👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter Last Week - Nov 3 (via Ian Kar)
Yo! I’ve been curating Tech Twitter TLDR for about four months now and figured it would be nice to switch things up a bit. I’m excited to be launching Crypto Twitter TLDR next month with Colin Goltra, the curator.
But in the meantime, I’m even more excited to share that Ian Kar will be curating this issue of Tech Twitter TLDR in the first of a series of guest curated issues of the newsletter!
✨A word on the curator✨
Ian is an independent product/strategy consultant in NYC and a human encyclopedia for all things FinTech. He runs a wildly popular new Fintech newsletter and slack community appropriately called Fintech Today where he provides in-depth analysis and commentary on recent events in the Fintech space - go subscribe! He also shares some pretty lit playlists. On Twitter, Ian has a balance of hilarious social commentary and thoughtful discussion of the current zeitgeist in tech.
And now, Ian:
Hey everyone, Ian here! Excited to guest write today’s Tech Twitter TLDR...it’s always fun to come out of my little fintech bubble and talk about things in the tech world.
Insta Removes the Like Button
The biggest news this week is definitely about Instagram starting to test getting rid of likes this week. Honestly, I’m thrilled: now I don’t have to feel like shit when 10 people like my terrible Insta’s (I’m more of an IG stories kinda person anyway.)
Of course, everyone is saying this is the death of the Instagram Influencers: with no likes to keep track of, how can anyone tell who’s popular? I disagree—Instagram wouldn’t alienate a massive user base that drives a ton of platform engagement. First, likes still exist. They’re just not public. So influencers can track their likes and report back to sponsors. Also, I think this is a step towards making instagram a bigger commerce platform too—influencers might be incentivized to hawk products for sponsors and get paid on conversation instead, since there’s a more direct ROI for companies.
I kinda foresee a buncha products coming out too: especially stuff around auditing influencers and managing those relationships.
Benchmark’s Ben Rubin makes a great point here too:
Softbank’s Deck - Not The Onion
Another hot topic on Twitter was Softbank and WeWork. I always thought I was bad at decks...until I saw this SoftBank deck that came out earlier this week:
Of course, WeWork got caught in the crossfire:
But here’s the thing: SoftBank being bad at making decks isn’t new; this has been going on for ages now. Just check out some slides from this deck from 2010.
You’d think with the $100 billion Vision Fund, they’d invest in an AI driven deck company to make less terrible decks.
AR wars heating up
A lowkey story from today:
Say no to growth teams
Growth teams are great. But do small startups need them? Unusual Ventures’ Andy Johns—who was also at Facebook, Twitter, Quora, and Wealthfront, says no. Instead, product teams should be focused on making big feature upgrades and advancements that make the overall product more attractive for users.
Apple Card is sexist
The hottest topic this week was how a viral tweet about the Apple Card potentially discriminating users’ credit limits based on gender led to the NY Department of Financial Services to investigate Apple’s bank partner, Goldman. I wrote about it in my newsletter this week (I highly doubt there’s anything fishy going on, btw), but I learned a lot about how complicated credit underwriting is in this fascinating tweetstorm from ex-CEO of Simple Bank, Josh Reich.
Time management is hard
I’m glad to know that I’m not the only one with time management problems. I always have issues figuring out this out and always think I can manage my time a bit better. One of my favorite hacks is explicitly low tech: I have an agenda I try to update with daily to-do lists. I’m always on my phone/iPad so taking time to actually put pen to paper helps me focus my thoughts a bit more. This question from Brianne Kimmel led to some other great suggestions too:
Future of work is over-hyped
Jeff Morris, who now the director of product and growth at Lambda School raises a really interesting point: the future of work seems to be supremely focused on optimizing people’s workflows, and not bigger problems with how we work in general. I never really gave this much thought until I started chatting with a buddy of mine, Zane Shannon, and his company, Roll (disclaimer: I’m an advisor). The gig economy has been great for a small group of labor, but very few startups seem to be focused on extending the benefits of the gig economy—flexible labor, working for whoever you want whenever you want, etc—to other startups. I feel like this space is wide open: why isn’t there a Uber for product managers!?
A few more great tweets
Thanks for reading!