👉 What Happened on Tech Twitter Last Week - Jan 19th

🍽 Uber is the new Yahoo, 🇩🇪Germany's startup problem, ✨how wizards use ads, 🚗why you should ditch your car, 📖the best of Gurley, and more!

Jan 30, 2020

Yo! It’s Brett again. Here’s all the juicy goodness that happened on Tech Twitter the week of January 19th.

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🍽 Zomato Eats Uber Eats India

Zomato, an Indian food delivery service has acquired Uber Eats’ business in India. Uber’s stock was up 7% after the announcement suggesting most public market investors believe becoming a holding company like Yahoo is a less awful outcome than running Uber’s business into the ground fighting pricing wars around the world that cannot be won.

Deepinder Goyal @deepigoyal

Uber Eats India is now Zomato. Here's to better food for more people, and new beginnings. For more details: zomato.com/blog/uber-eats…

🏛 Founders Fund takes on local gov

Mike Solana, a VP at Founders Fund said he may run for local office. As much as we hated seeing Theil get into politics in last presidential election cycle, having a smart non-leveraged individual take on the housing crisis in SF would be a great thing.

Mike Solana @micsolana

considering a run to become san francisco's district 5 supervisor. focus would be housing (more), public transportation (more), education (choice), and sheltering the homeless. bunch of questions. who understands this city's political machinations?

🇩🇪 Why there are few successful German startups

Ever wonder how a country known for excellence in engineering can’t seem to churn out any major successful tech startups? Soundcloud doesn’t count because it’s been on the struggle bus for some time lately. Kevin has the answers.

Kevin Kwok @kevinakwok

Germany lacks stock options which hurts startup ecosystem there Whenever I think of this, I wonder what new development would make our stock option system seem similarly archaic

✨ Ad magic for SaaS and DTC startups

Jeff gives two quick tips for SaaS ads to buy if you know nothing about ads.

Jeff Chang📈 @JeffChang30

If you are a SaaS startup and want to start with ads, I would recommend first doing: 1. Google search for your company and competitor names 2. Facebook retargetting for site visitors Everything else will take a lot more effort to have a reasonable payback period

Nik has some good advice on how to use ads to test for product market fit with a DTC product. I actually have a FB business account called “Valid the Implier” that I do this with.

Nik Sharma @mrsharma

The keys to a successful DTC launch: 1. A product that launches with pre-launch product-market fit — this leads to low initial customer acquisition costs. Easy to test too. Here’s how: create a fake brand, run ads to a landing page, and understand your customer.

🚗 Get rid of your car ASAP

Kyla Scanlon did a pretty interesting analysis comparing the cost of car ownership with utilizing ridesharing / micromobility instead. You’ll probably want to sell your car after reading.