sari

It starts with FOMO. This is the secret sauce of any community, but it's hard to manufacture. On Deck created FOMO by doing something unscalable (dinner parties) for years.

* (Negative) Working Capital Dynamics: The company holds goods on consignment. Once sold, it waits 14 days before paying out to make sure it’s not returned. The payout is putting the money into someone’s ThredUp account; typically they let it sit there and let the balance build. About 15-30% of this is eventually spent on Threadup.

Social Networks - MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and LinkedIn lead the charge to map out people’s relationships on the Internet. They used the best technology that they had access to at the time: a Delaware Corporation and racks of privately owned servers. This concentrated enormous amounts of power and capital in the hands of a few Silicon Valley C... See more

Google, Bloomberg, Yelp, and ZoomInfo are all data businesses. They acquire their data in different ways, and they generate revenue from that data in different ways. But for all these companies, data is the fundamental unit of value creation.

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast.