What’s Next — Fat, Experts, Startups
by Jordan Gonen | 9.3.2018
Hey 👋How is life going? I am thinking of redesigning this newsletter some time over the next few weeks — let me know if you have ideas!
Articles to Read.
The Case for the Fat Start-Up:
Start-ups everywhere adopted a lean, low-burn, low-investment model. To this day, companies seeking funding at our venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz, proudly proclaim in their pitch decks that they are raising tiny amounts of capital so they can run lean.
So what’s a start-up to do? Much of what has been written and said about lean start-ups makes good sense. However, that advice is often incomplete, and some of the things left unsaid are the least intuitive. In this article, I will articulate some of those things left unsaid in arguing the case for the Fat Start-up.
As you listen to the virtues of the lean start-up–lightweight sales, light engineering, and so on–keep the following in mind:
- If you are a high-tech start-up, your value is in your intellectual property. Don’t stare at your spreadsheets so long that you get confused about that.
- You cannot save your way to winning the market.
- The best companies can raise money even in this market. If you are one of those, you should consider raising enough to wipe out your competition.
Experts are generally right until they’re wrong. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get fooled into thinking that experts are always right. This is because they are…experts. They are authoritative and knowledgeable. This is especially true when it comes to trying new things in existing fields. We are biased into believing that knowing a lot about something confers an ability to predict the future.
Sam Altman — How to Succeed with a Startup (20 Minute Video)
Private cars sit parked 95% of the time. In fact, a single car usually occupies at least two parking spots: one at home, another at work. Because of this, contemporary cities have roads clogged with traffic, while premium spaces sit empty or occupied by a parked car.
Unparking uses data from Singapore to propose a systematic quantification of parking demand as a function of fluctuating mobility demand. It is based on two scenarios: the current situation with private cars using two parking spots and a scenario where self-driving cars partially alleviate the flow imbalances typical of commuting.
The gradual transition to shared mobility models will bring tangible reductions in parking infrastructure, with a subsequent decrease in traffic, fewer cars on the roads and up to 70% reduction in parking needs while increasing total traveled kilometers less than 5%.
With Uber, nothing is easy. Start with profitability, or the lack thereof: two weeks ago the company reported its quarterly “earnings”, and once again the losses were massive: $891 million on $2.8 billion in revenue. Clearly the business is failing, no?
Well, like I said, it’s not that easy: unlike a company like MoviePass, Uber has positive unit economics — that is, the company makes money on each ride.
The problem for Uber is trifold: first, the company continues to spend massive amounts of money on “below-the-line” costs: $2.2 billion for Operations and Support, Sales and Marketing,Research and Development, General and Administrative, and Depreciation and Amortization. Second, it seems likely that a good portion of the company’s improving margin stems from exiting more difficult markets like Russia and Southeast Asia, as opposed to improvements in its core markets in the United States, Europe, and Oceania. And most concerning of all, Lyft seems to be outgrowing Uber.
What it’s really like to hear for the first time after growing up totally deaf. I didn’t hear a damn thing until I was six.
When my parents discovered my deafness when I was four months old, the audiologist told them that I was the deafest baby she had ever met.
People left out a lot when they told me about sound. They only extolled its virtues, omitting the less desirable parts.
Nobody told me how saturated the world is with sound. Everything made sound. Papers rustled when moved. Shoes shuffled. Traffic droned. The world hummed and buzzed with constant activity, a deluge of random sounds that was just …. Noise. Amid the din, those famously sublime sounds were scarce indeed. There were ten or a hundred more crows cawing for every bird trilling prettily. Perhaps it was their scarcity that made them so precious.
anu Ginóbili, who retired on Monday from the N.B.A., after sixteen years as a member of the San Antonio Spurs, was the master of a paradoxical brand of excellence. When we call attention to the dominance of a basketball player, we usually mean that we can see, from the moment he or she touches the ball — and sometimes even before, as the player stands somewhere waiting to receive it — exactly what that player would like to achieve, and how the player will achieve it. He takes the route to the hoop that he’d always meant to take, or passes to the guy he knew would score, or pulls up to shoot from some preplanned and unconscionable distance, regardless of the hand obscuring his vision. From the beginning of his tenure with the Spurs, Ginóbili was different. He never seemed to step onto the court with a fully fleshed-out plan, or to have decided on a move — whether to shoot, to dribble, or to zing some oddball pass, fishy with English — until he was already partway through the motion that made it possible.
Logan Paul vs. KSI Youtube Fight:
Ultimately, this weekend’s hugely lucrative event was a reminder of some unpleasant, yet still central aspects of our broader culture. Thousands came to fill up the Manchester Arena, hundreds of thousands paid to watch the official YouTube stream, and more than a million others tuned in to pirated Twitch streams. People invested both time and money to watch two widely hate-loved internet clowns smack the spit out of each other’s mouth. The theatrics before this match were filled with Trump-tier insults, chants of “suck your mom,” and other car-crash misbehavior. And more than a million people couldn’t stop watching.
More to Check Out:
- The Bullish Case for Bitcoin
- Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
- Spies Using Linkedin to Recruit Americans
- Google for Colors
- How Much Time You’ll Waste Commuting (by City)Like reading books? Check out Bookclub.
Podcasts to Listen To:
- Ryan Petersen on Building Flexport, a Modern Freight Forwarder (YC)
- Tim Ferriss Goes to Maximum Security Prison
My Update:
- Decided to create a personal curriculum — let me know what you think of it.
- It has been great seeing everyone back at school. Still working remotely for Blend for another week or two. Then will figure out what’s next.
- As I mentioned, going to re-build this newsletter over the next few weeks…just playing with a few ideas:
a) switch to a daily text of an interesting article?
b) new design that makes easier to read?

