What I read/spoke/listened to this week (week of 12/12/2022)
What I read
- Unlike its competitor, who used convertible debt to avoid a down round, Snyk decides to raise one round at 15% off its previous valuation at $8.5B
- The funding from Qatar Investment Authority, different from Saudi Arabia, Qatar Investment Authority made several moves this year to acquire and fund business, for example, Elon Mush’s private buyout of Twitter.
How Slack’s Marriage to Salesforce Crumbled
- What exactly happened to slacks and salesforce marriage?
- Under Benioff and now left co-CEO Taylor, Salesforce had become one of the industry’s most succesful acquiers of software startups — Mulesoft and Tableau
- ‘OS for work’ — the decade long dream of Benioff is turning to unknown state now. Previously Taylor want core salesforce products to closely integrate with Salesforce, but gained resistance from leaders at core products teams.
- Slack’s $400M quarter revenue only accounts for 5% of salesforce sale, which already experience the slowest growth in its 20 years history.
Stop spending so much time on your product when pitching to investors
- At the earliest stages, your investors are evaluating whether you have the ability to build a good product. But an investor’s idea of a “good product” may be different than what you think when you hear that phrase.
- The world of startups (and the world of business in general) is full of products that weren’t great, but they won a customer base anyway. Having a product that is “good enough” to attract customers is better than a perfect product that somehow fails to get traction. From every angle that matters to a VC, the former is a better investment than the latter.
When it comes down to it, investors only really care about three simple things:
- The quality of the team (are you the right people to solve this problem?) and the ability to attract great talent (can you attract more people to help you fulfill your mission?).
- The size of the market and whether it’s growing.
- The problem you are solving and whether it’s worth solving at venture scale.
What goes into an investment thesis?
- Key components: Investment amount; Lead versus follow - board seat; Target audience
- The company hopefully could have a deeper understanding of the dynamics of how and why VC firms invest. “What do you typically like to invest in?” and “Do you think my company is a good fit with your thesis?”
The Four Biggest Changes Apple Made to its App Store as Regulators Turned Up the Heat
- As Apple prepares a notable change to App Store rules in the EU, we looked at the four biggest concessions it has made to app developers.
principles & best practices of rest api design
The Six Principles / Constraints
- Client-server: by separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns
- Stateless: Each request from the client to the server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.
- Cacheable - Cache constraints require that the data respond to a request with the implicit or explicit label as cacheable or non-cacheable. If a response is cacheable, then a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later, equivalent requests.
Layered System - A client cannot ordinarily tell whether it is connected directly to the end server or an intermediary along the way. Intermediary servers may improve system scalability by enabling load-balancing and by providing shared caches. Layers may also enforce security policies.
Nuclear scientist Marv Adams explains what happened in the successful fusion experiment
- 1 energy unit in, x1.5 unit out, and happens so fast!
- still quite far from application into real industry
Welcome to the Age of the Fit Startup
- Great article arguing that at current env, we need “fit startup” instead of “lean startup”, as the company still need to strive high to raise the next round.
Microsoft Squeezed by Growing Resistance to Software Bundles
- The idea of bundling software is not prevailing anymore easily
How CoinDesk Lit the Fuse That Blew Up Crypto—and Might Singe Its Owner Next
- How Coindesk unveiled the story of FTX
Use chatGPT for real in your workflow
What I listened to
Business breakdown on Doordash
- It's astonishing to hear the reason why such an famous brand, DoorDash, only has a grocery story level margin 4%. But interesting to hear the new future new initiatives.
Acquired podcast on Stratechery
- I didn't know much about this newsletter, turned out to be one of the most biggest name in this Internet based business newsletter. I immediately subscribed it after this episode. So resonating and inspiring when hearing the contents creation journey.
What I spoked about
On technology
What’s the NestJS framework?
What’s time series database? And how it compares with generic purpose database?
On investment
What is margin call?
What’s future earnings?
What’s a down round?
Enjoy the weekend!
