Better Hiring Processes, Fred Wilson on 2014 & 2015, The 2005 Bubble Talks, Team Building and Culture, Older Entrepreneurs, Twitter's Future. Happy New Year everyone!
If you're fans of Twitter like we are, here's a tweetstorm by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg on what Twitter's strategy should be... The master Fred Wilson takes a look back at 2014 and shares his insights for 2015. On the menu: major tech IPOs, wearables and vast opportunities in the enterprise/SaaS sector. The importance of recruiting at startups is tremendous. Amazon's top gun Anurag Gupta offers his solutions on how to mechanize hiring processes to improve decisions. AngelList's CTO Joshua Slayton explains the mechanics of team building and culture in this nice, visual presentation. Fab/Twitter Tweetstorm from Eric Scott Johnson. What Just Happened? I’m not much for the rear view mirror.
I like to look forward, not back. I guess that’s why I’m in the line of work I’m in. But I’m going to force myself to look back at 2014 and explain what just happened. Doing that will help me look forward (tomorrow?) And explain what is going to happen. This is not an attempt to be comprehensive, or accurate, or anything else. 1/ the social media phase of the Internet ended. this may have happened a few years ago actually but i felt it strongly this year. entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications. we still use them. but there isn’t much innovation here anymore. the big platforms are mature. their place is secure. 2/ messaging is the new social media. this may be part of what is going on in 1/. families use whatsapp groups instead of facebook. kids use snapchat instead of instagram. facebook’s acquisition of whatsapp in february of this year was the transaction that defined this trend.
What Is Going To Happen. Yesterday I wrote a post summing up what happened in 2014.
In it I promised a post on what is going to happen. What I did not specify was how far forward I am going to look. It’s a lot easier to predict the future without a timeline on it. I think we all know, for example, we are going to have driverless cars. When that is going to be mainstream, however, is a pretty big question that I can’t answer. But, because yesterday was about 2014, I am going to make this post about 2015. 1/ The big companies that were started in the second half of the last decade, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc, will start going public. 2/ Xiaomi will spend some of the $1.1bn they just raised coming to the US. 3/ More asian penetration into the US market will come from the messenger sector as both Line and WeChat make strong moves to gain a share of the lucrative US messenger market. 4/ After a big year in 2014 with the Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift, virtual reality will hit some headwinds.
Mechanize Your Hiring Process to Make Better Decisions. Dia01 02 keynote_Joshua_Slayton_angellist_The Angelist Way. The Aging Entrepreneur. Can older people be great entrepreneurs?
Marc Andreesen has a great post on this age-old question. In part I, he’s digging through the data. Some of his observations are powerful and worth summarizing: "Generally, productivity — output — rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. "Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit. " I went through an evolution of sorts on this topic. I started with a variation of the Beard Hypothesis (enthusiasm decreases with age but experience increases, and there’s an optimum cross-over point). The Stratechery 2014 Year in Review. 2014 was Stratechery’s second year, and what a momentous one it was!
In April Stratechery became my full-time job, and although I made some quick changes to the model, it’s been a big success. It has certainly kept me busy: in 2014 I wrote 88 free articles, 169 Daily Updates, and recorded 41 podcasts (29 of them were Exponent episodes). Here are the highlights (the 2013 edition is here): Peak Google The Five Most-Viewed Articles: Peak Google – Google owns search, and will continue to do so. PayPal’s Incentive Problem, and Why Startups Win Five Big Ideas Messaging: Mobile’s Killer App – Messaging is the killer app on mobile, but only LINE and WeChat have created true platforms that are true multi-sided markets (in another happy coincidence, this post was written one day before Facebook acquired WhatsApp)Netflix and Net Neutrality – There are fundamental tradeoffs between broadband investment, non-discriminatory treatment of data, and unlimited access.
Five Company-Specific Posts Five Podcasts.