What’s the solution? For Outdoor Voices, I’d posit a combination of faster and broader product development, more wholesale in the right places (it’s on deep discount at Nordstrom Rack), retail expansion (if the stores are working), sharper marketing, and international growth.
My advice that I'd go to jail for (provided anyone would listen to me) is "let's focus our energies on fixing the old corrupt systems rather than tilting at the windmills of eliminating the bad people." Efforts to fix bad people always get lots of supporters, but never seem to get any actual positive results.
Collapse the talent stack every chance you get . As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer... See more
One through-line that cuts through all of the above is business model innovation. U.S. consumer internet has long been reliant on digital advertising. Partly because it matured on mobile—at a time when mobile advertising was less proven and mature—the Chinese consumer internet pioneered more creative and diversified revenue streams. Take Facebook a... See more
Today, content creators monetize their social presence through advertising or sponsorships, but these limited methods are often unstainable. That’s why creators are turning to solutions like Superpeer, Patreon, and Gumroad to monetize their audiences. While these solutions help monetize creator time and content, they don’t always allow creators or ... See more
Task-negative mode is more colloquially known as daydreaming, and, as Daniel J. Levitin of McGill University has written, it “is responsible for our moments of greatest creativity and insight, when we’re able to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable.”