Victoria

Really good watch about prioritizing the value over the views @davidsenra

What if @Waymo and @ticketmaster partnered for the ultimate concert goer experience? A concert ticket and a ride home in one button

3 partnerships I can’t stop thinking about this week: 🍲 TikTok x Disney: Disney spent decades protecting its characters like someone might steal the nuclear codes. Now it's handing creators the keys. I think that's smart. Fandom is messy - edits, jokes, clips, people being weird online. Disney is accepting that it can't manufacture that inside Disney+. Even smarter: some of that culture gets funneled right back home to Disney+. 🍲 Everyone is talking about the $1OB deal. I'm more interested in the fact that Volta is seven months old. Normal enterprise procurement has apparently left the building. Al companies need power and compute badly enough that controlling future capacity can make a brand-new company strategically important overnight. It would be amazing if Volta delivers. Slightly insane that it has to deliver $10B 🍲 Al music is becoming a copyright migraine and Spotify's response is basically: fine, but can we charge admission? Honestly, im not mad at it. People are going to make covers and remixes anyway and Spotify doesn't need the best generation model. It may be much more valuable to own the place where the song, permission, attribution and money all meet. Own the toll booth, not the car.

Competing with other startups is a waste of time. Serve a tiny niche, make them happy, and expand later. Build progress in silence rather than broadcasting every step. #StartupTips #NicheMarket

I cant stop spending money on Tik Tok. Two months ago, I bought a portable sauna I haven't even touched since. Before shopify and tik tok partnered up, tiktok was purely funny videos and viral dances now, every couple posts an influencer is showing you a new product you can buy in 5 seconds. The TikTok and Shopify partnership started in 2020 and has been evolving since then. Shopify made it incredibly easy for influencers to connect to merchants, inventory and had the commerce infrastructure needed to turn attention into transactions on social media. Something other platforms like Instagram have been trying to get right for years. Here's my deep dive into it below

The whole of Silicon Valley won’t shut up about taste. When I say the word now, i get a cringe feeling. Similar to seeing someone dab or saying YOLO or 67. Hopefully with naming my publication/collection of thoughts “Good Taste” some of that can be reclaimed. Taste was never really something spoken about. It’s so personal. To some people you have it, to others you don’t, but to you - it’s just you. It changes overtime, it grows with you. You register influence and use it to pick design, font, furniture, food, vacation destinations, your clothes, the hand soap for your bathroom. I get why Silicon Valley is interested in the word. Software was hard to build, it was a specific taste of people who were in the field and they didn’t care too much about things outside of what they were building. Now you can prompt Claude and codex from your phone and almost anyone can build. What else do you do then? You spend time discovering what you like outside of code and notice that people outside of tech don’t really care about how things work but what is does, What it feels like, how it looks. And when 100 people can build the same thing- you have to differentiate. Here enters taste. The thing is though, again - you either have it or you don’t. You can’t really force it. And it takes work to craft and mold. You need to see alot, and seek a lot, and talk and share and figure out what you like and don’t like. You have to be judgmental and have empathy. Taste doesn’t form overnight. I for one am happy tech has realized taste is important, but in the way that I believe the path forward is to bring more creative and non tech people into the room, on an equally respectful playing ground. We all need each other. If tech doesn’t have input from the creatives, and vice versa, everything will look bland and the same, the arts will diminish and become even less funded, and the world would have a lot less color. Whatever you’re imagining, think worse. What does it look like? The marrying of the two? Outside of the open invitation into rooms, here’s how to start building your taste. When you see something you like, save it. When you see something you don’t like, as yourself why. Look at things and figure out what makes it different from other things you’ve seen. Once you notice that, do a deep dive into the style, the person, the history, whatever it may be. And continue. Form opinions and share them in conversation and hear other people’s opinions - this helps you understand if your care for the thing is strong enough to even defend is someone feels differently. Stop at your local shop and pick up a magazine. Buy something others may find ugly but you think it’s interesting. Pick up a random hobby, talk to a stranger, go on a solo date. Say no to a night out and experience fomo. Use cosmos, Pinterest and the social media save buttons religiously even if you only go back to look at them twice a year. Taste is a muscle and it’s important in understanding who you are as a person. Good luck finding yours.

Back in 2006, @Nike and @Apple changed running forever with the launch of Nike+iPod. They placed a small sensor inside specially designed Nike shoes and connected it to an iPod nano. Runners could track their distance, pace, time, and calories while listening to music, years before smartwatches existed. 3/5 of my favorite #tech #partnerships

In 2017 @TMobile and @netflix launched "Netflix on Us". It drove more than 1 million users per day on Netflix and offered $120 in annual value to customers. The partnership was successful because it made an invisible service feel valuable 2/5 of my favorite #tech #partnerships

Partnerships undoubtedly help businesses grow. The "Intel Inside" partnership turned a computer component into one of the most recognizable brands in tech. This is one of the best examples of ingredient branding: a company made its component valuable to the end customer by partnering with the companies that owned distribution.

Amazing article by @hyerijo_ on community building and the best thing in SF rn: Cafes @AngelList @UseCorgi @cursor_ai

Launching a $60M fund seems hard enough, but that may be the easy part #underpressure with Mandy Wen

"VC's are just like Startups raising from LPs, except they have no product" A few weeks ago I sat down with Mandy Wen who just raised a $60M fund and she told me what it's really like fundraising and how much harder VC's have it than founders. She is a former Partner at GSR Ventures. She led early investment in unicorns and 30+ $100M+ companies in both US and Asia markets with successful exits. Portfolio include DeepMap (acq by Nvidia), Phigent (acq by NavInfo), Flexiv Robotics, Lovart, ShadowBot RPA, Infinite Uptime, Blacklake, Creati.ai and more

Tech Media is boring 🥱 with Under Pressure, I'm asking the real questions people want to know and having fun while doing it. (While stressing my guests out) next one is next week luma.com/founders-0a9g @founders_cafe

Such a nice message ♥️

I wonder what the turn out would be for SF? Might do this @founders_cafe. Would people come?

Is it bad if I send a @meetgranola link when I get home and my partner asks how my day was?

The companies that understand this will build the next century