👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter Last Week - Dec 8th (via Nikita Singareddy)

enterprise margin crisis, frustrated ex-employees build unicorns, decentralized twitter, tweeter of the week stephanie, and more!

Dec 19, 2019

Yo! It’s Brett again. Really excited to share this week’s Tech Twitter TLDR curated by Nikita Singareddy!

Nikita is an investor at RRE Ventures in NYC and one of my favorite people in my Twitter feed. She was our Tweeter of the Month in November thanks to her “serial experiments” and consistent stream of interesting ideas, analysis, and lols.

Nikita S @singareddynm

Kicking off another Twitter experiment: sign me up for your favorite subscriptions! My email is sadboizizek@gmail.com. Listservs, newsletters, brands, campaigns, you name it. Can't wait to see what weird and wacky things make it to the inbox 📧💥

As a reminder, Crypto Twitter TLDR with Colin Goltra has launched! Go check it out.

And now… Nikita!

Is there an Enterprise Margin Crisis?

Martin Cascado, a GP from Andreessen Horowitz, breaks down why we’ve seen more margin compression in enterprise startups. He identifies main contributors like expensive AI, unoptimized cloud, lack of centralized buyers, GTM strategies (product-driven growth vs enterprise sales), and services spend.

martin_casado @martin_casado

0/ Is there an Enterprise Margin Crisis? It's not uncommon to see software startups with surprisingly low margins (30-40%). We believe there is a broader trend going on here, which I explore in this thread.

Biggest companies built by frustrated ex-employees of previous titans

Ethan Mollick is a Wharton professor focusing on innovation and entrepreneurship. He regularly posts studies and trenchant analyses on performance, failure, and decision-making. This recent thread caught my eye. Preseed and seed investors often bet on ex-leaders, indexing their investment decision on these entrepreneurs having subject matter expertise and experience building top performing startups. Mollick’s post explores motivations for these founders (and why they start new companies after conflicts with management).

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Most of the biggest Valley companies were formed by frustrated ex-employees of previous titans. How does that happen and why does it matter? 1/4

Well designed experiences leave you with a sense of wonder

Daniel’s screenshot comes from a longer piece, Patterns of Transformation: Designing Sex, Death, and Survival in the 21st Century. If you don’t know much about experience design, it’s a methodology and philosophy that takes people and human needs as the first frame of reference. This essay explores how design can nourish the human craving for connection and meaning in the face of increased isolation and diminishing social cooperation. Beyond creating that which is beautiful and useful, what happens when design turns away from comfortable objects and environments for the most privileged? Perhaps we can unravel and stitch together something more transformative.

Daniel ⚡️ @danielrakh

Decentralized Twitter!

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently announced that, partially in response to all of these problems with today’s internet, he wants to create a decentralized Twitter. This long thread goes into the difficulty of moderating a large platform, and about the benefits and challenges of doing so.

A few thoughts: the current nature of Twitter is that you have to constantly be online and responding to the zeitgeist immediately or your voice gets lost in the shuffle. I’m not sure how much that would change with decentralization. Moreover, Twitter could have been more decentralized years ago had it nurtured relationships with developers and opened more third-party API access (it didn’t). This decision certainly keeps with Jack’s blockchain involvement but I couldn’t get a read on whether this would be a meaningful part of Twitter’s business rather than an experiment. Don’t get me wrong - I love a good experiment :)

Decentralized Twitter from @jack: “Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.”

jack 🌍🌏🌎 @jack

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

Sarah McBride’s Spotify Wrapped write up

My friend Sarah McBride know a thing or two about marketing (she was the resident GIF maker at Betaworks before joining spunky Shrug Capital). Her recent Medium piece dives into the genius virality of Spotify Wrapped. You saw it all over your Twitter feed last week, friends sharing their top genres and most-listened to artists of 2019 and the decade (Ariana Grande, anyone?) Sarah writes, “Spotify has achieved this year with Spotify Wrapped is the creation of an organic marketing engine… Understand how your product supports your user’s identity, build a frictionless way for them to share that experience with others...”

Product Hunt @ProductHunt

Brands (including us) can learn a lot from @Spotify's execution of #SpotifyWrapped 👏 @sararahmcb did a super-smart breakdown about why it worked 🤓📊 meow.ph/wrappedmarketi…

meow.phHow To Build An Organic Marketing Engine — 4 Lessons From Spotify Wrapped | Product HuntI listen to a lot of Khalid, ok?

Aashay Sanghvi, Looking Back / Looking Ahead

Like Aashay, an investor at Haystack, I’m a newly minted venture capitalist. There are certain tech and investing concepts that felt more abstract before VC. Aashay lays them out nicely, ranging from the seed vs A product to a coherent investment funnel, peers, and career option value. Give it a read.

Aashay Sanghvi @aashaysanghvi_

Made a few notes and observations about the first few months in venture as the year comes to a close.

aashay.substack.comLooking Back, Looking AheadAs the 2019 holiday season comes around the corner, I thought it’d be worthwhile to share a loose collection of ideas bouncing around in my head during the first few months at Haystack. They’re learnings and observations emerged as a result of working at a seed firm and spending time in San Francisc…

Tweeter of the Week

I think of Steph as tech’s @dril. I don’t know / want to know who she is but she is the voice of the smart, nihilistic, self-deprecating tech gal in San Francisco. She doesn’t try to hard but just calls out tech BS and tries to fight off a sea of reply guys.