a #GenZ intern who changed the entire company's #enterprisesales strategy with a single question:
"Why don't you just slide into the DMs of the top brands on Instagram?"
They tested it. It worked, at scale!
Listen to junior people and their ideas.
Funny Tweets
Jack Ma's performances at Alibaba's annual parties are among the most-anticipated acts of the night. And when Daniel Zhang joins in, that just makes it extra special. Check out their version of "You Raise Me Up" at the company's 20th anniversary celebration.
How I code:
1. Make it work
2. Make it pretty
3. Make it work again because I probably broke it while trying to make it pretty
Me on Instagram stories now:
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Me on Instagram stories if I ever found a DTC company:
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