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 […]
Product managers need to be multi-lingual. If you do not speak the language of the function you are interacting with, everything becomes more difficult. Conversations take longer. Alignment becomes tedious, if it ever happens. Stakeholders come back after a feature is launched with a list of complaints. The best PMs prevent these messes by speaking […]
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. […]
India is exploding as a hub for innovation. These days, it seems more common to hear Unicorn announcements out of Bangalore than out of San Francisco. The numbers back up the feeling. Unicorn announcements in India have literally 10x’d. In 2021, India had 44 new unicorn announcements. Only 37 companies had hit that mark in […]
From the New York Times and Wired to Allure and Vox, everyone seems to be writing about digital fashion. For gamers like myself and our collaborators for the week at Master the Meta, this is a bit of a head-scratcher. Cosmetics have existed in games for over 20 years. So, the question of the day […]
If there were ever an example of greatness, it would be Tom Brady. Starting from nothing as a backup QB on a lossless team his freshman year of high school, Tom Brady faced adversity every step of the way. At the University of Michigan, Tom had to watch from the bench as Brien Griese led […]
With pieces that have read times in the hundreds of minutes, The Generalist is like if Wikipedia were written by a fiction writer who worked in Venture Capital. It turns out, it kind of is that. Mario Gabriele has managed to forge one of the most unique media brands in the technology landscape. His deep […]
Modified version originally published in Master the Meta. Just a few weeks into the year, we already have our first hit game of 2022. As Emily Coleman said, “Wordle is the sourdough starter of Omicron.” In a world of increasing social disconnection and outside-the-home chaos, Wordle has been a comforting, participate-with-other social gaming phenomenon. The simple […]