Never Fully Read #2

💬 Quotes that make you think:

• "Your lack of commitment is an insult to the people that believe in you" - Connor Mcgregor

• "The familiar past can quickly become the predictable future. Watch your thoughts" - Joe Dizpenza

• "Boos Don't Block Dunks" - Kobe Bryant

• A big component of being lucky is showing up and being likeable

📈 Trends of the week:

• Ads with User Generated Content receive 4x higher CTR and a 50% drop in CPC compared to regular ads. (Source)

• 🐕 PetTech:

  • Doggy Day Care: Google search interest for doggy day care centers hit an all-time high this May. (Source)

  • The market for pet wearables is forecast to reach $1.7B within the next 3 years, at a 19.6% CAGR. (Source)

• 🚑 Care tech:

  • The over-60s are the fastest-growing demographic group in the world, expanding at ~2.5% annually (vs. 0.7% growth for the whole population). The over-55s also spend twice as much as millennials under 35 in the US. (Source)

  • with more (13%) reporting being moved to an old age home as an even bigger fear than death (3%). (Source)

• The USA has 17, 436 crypto ATM machines. The next biggest is Canada with only 1,474...

• Walmart marketplace has doubled in size in twelve months to reach 100,000 third-party sellers. It has doubled for the second year in a row. Having reached 50,000 sellers in July 2020, the marketplace is now adding close to 5,000 new sellers monthly.

• 69% to 81% of #ecommerce journeys end with an abandoned cart.

🤖 Tech news this week:

• Popshop Live raises about $20M at a $100M valuation for its live stream shopping platform.**

  • "Sellers on Popshop Live are seeing gross merchandise value of $500,000 and more, with 80% of customers returning within 30 days to buy more."

• Video chat company Mmhmm raises $100M.**

  • "Mmhmm’s core presenter tools help your meetings look more like professional newscasts than warmed-over digital versions of transparency slideshows and whiteboard scrawls"

• Zoominfo drops $575M on Chorus as AI Shakes up the sales market**

  • "ZoomInfo announced this morning it intends to acquire conversational sales intelligence tool Chorus.AI for $575 million. Shares of ZoomInfo are unchanged in pre-market trading following the news"

• Flipkart raises $3.6 billion, setting a record for Indian start ups**

  • "Flipkart now worth $37.6B: An anticipated investment into Flipkart has come to be, with the Indian e-commerce player raising some $3.6 billion in a single deal. It’s a massive round and a huge endorsement of the larger Indian startup ecosystem."

• Revolut confirms a fresh $800M in funding at a $33B valuation to supercharge its financial services superapp**

  • "The fintech funding continues to roll in at a rapid pace, a result of the huge shift underway in how consumers spend and manage their money. In the latest development, Revolut — the London-based financial “superapp” that provides banking, investing, currency transfer and other money management services to some 16 million users globally"

🎙 Podcasts of the week:

• Will Shu on The Diary Of A CEO

  • Deliveroo Founder - From 0 to £5 Billion

  • Spoiler, he still does deliveries...

• Dr. Joe Dispenza on Impact Theory

  • How to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Mind

  • Something I'm pondering from the episode:

    • "95% of who we are by the age of 35 is a memorised set of behaviours, emotional reactions, unconscious habits, hardwired attitudes, beliefs and perceptions that function like a computer programme"

• Iron Cowboy James Lawrence on the Ed Mylett Show

  • Master MENTAL TOUGHNESS and Redefine IMPOSSIBLE

  • "So earlier this year, he embarked on Conquer One Hundred -- 100 FULL-DISTANCE IRONMAN TRIATHLONS IN 100 CONSECUTIVE DAYS. That’s 140.6 miles a day for 14 weeks, totaling 14,060 miles. Pro Tip: The secret to taking on 100 triathlons (or any task for that matter) is one step and one mile at a time."

📚 What I'm reading:

• How To Fail - Elizabeth Day, Everything I’ve learned from things going wrong

  • Passage on relationships ending not meaning it’s a failure: ‘Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success’, ‘Twenty years of anything with another person is a success. If a band stays together twenty years, it’s a miracle. If a comedy duo stays together twenty years, they’re a triumph. Is this night a failure because it will end in an hour? Is the sun a failure because it’s going to end in a billion years? No, It’s the fucking sun.’

  • “Living your life according to what everyone else might think of you is to cede control of who you are. It is to outsource your identity to a bunch of strangers who do not know you.”

  • “Life crises have a way of doing that: they strip you of your old certainties and throw you into chaos. The only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking, into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.”

  • “Adventures do by definition involve risk, but not having an adventure means missing out on life, a far greater risk.”

  • “We’ve been told that success is to be known by others, when in truth the most meaningful success is to know ourselves.”

Don’t seek certainty, you’ll never find it.

⏱ Timeless insight:

• "One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They're too frightened to even start" - Paul Graham

What do you wish you spent more time doing five years ago?

Happy existing…