Who to Read
Here is my list of people who inspired me for posts and analyses
I systematically read their content and find a lot of insights there for my companies myself.
1.Scott Galloway — professor of Marketing at NYU Stern · Founder of L2 Inc, Red Envelope, and Prophet. Bestselling Author of “The Four” and “Algebra of Happiness”, Cohost Pivot Podcast.
Recently, Scott shared an essay about The Attention Economy. You can also check an article about this phenomenon in Berkeley Economic Review. «Netflix rose to dominance by cracking a gusher of classic sitcoms and rewatchable movies. More commercial-free content extracted more attention. By 2016 that was enough to make Netflix bigger than the entire industry it supplanted, cable TV.»
It means that video streaming platforms have won previous business models. The Internet has won a TV. But it is turning us into a new challenge. Вata in exchange for content? Is it a new basis for the social contract?
2. Benedict Evans spent 20 years analyzing mobile, media, and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting, and venture capital. I’m now an independent analyst. Mostly, that means trying to work out what questions to ask. He writes essays about things I’m trying to understand, and a weekly newsletter with 175,000 subscribers, and gives presentations pulling together these ideas.
Interesting pick from the last newsletter from The Wall Street Journal. «Netflix’s ad-funded plan continues to drip out. According to the WSJ, the company is telling potential advertisers that it expects 40m viewers (not subscriptions) globally by Q3 next year, versus 230m current subscribers.»
Companies got as many as they can users with subscription. The part of users who has a habit of paying for content is limited. Segments are always exhausted. Then again you need to look for new segments and try to figure out how to sell them. Now it is opening the battle for ad-supported users with a cheap subscription plan.
3. Paul Graham — co-founder of many startups and Y Combinator. I love his last essay about what founders can learn from users.
Here are a few quotes:
— «how bad founders can be at realizing what their problems are. Founders will sometimes come in to talk about some problem, and we’ll discover another much bigger one in the course of the conversation»;
— «That was another big surprise: how often founders don’t listen to us. A couple of weeks ago I talked to a partner who had been working for YC for a couple of batches and was starting to see the pattern. “They come back a year later,” she said, “and say ‘We wish we’d listened to you.’»;
— «The reason startups are so counterintuitive is that they’re so different from most people’s other experiences. No one knows what it’s like except those who’ve done it. This is why YC partners should usually have been founders themselves. But strangely enough, the counterintuitiveness of startups turns out to be another of the things that make YC work. If it weren’t counterintuitive, the founders wouldn’t need our advice about how to do it.»
Who is your content crush?