NFR #51 - Steven Bartlett, Conor McGregor & Stranger Things

🐦 Inspirational Moment

I met Steven Bartlett & watched his podcast the Diary of a CEO being recorded live.

I have followed Steven Bartlett right from the start of Social Chain & it’s been such an inspiration to watch him create this empire in a relatively short period of time.

Having followed Steven Bartlett has without a doubt improved the trajectory of my career and happiness. I’m so glad entrepreneurs & humans like Steven Bartlett exist as it inspires millions of people to think differently & go after what is a meaningful challenge & adventure to them in life.

Some of the key lessons I’ve taken from his journey so far.

(Some of these I still aspire to develop and work on/towards but haven’t fulfilled just yet. But that is all part of the journey)

• Consistent & relentless focus over a long period is needed to reach the top

• The power of constantly looking for that extra 1% improvement & the compounding nature of marginal gains is exponential over time

• There is always room at the top

• If you want to succeed in a crowded market you have to stand out & be different

• You have to be willing for people to dislike you if you’re going to build a personal brand

• Radical candour simplifies business but also creates trust & deeper connections in your relationships

• It’s ok to vulnerable about your emotions. Surface level conversation quickly gets boring anyway

• Be haunted by the scarcity of time

• Be ambitious, have big lofty goals and build unwavering self belief to achieve them

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🤖 eCommerce News:

🚀 Entrepreneur First raises $158M at a $560M valuation, adding Stripe’s Collison brothers to its list of backers

“Entrepreneur First made a name for itself a decade ago in its home base of London, and then further afield, for the novel approach it takes to tech investing: Rather than seek out interesting, scaling startups like typical VCs, it backs founders and their very, very early-stage startup ideas — so nascent in fact that sometimes the startups themselves haven’t actually materialized when EF writes its first check. Its method, and the results, have catapulted EF to a portfolio that is now worth some $10 billion over more than 500 companies, and now it’s announcing its latest round of fundraising — $158 million.”

🤖 Reddit acquires natural language processing company MeaningCloud

“MeaningCloud was founded in 2015 and specializes in extracting meaning from unstructured content, such as social conversations and web content. Reddit says the company’s technology will strengthen its machine learning proficiencies and understanding of unstructured data to provide relevant information for Reddit users. “MeaningCloud helps strengthen Reddit’s platform by helping our community get the relevant information they are looking for even faster,” said Jack Hanlon, the vice president of data at Reddit.”

🎶 Spotify partners with Netflix to curate a personalized ‘Stranger Things’ playlist for fans

“Which song will save you from Vecna? In partnership with Netflix, Spotify has launched a personalized “Stranger Things” playlist dedicated to Season 4 Volume 2, which premieres this Friday, July 1. The Upside Down playlist, as it’s called, blends music from a listener’s own selection with a handful of “Stranger Things” classics from the newest season.”

⚒️ Promoted grabs more funding to help e-commerce marketplaces achieve profitability

“The Bay Area company, which brings together search, feed, ads and promotions for marketplaces, announced it took in an additional $6 million in seed funding to bring its total amount raised to $8 million. The company was launched in 2020 by two former Pinterest engineers, Andrew Yates and Dan Hill, with a two-fold model: help buyers find the products on marketplaces more easily to yield repeat purchases, and provide sellers with immediate feedback about how their products appear in a search and tools to improve sales.”

👀 Voyantis emerges from stealth to predict customer lifetime value

“Wiesenberg and Eran Friendinger founded Voyantis in 2020, motivated by the idea that many companies today base growth and marketing decisions on spreadsheets — or so Weisenberg claims. “Traditional methods were making it difficult to both analyze and utilize company-owned data to make informed time-sensitive decisions and activate growth,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “These days, as all companies are making the shift to get on the path to profitability, it is crucial to understand and act on the future value of each user.”"“

📶 Raspberry Pi introduces a $6 board with Wi-Fi

“The new Pico W is launching today for $6 — the “W” (and an additional $2) brings 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity to the system. The $5 Pico H adds a pre-populated header for interfacing with other systems; the Pico WH ($7) gets you both. The first two are available right now, while WH is shipping at some point in August. As the company notes, its boards have found a lot of success beyond their initial hobbyist and educational focus, as companies have begun to integrate the controllers directly into their products. More than once in the wild I’ve seen some sophisticated pieces of machinery being controlled by these inexpensive systems.”

🏎 Instacart and Walmart Canada launch virtual convenience store

Called Walmart Now, the virtual store offers nearly 4,000 items for delivery in as fast as 30 minutes with service powered by Instacart and orders fulfilled from 10 of the retailer’s stores, according to a Walmart Canada press release. The service, which is available on Instacart’s app and the Instacart-powered Walmart Now site, utilizes some of the technology company’s new retail services unveiled in March. The virtual c-store comes at a time when Instacart is ramping up its service offerings and facing growing competition to enable rapid delivery for retailers.

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🎶 Tik Tok Ad Of The Week:

Conor McGregor (Scheiffer Bates) x Craftd

Why was this Ad good?

✅ Authentic - Scheiffer Bates is a professional impressionist & voice actor, letting him do what he does best works well for this ad

✅ Unique Influencer - I’m always impressed by brands who take the time to understand the culture of the times and create a unique ad that stands out

✅ Humour - Scheiffer nails it with a hilarious impression of Conor McGregor

(Link to Tik Tok)

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📈 Trends Of The Week:

The end of a second straight month of layoffs in tech

“June brought another wave of layoffs in tech, with cuts impacting roughly the same number of employees as May: 16,000 employees, according to tracker layoffs.fyi. Another layoff aggregator from TrueUp paints a more dire picture, counting 26,000 impacted employees this month, up from about 20,000 last month. Either way, the data is grim. The end of a second straight month of nearly daily layoffs shows how every startup sector, from mobility to fintech, is impacted by the downturn.”

DEPT OF BANDWIDTH

“Watch the frequency. It is astonishing when you think that global mobile network data traffic has increased nearly five-fold in four years and that this is set to continue for some years to come.”

(Link to exponential view)

Source

Streaming continues to 🚀

Stranger Things 4 just became the second Netflix show to hit 1 billion hours viewed

“Stranger Things 4, the most recent season of the hit show, just became the second Netflix show ever to surpass a billion hours viewed. Since the first instalment of the season dropped on May 27th, viewers have spent a cumulative 1.15 billion hours watching the season’s nine episodes, including 301 million hours just this past weekend. That makes Stranger Things 4 the second most-watched Netflix season ever, after Squid Game in 2021. It was in Netflix’s Top 10 in 93 different countries this weekend, the company says. The show is so popular right now that it’s boosting the older seasons, too: all four Stranger Things seasons were in Netflix’s six most-watched shows over the weekend, with only The Umbrella Academy able to keep up.”

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Happy Existing 👋