My favorite links goes multimedia this time with two podcasts, among the other articles.
Jelly Roll: The Popcast (Deluxe) Interview [Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli/New York Times] – The guy with the face tattoos from the Super Bowl Uber Eats commercial. I’d known he was also a rising music star but not his backstory. In this podcast he’s confident, humble, thankful, curious, funny, competitive – just basically a great chat between folks who care about the music. Must listen for founders IMO.
Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point? [Zach Helfand/New Yorker] – The PoS spins around and you see a 25% minimum suggested tip box, for something that just a few years ago was a generally accepted ‘non gratuity’ transaction. Here we learn the history behind tipping, the psychologies at play, and where the breaking point might be. Even if you don’t click through, here’s the fact you should know, its potential origin:
By the seventeenth century, visitors to aristocratic estates were expected to pay “vails” to the staff. This might have lowered payroll for the estate itself. At least one aristocrat helped himself to some of this new income stream; he threw frequent parties to increase revenues. The system spread. English coffeehouses were said to set out urns inscribed with “To Insure Promptitude.” Customers tossed in coins. Eventually, the inscription was shortened to “tip.”
Stop Trying to Replicate Silicon Valley [Chris Neumann/Panache Ventures] – While the title might sounds like a Bay Area VC telling all other geos they just can’t compete with the OGs, it’s actually a Canadian investor trying to direct local energy into more productive strategies than low-res carbon copies. Chris cites more innovative strategies such as governments helping their native startups sojourn to the Valley for stints, bringing back relationships and learnings.
Here’s the thing: if governments really want to accelerate their tech ecosystems, they should be encouraging their founders to travel to Silicon Valley in order to learn from and work with the best. Sure, a few might stay. But the vast majority won’t for a wide variety of reasons. And guess what? Those who do stay will learn a ton while they’re in the U.S. And a good number of them will one day repatriate home and bring back with them the knowledge and experience they gained. And for those who choose not to return, where do you think they’re going to open their first remote office…?
The reality is most US cities shouldn’t waste money on cut rate startup incubators or similar, but work their asses off to get large tech companies to locate offices locally, even if it’s just starting with QA and other entry level roles.
The Huberman-ization of America [Rex Woodbury/Daybreak VC] – Rex analyzes the popularity of neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and builds a startup investment framework based on society’s growing interested in wellness. He breaks it into three categories (Performance; Aesthetic; Health) and gives examples of companies selling into these trends. As well as areas that are less covered right now.
Side note, I didn’t realize how popular Huberman’s podcast is!
Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future [Nilay Patel/Decoder] – I’ve know Hank Green for a while now due to our YouTube connections. He’s a sharp guy who, along with his brother, are some of my guideposts for what makes a healthy internet. In this interview he switches rather effortlessly from guest to host, interviewing The Verge’s Nilay Patel on Nilay’s own pod [more podcaster should allow this reversal from time to time]. I loved this section in particular:
One of the wildest moments of this conversation for me was when I made a comment that I thought was just a universally believed truth about the post-platform internet: that people these days prefer individuals to brands. And then Nilay told me, “No, that’s wrong. It’s not people who are doing that; it’s the systems that deliver content to people” — a distinction that I’m going to be thinking about for a long, long time.
All The Carcinogens We Cannot See [Siddhartha Mukherjee/NewYorker] – Read it for the science and/or the symbolism. Article covers the role of agents which aren’t considered carcinogenic but which end up promoting cancer based on the inflammatory response of our immune system (such as air pollution as a precursor to lung cancer). For example:
In the experiment, two researchers working at Oxford, Isaac Berenblum and Philippe Shubik, assembled a group of mice, clipped a patch of hair on each rodent’s back, and painted the patches with DMBA, a cancer-linked chemical that was found in coal tar. Yet only one animal in thirty-eight developed a malignant lesion. When the researchers added some slicks of croton oil to the same area, the results were startlingly different. (Croton oil, a blistering, inflammatory liquid extracted from the seeds of an Asian tree, was used as an emetic and as a skin-sloughing exfoliant.) Now malignant tumors bloomed, appearing on more than half the mice. The sequence mattered. Reverse the schedule of application—croton oil first, tar after—and there were no tumors.
Enjoy!
