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- Never Fully Read #17
Never Fully Read #17
“All sins are attempts to fill voids.” - Simone Weil
☕️ Monday Morning Inspiration:
“What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” Chris Dixon
Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz
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🗄 My Knowledge Hub
I’ve created a shared drive on Notion where I’ve curated all the newsletters into an easy navigable, digestible, searchable place to find the content you’ve enjoyed across all the editions:
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🤖Tech News:
“Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s late selloff on Thursday on the back of disappointing earnings reports may wipe out more than $200 billion in combined market valuation from the companies when markets open on Friday.”
“Twitter is allowing all iOS users to Super Follow select creators. The feature, first released in September and only available in the US and Canada, allows users to monetize their Twitter account and create exclusive content through monthly subscriptions. Twitter first announced Super Follows in February and rolled it out to select creators in September. Within the first two weeks, subscribers had contributed around $6,000, according to SensorTower.”
“A new healthcare startup is buying Birchbox for more than $45 million, with plans to revitalise the subscription box company by getting into personalised health and wellness products.”
“The car-rental giant Hertz is making an audacious bet on electric vehicles, purchasing 100,000 battery-powered vehicles from Tesla. The news of the sale lifted Tesla shares, and the world's most valuable automakers briefly hit an unprecedented $1 trillion market cap. Hertz's purchases will be made up of the Tesla Model 3, a sedan that is the cheapest vehicle currently available from the electric carmaker.”
“Facebook plans to spend at least $10 billion this year on Facebook Reality Labs, its metaverse division tasked with creating AR and VR hardware, software, and content. We are committed to bringing this long-term vision to life and we expect to increase our investments for the next several years,” the company wrote in its third-quarter earnings release this afternoon. Facebook sees AR and VR as being core to “the next generation of online social experiences.”
“Amazon disclosed Friday that it owns a 20% stake in Rivian, the electric automaker that filed for an IPO earlier this month. As of September 30, the e-commerce giant held equity investments, including preferred stock of Rivian that represented about 20% ownership interest, according to the filing. That holding had a “carrying value” of $3.8 billion, up from $2.7 billion as of December 31, 2020.”
“As urban rental markets recover and people flock back to cities, people are once again finding themselves with plenty of new neighbors in communities that are trying to embrace a renewed vibrancy of post-lockdown life. OneRoof is building a social network for residential buildings. Unlike Nextdoor, which organizes communities based on ZIP codes or neighborhoods, OneRoof wants to build up a presence inside large multi-unit buildings so that neighbors can get to know each other in smaller, tighter-knit circles.”
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📈 Trends Of The Week:
The Future of Online Learning Is Cohort-Based
“Research shows that CBCs have much higher completion rates (80%-90%) than self-paced learning (5%-15%).
The cohort-based online learning style was first made popular by the likes of Seth Godin (altMBA) and David Perell (Write of Passage). Now, companies like Maven, Mighty Networks, and many others are raising 10s of millions of dollars to build platforms that allow anyone to create his or her own CBC.”
Source: Crunchbase
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🧠 Quotes that make you think:
“What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” Chris Dixon
“Denying and pushing back against NFTs and crypto is basically saying: ‘We’re not going to have a collectively owned future. We’re going to have a corporate-owned future, and we’re going to have a government-owned future.'” Naval Ravikant
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” Mother Theresa
“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” Hypatia
“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.” Hannah Arendt
“All sins are attempts to fill voids.” Simone Weil
“I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.” Juana Inés de la Cruz
“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is.” Margaret Mitchell
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⛓ Mental Model Of The Week:
Gall’s Law states that all complex systems that work evolved from simpler systems that worked. If you want to build a complex system that works, build a simpler system first, and then improve it over time.
Gall’s Law is why Prototyping and Iteration work so well as a value-creation methodology. Instead of building a complex system from scratch, building a prototype is much easier—it’s the simplest possible creation that will help you verify that your system meets critical selection tests.
Expanding that prototype into a Minimum Viable Offer allows you to validate your Critical Assumptions, resulting in the simplest possible system that can succeed with actual purchasers.
Iteration and Incremental Augmentation, over time, will produce extremely complex systems that actually work, even as the environment changes.
If you want to build a system that works from scratch, violate Gall’s Law at your peril.”
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🎤 Podcasts I listened to:
“Tom Bilyeu is co-founder and CEO of Impact Theory Studios, a revolutionary digital-first studio that produces wildly entertaining, original content focusing on themes of empowerment.The company has grown 400% in the last two years with over half a billion views on YouTube alone and over one billion social media impressions. Prior to Impact Theory, Tom co-founded billion dollar brand Quest Nutrition, which grew by 57,000% in three years, reaching #2 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies.”
“Chris Dixon (@cdixon) is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where for the past six years he has been an active seed and venture-stage investor.
Naval Ravikant (@naval) is the co-founder and chairman of AngelList. He is an angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many mega-successes, such as Twitter, Uber, Notion, Opendoor, Postmates, and Wish. You can subscribe to Naval, his podcast on wealth and happiness, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find his blog at nav.al.”
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📚 Book I'm Reading:
The World’s Fittest Book - Ross Edgley
This book will show you how it's possible to:
Live below 10 percent body fat with the aid of chocolate and Mayan secrets
Add 27 percent more muscle mass, courtesy of tips from world heavyweight champions
Increase speed by 10 percent, thanks to gold medal winning Olympic sprinters
Squat, deadlift and bench weights you never dreamed of lifting, with the guidance of the world's strongest men
Improve endurance capacity by 60 percent, thanks to the knowledge of world champions in multi endurance-based sports
...all of which the author has achieved during the 10-year 'fitness pilgrimage' that has taken him around the globe.
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Happy existing…