Can you name Reddit’s CEO? Did you guess Alexis Ohanian? You would be wrong. The famous husband of Serena Williams has cultivated a larger internet personality than the other co-founder of Reddit who is the actual CEO. That would be Steve Huffman. The same Steve who coded the entire site in Lisp in a few […]
If you add up the revenue of Twitter, Snapchat, Zoom, Lyft, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Spotify all together, it still wouldn’t be as big as Bytedance. The company is a behemoth. And Bytedance’s biggest product, by far, is TikTok. This year, TikTok crossed Twitter and Snapchat for US users. Yet, as recently as two years ago, […]
“Thinking deeply about payments.” In 2008, this sounded like the job of companies like Visa and Mastercard. But, in the end, the company that disrupted the merchant payment experience was a small upstart. After being fired from Twitter in 2008, Jack Dorsey came back with a new company that was thinking deeply about payments. From […]
In 2002, Amazon launched a side business with little fanfare: cloud Infrastructure as a service. 20 years later, it now makes over $70B in annual revenue. It’s a huge business. In fact, AWS’ hefty profit represents well over 50% of Amazon’s total. It is Amazon’s crown jewel. In a conglomerate full of great businesses, it […]
How does a company navigate the clashing waves of the travel industry? Adeptly, like a master using a Kayak. The meta-search engine started in 2004 can be a forgotten site in the business coverage of travel. Certainly, at 30M visitors per month, it’s not forgotten in the actual travel side of travel. Kayak is ubiquitous. […]
Solopreneurs are all the rage these days, and one of the most interesting instances is that of the e-commerce entrepreneur. Across the world, individuals are creating and selling products online at rates never seen. The Covid-19 pandemic was, in particular, a catalyst for the activity. Three separate megatrends converged: E-commerce platforms like Amazon and Shopify […]
A Collaboration with Productify Product people are both lovers and haters of experiments. On the one hand, they are great at helping measure the result of changes. On the other hand, launching anything as an experiment takes more analytics and engineering work, and typically also slows down forward progress. If you already have a vision […]
Brian Armstrong just bought one of the most expensive homes in the state of California. For $133M, his modern Bel Air mansion is now one of the priciest single-family home transactions ever. The self-confessed “on the spectrum” (of Autism) CEO has managed to become one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs, as well as one of […]
Six months ago, OpenSea raised at a $1.5B valuation. Today, it just raised at a $13.3B valuation. NFTs are a massive business. Here is OpenSea’s yearly transaction volume. It takes 2.5% of that volume, generating the revenue in the pictured line chart. 2018: $474K2019: $8M2020: $24M2021: $15B We’re only a few days into 2022, but […]
1.275 billion dollars, all cash. When news hit two weeks ago that the lending company owned by Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert was buying the personal finance app Truebill, heads turned. It was an eye-popping sum for a company that just 6 months earlier raised a series D at a $500M valuation. Did Truebill deserve […]