Co-Founder Weekly (October 7, 2018)
Co-Founder Weekly provides musings on entrepreneurship, investing, and tech culture. This week’s edition has 4 sections: Tweeter’s Digest, Articles, Jobs, and a Weekly Thought.
✨✨ Tweeter’s Digest✨✨
Articles:
How Gruntwork got to $1 million in annual recurring revenue with $0 in fundraising.
How Buffer’s 10 person marketing team spends money each month. Interesting that Buffer (1) revisits budget quarterly (2) spends 78% of marketing budget on salaries (3) has an experiments budget (4) continues to demonstrate that oversharing is good marketing in 2018 (getting another shoutout on this newsletter)
The Anti-Portfolio by Bessemer Venture Partners. BVP includes a page on their website dedicated to all the startups they passed on (and why), and later became huge successes. I like the concept and appreciate the humility.
Entrepreneurial and VC jobs:
A bunch of interesting job opps surfaced in the past week. Even if you’re not actively looking for a job, it’s interesting to read the dynamic nature of these roles.
#1 Chief of Staff to Kevin Hartz (Chairman and Co-Founder of Eventbrite)
#2 Batch Director at YCombinator
#3 Business Partner / Executive Assistant to Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst)
Weekend Thought:
“I’ll just buy it on Amazon.” It’s a phrase I say or hear almost daily.
When considering the alternatives between buying an item in store on a company website — Amazon is just that much more convenient.
The idea of Amazon’s dominance has makes me a bit queasy recently. On the one hand, I use Amazon regularly and love their business model. On the other hand, their road to dominance is starting to feel a bit dystopian. Their rapid growth into new categories is crushing local businesses and incumbent retailers alike. It still feels like early innings in their quest to truly be the everything store.
They will open 3,000 cashierless stores by 2021.
They continue to make inroads into your home with the acquisition of home security startup Ring, and growing their line of Echo and Alexa products.
They now have groceries with the acquisition of Whole Foods, and are entering the drugstore and pharmaceutical space with the acquisition of Pillpack.
And, importantly, they can offer products at competitive prices for three main reasons:
- Amazon Web Services is super profitable and is effectively a subsidy to their ecommerce business
- Workplace automation is way ahead of the competition (Walmart is making headway with the acquisition of Jet.com)
- Amazon Prime members (recently reaching 100 million members) pay annual dues
So what’s next for Amazon? I predict more direct to consumer acquisitions (startups that own a DTC vertical, like Casper), more altruistic initiatives (like the $15 minimum wage) to garner political goodwill as they crush forward, and more of my paycheck going towards Amazon.com 😒.
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Check out newsletter edition 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 9, and 10.
