Brain Food - #2 | Cosmic Burgers

Brain Food - #2 | Cosmic Burgers

Hello there!

If you read my very first newsletter last week and have come back for more in week 2 - thank you

If you’re new to this newsletter - welcome! I have recently taken up the task to pick my top favourite content pieces every week and share them with all the curious souls out there. You will find memes/podcasts/articles/videos on any and all topics under the sun. I hope that you find something here that sparks your interest or opens you up to a new world

Here’s Brain Food - #2. Last week was interesting. I went all in on AI-generated art and the rapid pace of innovation that is taking place in this space is absolutely MINDBLOWING! I highly encourage everyone to give Dall-E 2 or Midjourney a shot and discover their creative gene - seriously everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, can now become an artist

The funnies didn’t happen much in the last week, it was a serious one, to say the least - primarily driven by the fact that I had to deal with my 3rd bout of Covid. But that just gave me another reason to dig up even more content! So without further ado - here’s my random top picks from last week - hope you have fun going through these

Do provide your feedback by replying to this email/thread directly

Meme of the week: (Source - Alex Menn ) I chuckled hard on this one, need to see a fresh one on the pants next (see the meme for context and then come back to this sentence haha)

[Consumer Tech] - How ShareChat now earns $50M from virtual gifting - [Economic Times]

• ShareChat is a social media app that has 400M+ MAU (Monthly Active Users) across largely tier 2-3 cities in India. They’ve been trying their hand at different areas of monetization over the last few years
• This segment (virtual gifting) of revenue is quite surprising, given their audience - it’s funny and beautiful how India works

[Web3] - Audius, a web3 music platform now hits 7.5M MAU - [decrypt]

• I absolutely love Audius’ mission to give more financial freedom/upside to music artists, but was always skeptical about how/why would listeners actually use it. I for one didn’t get much of the music I listen to
• Turns out, EDM listeners are flocking to the platform now, and I couldn’t be happier for them
• What’s interesting is that <10% users actually use a crypto wallet (such as Metamask) and most of the users are simply treating it like the next SoundCloud

[AI Art] - After going down the AI Art rabbit hole, I stumbled on this artist (Nikhil Sekar), who creates some stunning artwork via AI - must definitely check it out and give it a follow - [Instagram page]

• I started thinking - “Is there a way AI can convolute my own images and create Avatars based on facial models” - and the internet gifted, of course - here’s an amazing thread on the same

[Music] - How System of a Down created “Chop Suey” - by Rick Rubin x JRE [Youtube]

• We’ve all heard Chop Suey, right? (WAKE UP!)
• Rick Rubin (a very famous music producer) came on the Joe Rogan Podcast! He details an amazing story on how he helped the band (SOAD) come up with the lyrics to a famous song

[Ecommerce] - Bain’s report on “How India shops online” 2022 is out! [Long read - Bain]

• Key details: Market penetration to increase to 10% by 2027 (currently at 5%); the e-retail market currently stands at $50B, expected to rise to $150B by 2027
• Bain also produces a ton of successful CEOs in India (hopefully I do them proud someday) - here’s a hot take on it by Samarth Mehta

[Super Funny] - Here’s a fun take on every single speakeasy, EVER [Youtube shorts]

• Trevor Wallace is a super funny content creator, and this sketch is super accurate! Having been to a ton of speakeasies in Singapore, I can safely say this video covers exactly how the experience is like

[Fun | Gaming] - How a competitive GeoGuessr player - Rainbolt - thinks, analyses, and competes [Youtube]

• GeoGuessr is a geographical browser game created by Anton Wallén in which players guess locations from street view imagery
• The game is amazing and super addictive, I’ve recently started playing it and it’s super interesting to figure out

[Interesting - Global Economics] - Cocaine should be legalized (yep, you read that right) - [Economist]

• Super article by the Economist, giving their take on why cocaine should be legalized, primarily because the costs of prohibition outweigh the benefits

[General Startups] - Here’s an interesting analysis by Ilya Strebulaev on how much time it takes to make a Unicorn [Linkedin]

• Three out of four companies became unicorns within nine years of their founding. Some became unicorns super quickly
• A median unicorn in the sample (n=1,123) took 7 years after founding to achieve the $1B+ status
• Curious, does Mensa Brands hold the “record” for fastest unicorn ever? (6 months)

[Content Creation - Tech] How Tiktok is now chasing Amazon by getting into ecommerce fulfilment [Axios - read]

• The move signifies TikTok's commitment to e-commerce as its next major revenue stream, following the explosive growth of its ads business
• Tiktok has already experimented with a live shopping feature, which was successful
• Their vast pool of users, fine-tuned content algorithm, and accelerating cash machine have made it the upstart that most spooks Facebook, which started copycatting TikTok's format in 2020
• The co has taken the world by storm, I’m convinced they’d cross the $1T market cap number, and soon

I’d love to improve this curation and the way its presented, do give your feedback on my DMs or directly on this thread.

Have a great week!

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