9/5/2020 - Raining S-1s and Zooming through
Trying out a new approach.. Stuff I found interesting!
I've been largely silent on the blog for the past several months — because coming up with interesting things to write long articles takes a lot more time, commitment, and most of all, original thinking — all of the things that I have found I'm short of these days. So, I'm planning to try a new approach. Instead of just focusing on long-form articles, I wanted to start sharing some of the things I've been reading and found fascinating during the past week. This is for two reasons: for me to save these gems of wisdom for posterity and share them more broadly in a structured format. Plus, with a weekly deadline, I will be forced to write more often.
This is as much for me as it is for the readers :) Let me know what you think!
Snowflake S-1 Teardown and the Zoom Quarterly Report
Last week was fascinating for SaaS. Five S-1s dropped on Mon 8/24 - Unity, Asana, JFrog, SumoLogic, and of course, the most fascinating of course was Snowflake. What an amazing business — and still growing at 121% at a ~$0.5B base. Snowflake has taken the Switzerland approach to data lake design, supporting all the public clouds, but also built their own unique capabilities like zero-cost clones, time travel etc. The other great part is the simplicity and transparency of pricing.
Of course, the other whale of the report in the past week was from Zoom. It wasn't surprising that nobody else reported on that day!
Avoid buying Coconut Headphones and the Deep Learning Pullback
A lot of senior execs fall into the trap and I have found myself to be guilty of this too: Invest in something just because it’s cool, or because peers in the industry are doing it, or sometimes just for employer branding without thinking about how it applies to their business. Funnily enough, the article talks about it through the behavior of the Pacific Islander chiefs. Recent hypes have been around Microservices or even Deep Learning — it was interesting to read in the context of the recent pullback in Deep Learning.
Will the Pandemic make us better at async communication?
A lot of us are learning to do better async communication, but will we retain this muscle once the pandemic ends. For many organizations, as new people get onboarded, being able to reason behind historical decisions, the framework followed, trade-offs considered, etc. are not recorded well. Design Docs and Architecture Design Records are good ways to capture it, but this applies to any kind of decision.
The Golden Rule of Platforms
Everybody wants to build a platform, but only a few get to it. Some interesting things to keep in mind: (a) Great platforms are great products first, (b) They should be externalizable from day one and (c) Important to keep in mind what should be in the Organization context vs Domain context
Founder Control and the ITC Conundrum
ITC is one of those fascinating companies — it has a huge cash cow, has diversified a lot but by all accounts, the diversification has not made a dent in the bigger scheme of things. It's also interesting to see how other companies like Reliance made risky big bets (like Jio) (186 Bn) and have been far richly rewarded than ITC (~$30 Bn). This discussion can go into many facets with a lot of questions about ethical behavior on both sides but is a classic example of risk and reward that founders vs professional management enjoy
Bite-size
In 2007, the EU stock market was 4X of the US tech sector. In 2020, US tech sector ($9.1 Tn) > entire EU stock market ($8.9T) h/t @wolfejosh
Elsewhere in the World
For the first time probably in decades, the US had to run a second lottery for the H1b process 275k people had applied, but a whole bunch dropped out amidst the pandemic
Jeff Teper's experience of running MS Teams during the pandemic is a fascinating read about how quickly things changed and how Teams adapted
SPACs continue to be the flavor of the season with commentary by Fred Wilson and Bill Gurley
State of the Frontend 2020 Survey Results: I'm always fascinated to read about front-end stuff. For starters, they are all beautifully designed. Besides, the world of front-end moves so fast, it’s impossible to keep up. I'm still scratching my head about Jamstack and Headless CMS
EdTech in India is on a roll. For the longest time, EdTech was ignored as being too hard to do, and suddenly during the pandemic, it has made up for decades of underinvestment and under-adoption: its probably had a decade of growth just in the last ten weeks. First, there was Whitehat Jr's acquisition by Byju's and now Unacademy's fundraise from Softbank. As Ray Dalio said in his book, Principles, 'Timing is everything'. The backstory of their seed round was an interesting read.
Reliance Bought out Future Group's retail business. While the news is widely reported, having done a company in the retail tech space, I can still recall how people used to hang on to each word by Mr. Biyani in India Retail Forum. Fascinating turn of events, but Mr. Biyani will always remain the Prince of Indian Retail
Amazing insights. Thanks - Rajesh Vijayaraghavan