Look around and you see things you take for granted. Today I will share two articles that I read recently – one on the invention of the Zipper – its initial failure and ultimate world domination – the other listing 19 inventions by Women.
HBR published its list of management lessons from 2019. Here is a quick peek:
I was not aware of Cliqz, the initiative from Europe to build a new search engine and browser from scratch headed by Jean-Paul Schmetz (and not riding on Google or Bing or Yandex for example).
How many times do you routinely prove that you are human? Retyping texts, matching photos of motorcycles and traffic lights. Ot some such ridiculous things? Have you wondered why? Because most of the Internet we encounter today is Fake.
It is already 17B and growing. CB Insights projects it will be a 33B industry by 2022. The halo days of proprietary software is limited and Open Source captured the imagination of developers all over. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Redhat make large contributions to open source softwares. The criticality is evident from the Microsoft’s acquisition of Github for 7.5B in 2018, the largest in enterprise software in history.
So what is big data? This is what companies know about us. Aggregated from numerous sources and analyzed for patterns. Big data is what helps banks predict and flag credit card frauds. Little data on the other hand is what we know about ourselves. “What we buy. Who we know. Where we go. How we spend our time. We’ve always had a sense for these things — after all, it’s our lives. But thanks to the combination of mobile, social, and cloud technologies, it’s easier than ever to gain insight into our own behavior” writes Mark Bonchek in this HBR article.
Jordan Valencia, Programs and Partnership Manager at Grab Ventures, in her latest article in Harvard Business Review talks about the need to focus on culture when companies are in the Hyper Growth phase. Defined by Alexander V. Izosimov in HBR in 2008, “Hypergrowth refers to the steep part of the S-curve”. The rapid growth comes with steep rise in employee count. This is where the challenges set in.
Tomasz Tunguz is the one you turn to for analysis when watershed events happen. Salesforce Tableau acquisition is one such event in a string of similar ones (although the most expensive by value by far) playing out this month. It follows Google’s Looker acquisition and Sisense’s acquisition of Periscope Data.
It is clear. Everything legacy, every business, every process will be disrupted. So the choice is yours if you will be the one to be disrupted or you will be the disruptor. The disproportionate value that the disruptor harnesses is clear (Uber, AirBnB, Dropbox, Zappos). What makes someone to become the disruptor? Sometimes it is by accident, but more often than not it is because the disruptor decides it was enough of the status quo and acts.
I was reading this article by Jackie MacMullan on the ESPN site – on how elite athletes cope or learn to cope with high stress linked to split second (guaranteed) performance. What makes them falter (mostly overthinking that disconnects their instinctive muscle memory from the last at hand) and how they make a come back from defeat. The article is a must read to see how the top athletes develop regimes to tackle stress under pressure. And it should give Founders a lot of clarity about how to deal with stress in our own play fields.
