Strategy, digested. #13

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This is digest #13, so in order to avoid any misfortune, I have timed it so I can send from the land of luck, Ireland! ???? I am in Dublin this week, attending my employer's annual customer event, where I had the opportunity to hear a keynote presentation from the Irish Taoiseach (Prime-Minister), Leo Varadkar. He represents the embodiment of an outward-looking, diverse and modern Ireland, committed to openness and progressive policies, and so he also embodies the spirit of this news digest. It was refreshing to hear from a internationalist politician in this current age of populism.

Thank you all who (re-)subscribed to this digest, since when I transferred it from the previous emailing platform that I was using, I decided not to copy the distribution contacts. 

We are now a smaller community of readers, and this makes me happier. Having a big audience from the very beginning can be dangerous, since it is the engagement of the initial small audience that makes one to continuously strive to get better. And it is the distribution via e-mail (rather than throwing it in the social media void) that creates the curator-reader intimacy enabling that feedback loop (hence the returning importance of e-mail as a media platform).

I saw this tweet:

“We are homeless in a jungle of machines that haunt and lure the imagination. Our culture is confused, our thinking spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. We are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.” - Walter Lippmann, 1914

It is amazing that 100 years later, we are back in the same place. I have written a blog post on Medium about why I think this has happened. And how this digest tries to complement your reading, in your quest for perspective. I hope it is beneficial for our society as a whole, but also, ultimately, I believe it is one's ability to focus on complex, long-reads that will become a personal competitive moat in the new economy. That's right, not only companies create moats, but individuals as well. This digest will do its best to help you achieve that. We are all hunters for knowledge here.

To end this personal note, I just want to remind you that the frequency of this digest will be somewhere between every two and three weeks, with no specific day of the week set in stone. Thank you for allowing me this freedom. I surely don't intend to optimise it for efficiency by choosing to work at scale, since I do this in my personal time outside of work remit, but rather to cherish the value of human imperfection.

This digest does not intend to be the first source of where you get the news or information from, but more of a follow-up. The value of this approach was captured beautifully by André Gide:

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

Strategy and Business Models in the Entrepreneurial Age

A (not boring) story of how radical tech innovation was and is financed 

?? I was pleasantly surprised to discover this great magazine (available both in print and digital) about technology. Kim-Mai Cutler has written a fascinating article in its 4th edition about the history of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the imperative of scale. VCs are a two-sided business, in a way, since they must also obtain investment rounds, from limited partners (such as major pension funds, endowments, public institutions etc.), just like the entrepreneurs they end up funding with that money.

The VC world needs scale to survive, meaning they act as hunters for unicorns, looking to fund companies that will become very big, to compensate for the multiple other losses in the portfolio (since 6% of investments generate about 60% of returns), so they distribute the pressure for scale down the value chain. It is why entrepreneurs accepting VC money are committing to steep growth curves (despite the fact that this model is not necessarily applying to all companies that are new). All in all, a fascinating read about how the VC industry started, first as a way to fill in the gaps created by stoppage of military funding into technology, with the help of Sherman Fairchild, heir to the IBM fortune and a few other "traitors", who later on gave to the world today's giants, like Intel, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, PayPal. But what this industry also gave to the world was the fundamental shift from a principle of risk avoidance to one of risk management.

?? But now, even the biggest Silicon Valley VCs and PEs are now often priced out of later-stage funding rounds, by SoftBank's Vision Fund, who seems to be redefining once again risk management. Understanding where the most powerful investor in the world, Softbank Vision Fund, places its investments can be a good peer for predicting future technological platforms that will influence both incumbents' and start-ups strategies. The Economist sees three main sets of investments: 1/ "the frontier" - based on instinctive bet in areas such as IoT (including the chips that will power this connectivity), robotics, AI, genomics; 2/ investments designed to bring new tech to old industries such as transport, property and logistics (n.b. where are financial services?); 3/ media and telecoms.

Vision Fund is using its sheer capital power to create the narrative for the companies it invests in that having lots of capital is in itself a moat against competitors. Skepticism is of course due, as being force-fed with more capital than they deserve or need can be dangerous for young companies and can inflate bubbles. SoftBank is itself is a fascinating story, capturing the very essence of VC investment, having seen 99% of its market value wiped out after the dot com crash, only to come back to glory due to a $20m investment in Alibaba that turned into $140b in 2014 when the Chinese giant IPOed. 

Mind the business model gap and the customer acquisition (costs)

???? Earlier this month, Andrew Chen, of a16z (and former head of growth at Uber),posted a great twitter thread describing how most companies fail because they get addicted to paid marketing, fooling themselves for achieving product/market fit while ignoring customer acquisitions costs. And when scale hits, it ends up working against the company, rather than for it. Also, addiction to paid marketing de-focuses business leaders from building competitive moats. Now, of course, there will be people who will notice that it is nothing revelatory in this thread, just old-marketing knowledge ("nothing kills a bad product faster than great marketing") repackaged in a new way. But we have already established the importance of repetition, with the quote from André Gide at the beginning of this digest.

?? So ignoring the cynics, Tren Griffin draws a few more business lessons from what Andrew Chen has written / tweeted about over the years. Growth is a necessity to prevent the death of a business, but scaling growth is hard. Besides reducing friction, constantly exposing new values and facilitating sharing to enable virality, an important lesson is to always look at growth from both a top-down as well as a bottom-up basis (=growing the NPV of cash flows of each customer). Reconciling top-down with bottom-up is an imperative because customers are heterogeneous, not homogeneous, and optimizing business processes for the average customer is sub-optimal (it can lead to a miss in identifying and converting high-intent users in the funnel, for example). The addiction to paid marketing can come from the fact that today, when capital is abundant, competition is much more intense, hence the need of marketing spend is higher than back in the time. And as lines between industries are fading, no business is protected from being displaced by new entrants.

?? Alex Rampell of a16z explores the opportunities and pitfalls of the B2B2C business model, which ultimately is a model that can lower the customer acquisition costs. This is not to be confused with "re-selling" or "channel partnerships", and not even with "white-labelling", which is still B2B. A B2B2C model ultimately aims to obtain the brand-awareness, as well as business data and end-customers, which the business then gets to keep and use. Therefore, this strategy's objective is that the end-customers must end up recognizing the business providing the product or service (the first B in the B2B2C chain). The pitfalls can lie in the fact that, after the partnership is signed, the main business (the one that already has the existing customer relationship) does not promote the new business enough, because it does not perceive that it receives more value than it gives. This implies that first, it is critical to convince the second "B" in the chain of the value-add that the blended network brings: product improvements, pricing power, and defensive moats. Done right, B2B2C can be one of the most effective ways of acquiring customers and constructing a powerful moat.

Too good to be true?

?? Of course, lowering customer acquisition costs by creating virality of a product via a "service that is too good to be true" does not necessarily create a sustainable business model, because there's more to customer lifetime value than that. This is why MoviePass, a subscription-based business, aiming to create a bundle around cinema-going, is facingquestions from Chris Lee about a possible death over the summer (which is the equivalent of the company "reducing the scope of their planned growth"). Its CEO Ted Farnsworth has declared that the market-hunters see the unicorn potential in MoviePass, therefore he has unlimited access to capital funding, so he's not worried about cash burn.

MoviePass suffers from three fundamental problems: 1/ a flawed business model - losing big money per subscriber on a variable cost basis, a problem that scale won't solve; 2/ movie-theaters don't want to be commoditized and see their ticket prices fall; 3/ its data business strategy (advertising, insights based on customer tracking) is unclear, and well, not the best-timed considering the privacy-related scandals around consumer-tech right now. But as per Eddie Yoon and Erich Joachimsthaler, there can be ways to fix it. And the key lies in understanding the economics, motivations, and aspirations of its super-customers: it is the experience that matters, not the movie itself. It is why a data-heavy platform like MoviePass can completely re-design the movie-going experience, in collaboration with cinemas. First place to look at: concessions (snacks, soda etc.). But for that, MoviePass needs to get better at articulating the value they bring to cinemas, who feel more threatened by commoditization rather than empowered to grow the cinema industry back to its glory. Yes, a classic B2B2C conundrum.

If only there were a map for all of this!

??? Speaking of supplier commoditization, Ben Thompson does a great job in his free weekly article (please do subscribe for daily insights) in building a moat map of current platforms and aggregators. Both platform businesses and aggregator-businesses derive their power from ownership of the customer relationship, but ultimately the nature of the moat they create depends on the interaction of supplier differentiation and network effects.

Ben puts today's tech giants on two spectrums, one being commoditized vs. differentiated suppliers, and the second being the extent to which the network effects directly improve the company's core product (internalised network effects) vs. improving the ecosystem rather than the product ("externalised). From Facebook's commoditized suppliers and internalised network effects to Microsoft's differentiated suppliers and externalised network effects, this is a great read into understanding the incentives (or lack of) these companies have for sharing economic benefits with the rest of the ecosystem, meaning having suppliers and the ecosystems on top be powerful (and healthy) as well. Please read the whole article, you won't regret it.

?? I guess, we could also apply Ben's Moat Map to investment companies as well. Most VCs' model is aligned with chasing only a few successful entrepreneurs (which will give the returns they want), while ignoring the other entrepreneurs from their portfolio. In a way, they commoditize the majority of entrepreneurs in their ecosystem (which can be another perspective for how the VCs chase only a lucky few ??, for which there must be a lot of trial and error). But there are other firms, at the other end of the spectrum, like Europe's The Family, that are successful when most, if not all of their ecosystem is successful.

Tech, Policies and Misdemeanours

Understanding Facebook and its ecosystem

As I write this section, it has been confirmed that Mark Zuckerberg will appear in front of the European Parliament, in a live streamed session. The past days have seen a flurry of articles analysing the health of Facebook's ecosystem. Ben Thompson's map surely makes it easier to navigate it.

?? Zeke Faux takes a look into the scammer-ecosystem that pollutes Facebooks' affiliate marketing programme (scammers are attracted and made powerful by Facebook's targetting power, and Facebook is not doing enough to eradicate it). Symeon Brown delves into the scamming influencer-marketing ecosystem that pollutes Instagram while Miranda Katz points to the absurdity of marketing relationships and paid posts distributed viacomputer-generated influencers (who defy the very idea of an influencer which is "Yes, I have tried that and therefore I can recommend it"). Both are probably a case for the need of (better) regulations around influencer marketing. Facebook has disabled almost 1.3 billion fake accounts over the past six months, but the reality is that it is still very easy to buy fake Facebook profiles, writes Charlie Warzel (I guess Facebook's conundrum lies in how can it collect and use more data in order to better and faster identify fake profiles, while managing privacy's concerns). KYC-ing ecosystems is hard! (n.b. hence why banking, such a deep-domain expertise field, has better chances to be disrupted by challenger banks rather than tech giants)

Also Upturn, a Washington-based nonprofit, has published the first rigorous, independent evaluation of Facebook’s new political-ads transparency plans. They fall short of its commitments. For example, the ability to search, sort, and computationally analyze ad data is missing, as well as information about how the ad is targeted and the size and nature of the audience it reaches.

?? But there is also immense value in Facebook, especially in emerging markets where its MarketPlace platform proves a real value creator for entrepreneurs or individual sellers who do informal business. The trust element that the platform brings, by socially vetting the transaction participants, is key. Also, let's not forget that Facebook groups are the new workers' unions in the digital age, and I explore below why that is critically important.

Choose a gig-life. 

Who needs reasons when there's a delivery to be made?

?? Because Uber controls all the data, it is hard to understand how much money Uber drivers make (studies point to anywhere between $8.5 to $21.1 per hour). Uber sees this, of course, through the lens of "invisible hand", and argues that drivers' wages represent the optimal equilibrium point between supply and demand. The part that is not captured is, because Uber's moat is not as strong due to the fact that its suppliers are commoditized, it is very prone to being disrupted by other companies, such as Lyft, that understand that platforms can derive more value long-term if its participants are truly empowered to extract more value and offer a differentiated proposition to end-consumers. Because Uber doesn't have that strategy, it competes by constantly lowering the fixed reference price point, claiming customer benefits, at the expense of drivers. 

Alison Griswold writes that, after expenses, Uber drivers can actually make more money flipping burgers at McDonald's, hence why Uber sees the fast-food chain as competition for its supplier-side of the platform. Reading this quite literary essay from John Telfer, a participant in the gig-economy, we find that this type of gig-work might pay rent, or not, but still, there is something addictive about the feedback loop of receiving a task, completing it, and watching the payment hitting the phone display. A direct feedback loop that turns a moment of reward into a habit, because the more you complete, the more frequently tasks will come. 

"There might be someone out there who wants a delivery"

? Law professor Hiba Hafiz writes about the U.S.'s National Labor Relations Board, that encouraged workers to unionize in order to lift Depression-era wages, and how it was paralysed when, in 1947, its Division of Economic Research was barred from hiring experts in economic analysis. It is why since then, the agency's policies and labour law decisions have suffered. A new economic division would adapt labour policymaking to the workplaces that have been radically transformed in the past decades, by being able to analyse the immense amount of data it has already collected. Ultimately, a framework for wage bargaining is important because, as per latest research study from Kevin Rinz and John Voorheis, raising the minimum wage does increase incomes at the bottom of the distribution in a way that is persistent for several years. This also encourage workers to pursue better jobs and higher wages, by enabling more geographic mobility. It enables hunting.

?? But the reality is that self-employment and gig-work is bound to grow, hence new forms of organizing for collective bargaining are being created. We cannot rely on the old labour unions for the new nature of work, argues Nicolas Colin. And while there are many ways in which the nature of the gig-work can be approached negatively (like a McDonalds' comparison), Nicolas' newsletter surfaces out a tweet from Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie which creates a different point of view:

“I think many people in the upper middle class underestimate how desirable [platforms] are because their jobs already come with harassment-free managers, flexibility to run errands in the middle of the day, work being available every day, and not being fired if you need a day off.”

It is also critical to understand the paradigm shift in which work is transitioning from the 20th century settlers (secure middle class jobs with house ownership), to the digital erahunters (switching jobs, moving often, chasing opportunity).

A hard knock life for regulators 

?? Catherine Miller, Director of Policy at DoteveryoneUK, writes that in the challenge of regulating internet companies, it is vital that the public is recognised as the primary stakeholder and the ultimate beneficiary of any regulation. Through her research, Catherine found out that people believe the internet has a positive impact for individuals, but less positive on society as a whole. Also, people do not really understand the technologies and today's data flows, but overall there is a will for greater transparency.

?? As I was preparing for my trip to Dublin, I enjoyed reading Adam Satarino's profile of Helen Dixon, who suddenly became one of tech's most important regulators and how Ireland is taking a global center-stage at privacy protection, under her helm. Currently, European headquarters of the most data-hungry companies are in Dublin: Facebook, Airbnb, Apple, Google, Twitter, Microsoft - which means that she has a big role ahead. Her office is among the best funded privacy agencies globally, but still more budget is needed(n.b. which I'm sure Leo Varadkar will be able to secure). But besides funding, Helen's challenge lies in understanding her mandate from the general public - does the public care, or even support her role in protecting privacy? Are new definitions and layers for privacy required?

?  Helen has a real puzzle to unlock, if we also consider Deutsche Bank's data showing that people actually increased their Facebook usage after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. People seem to care about privacy as long as it makes the breaking news.

Healthy Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

?? Every business is becoming a data business. To be more specific, a data-flows business. But with governments taking a more protectionist stance and severely restricting international transfers of data, this drives up costs for business as they need to regionalize more and more operations. With economies becoming information-intensive, it is curious to see who will bear the ultimate cost in the end.

?? Lessons from Leo Varadkar, Ireland's Taoiseach

As mentioned, I had the opportunity to listen to a great presentation this morning from Ireland's Prime-Minister, Leo Varadkar. I admire very much his drive for multiculturalism and openness, which is visible in how Ireland, a small island, is expanding its role internationally and taking center-stage (and not just geographically). Digital transformation creates, and does not destroy, economic opportunities for the whole of the society, and it is the government’s role is providing a cohesive strategy and infrastructure for this development. It is why, more than ever, Leo Varadkar believes Ireland should work on ensuring it is a leader, and not a follower, in this new world.

It is the government's role to embed trust and find the right balance between privacy and data-insights, between innovation and security. It is why businesses should not fear GDPR! This European regulation will help the society realise even further the enormous potential of technology. And it is the combination of progressive regulations and technology that will allow Ireland to create ecosystems that truly improve people's lives (which is why governments must embed data-intensive practices in their own institutions and processes., as well). 

Ireland now specialises in progressive transformation, AI, cloud, analytics, robotics. It is fully committed to education and nurturing talent, as a core ingredient. As well, Ireland remains fully committed to the European Union, to multilateralism, to Paris climate-accord, to free trade.

And this strategy is paying. From one of the poorest countries (agrarian background), Ireland has become one of the world's most prosperous (enabled by technology). Ireland runs on a surplus, is focused on reducing national debt as a strategic hedge against the inevitable downturns of the future, while also increasing public spending on infrastructure by 25%!

There are now more people at work in Ireland than at any time in the country’s history! And one of Mr. Varadkar's main focus is to ensure that the jobs that Irish people have are good jobs (n.b. hunters with benefits of the settlers). And through progressive tax policies, like shifting tax burden from the middle-class to the very rich, Ireland offers sustainable pay rises to the working class.

?? In other words (my own), and drawing a parallel with Brexit, while UK has commoditized its working class, Ireland wants to help them differentiate. Ireland ishunting for sustainable growth. ??

?? I must say, it is very much refreshing to hear from Leo Varadkar, and also to read in the same day about the similar forward thinking strategy from Justin Trudeau - Canada's crucial investment in tech and innovation.  ??

???? Made in China 2025. A look inside Beijing's booming start-up scene shows how ubiquitous the country's tech culture is, by Alec Ash.

???? We often only talk about the rivalry between U.S. and China, shadowing Europe's which is scrambling to find its strategic positioning in the global tech scene. But Kigali’s knowledge-based sharing economy is an example for other cities looking towards the future. Lauren Razavi on how Rwanda’s capital became an African tech leader.

???? ???? In the last digest, I shared an article about how "Romania is becoming the next Berlin". This implies, of course, that Berlin is evolving as well. It has one of the world’s most vibrant political histories, was once the world's spy capital, and it is now becoming the new ideological center of the decentralized world. Interesting portrait series featuring the people shaping Berlin’s crypto ecosystem, by Hugo Amsellem. Berlin is also on a digital crackdown on hate speech, as it is one of Facebook's biggest content moderation (deletion) centers.

"You know why they don’t have it? Because it can’t be done. So I only have one advice for you. And that is to close down this company. It’s never going to work. And trust me, I’ve been in this business for a long time." - the painful story of how iZettle was founded

???? ???? What's even more painful is that Europe lost another unicorn, with iZettle being acquired by PayPal, 9 days after disclosing official plans for an IPO. The relationship with PayPal is not a new one, in fact the U.S. fintech was courting iZettle for years. Yes, small businesses deserve something (even) better. But as my colleague Ben Robinson wrote two years ago, Europe also deserves lions, not unicorns. 

?? Nicolas Colin wrote about how startup M&A is critical in building entrepreneurial ecosystems, along with IPOs (I presume especially in Europe where VC funding is still not mature enough, hence any kind of liquidity is welcomed). But usually entrepreneurs that have found product/market fit are focused on growth, which in turn attracts funding (private of public liquidity events), so therefore if they are interested in being acquired, it could also be a signal of lack of ambition. 

????? But tech M&A is also a form of hunting for talent, since incumbents (most of them being rent-seeking settlers in the economy), can't attract the sector's best employees, which are also hunters themselves, argues Tanay Jaipuria.

FinTech snippets

Financial inclusion

?? It is the combination of technological progress and government intervention that advances the global agenda of financial inclusion. In 2012, circa 2.5 billion adults had no bank deposit, no formal credit scoring, and no means of payment other than cash or barter. This number has now been estimated to have fallen to 1.7 billion adults. This means that 1.2 billion people got access to banking services. This is impressive especially since very few consumer products, in general, have ever diffused so rapidly, write Stephen Gecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz. Mobile phones played a critical role in this process, as a channel for distributing financial services especially where other banking infrastructure lacks, and it is also where the biggest opportunity lies for the rest of the unbanked population.

Share your thoughts

I would love to hear from you on Twitter, @DanColceriu.

Thank you for reading, warm regards from Dublin! ??

If you liked this, please subscribe to receive it regularly on your email: https://bit.ly/2Itvr51

Top 10 articles I recommend which were featured in this digest:

1. Kim-Mai Cutler - The Unicorn Hunters - March 2018

2. Alex Rampell - On B2B2C Business Models - May 2018

3. Ben Thompson - The Moat Map - May 2018

4. Kevin Rinz, John Voorheis - The distributional effects of minimum wages - May 2018

5. Nicolas Colin - Uber and the future of work - May 2018

6. Adam Satariano - New Privacy Rules Could Make This Woman One of Tech’s Most Important Regulators - May 2018

7. Alan Beattie - Data Protectionism: The Growing Menace to Global Business - May 2018

8. Stephen Gecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz - Banking the masses - May 2018

9. Vasilis Kostakis and Wolfgang Drechsler - Utopia Now - April 2018

10. Matthew Stewart - The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy - May 2018