Lillian Sheng

When the mouse is motivated by shocks, that’s away behavior. When the mouse is chasing the scent of stinky cheese, that’s toward behavior.

We’ve seen professional media platforms do this on a smaller scale (e.g. Netflix making originals, etc). But to do this at the scale of an open creation platform, such as TikTok or Instagram, platforms won’t be able to rely on humans. They’ll instead need to rely on machines to create AI-generated media, or as my friend Matt Hartman calls it,... See more

What New Twitter Should Build The Open It Up camp argues that Twitter should go back to the way things were: open up the API and the microservices.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive the freezing cold mud, the howling wind and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors. As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some “egregious infraction of the rules” was ordered... See more

The livestreamers think the early ideas, planning and execution were their own. In this view, the MCNs only swooped in with some operational and business support at the last minute. Why should they take the lion’s share of the profits if a livestreamer becomes popular?   

In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme. If you can attract enough people to buy your tokens, and they can attract enough people to buy even more tokens, the whole enterprise will continue to increase in value.

• Vertical SaaS can support longer payback periods than generalist SaaS. Historically, Toast had a 18-month payback period which is extremely long for a company selling to small businesses (I would have expected something between 6 to 12 months). It works because Toast has a verticalised and all-in-one platform. As a result, it becomes the last

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By controlling the whole value chain, goPuff is also able to build a business model with proven positive unit economics. On the supply side, goPuff is able to cut intermediaries and order products directly from CPG brands that it will resell to the end customers with a healthy premium. On the delivery side, goPuff's warehouses are used only for... See more

Trade-offs Since adopting RSS saves podcast listening apps an enormous amount of time and money by not forcing them to reinvent the way content flows through the podcasting ecosystem, it means the barriers to finding an audience for these apps is lower. As a result, many of these apps exist, and thus a tremendous amount of market fragmentation has... See more