JCNews #30
La stratégie d'entreprise de Google Cloud.
Bonjour,
Chaque semaine, je partage quelques articles que j’ai trouvés particulièrement enrichissants. J’espère qu’ils vous aideront autant qu’ils m’ont aidé.
Cette semaine (entre autres) :
Quelques chiffres clés de Lemonade
Slack versus Microsoft
Excellente analyse de la stratégie de Google Cloud
La stratégie d’Oatly
Les supercentres de santé de Walmart
Une surprise … 🎁
Certains articles sont en français, la plupart sont en anglais (je copie certaines citations en anglais). Ils ne sont pas tous récents et vont au rythme de mes lectures.
Bonne lecture !
Si vous aimez, vous pouvez vous inscrire, partager ou encore me suivre sur Twitter.
📱Monde des technologies
👉 Quelques chiffres clés de Lemonade (Mario Gabriele)
As of the first quarter of 2020, Lemonade grew revenue 138% year-over-year, which is especially impressive given the disruptive arrival of the coronavirus. But expenses have also mounted, resulting in deepening losses. In 2018, Lemonade found itself $52.9 million in the red — a year later, the deficit had swollen to $108.5 million.
Lemonade spent $89.1 million in sales and marketing in 2019, and though marketing efficiency has improved, low-value premiums and subpar retention mean that its lifetime value per customer (LTV) is just 1.26 times greater than its customer acquisition costs (CAC). That’s not particularly impressive.
That represents $67.3 million in 2019 revenue. Taking 2020’s numbers, Lemonade appears to be on a $104.8 million annual run rate, implying a revenue multiple of 14.3x.
Rather than 80%–90% gross margins, Lemonade lands around 18%.
👉 Excellente analyse de Jio et de la géopolitique autour de la tech (Stratechery) I’m focusing on what makes an amazing freemium product take up:
It also seems unlikely that European competitors will fill in the gap. Any company that wishes to achieve scale needs to do so in its home market first, before going abroad, but it seems far more likely that Europe will make the most sense as a secondary market for companies that have done the messy work of iterating on data and achieving product-market fit in markets that are more open to experimentation and impose less of a regulatory burden. Higher costs mean you need a greater expectation of success, which means a proven model, not a speculative one.
That is exactly what Jio did: it spent that $32 billion building a network that covered all of India, launched with an offer for three months of free data and free voice, and once that was up, kept the free voice offering permanently while charging only a couple of bucks for data by the gigabyte. It was the classic Silicon Valley bet: spend money up front, then make it up on volume because of a superior cost structure enabled by the zero-marginal nature of technology.
👉 Slack dépose plainte contre Microsoft auprès de l’UE (The Information)
Slack has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the European Union alleging the company has engaged in “illegal and anti-competitive” behaviour by bundling its workplace Teams product into the Office suite.
Along with the complaint, Slack issued a blistering press release labelling Microsoft Teams a “weak, copycat” product, underlining the fact Microsoft is repeating its ‘browser wars’ behavior.
Slack is framing this as a fight between gateways (smaller, more agile upstarts) and gatekeepers (the Big Four behemoths).
🏯Construire une entreprise
👉 Le travail nécessaire pour se forger une opinion (FS)
Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. “You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.”, Charlie Munger.
When Darwin encountered opinions or facts that ran contrary to his ideas, he endeavored not only to listen but also not to rest until he could either argue better than his challengers or understand how the facts fit. Darwin did the work.
👉 Excellente analyse de la stratégie d'entreprise de Google Cloud. Beaucoup à apprendre et à déconstruire pour les entreprises B2C. (Stratechery)
What was impressive about this year’s presentation was the outline of a consistent product strategy that embraces Google’s position in the market, clear indicators that Google is listening and reacting to real-world customers, and yes, even more boring enterprise sales stuff.
Sales is different than B2C:
This announcement is a direct repudiation of Google’s previous approach to the cloud, which expected customers to bring their data to Google simply because Google had the best tools. That latter point may have been correct, but as Google learned, enterprise sales are a lot different than the open web. Google Search didn’t need to do any marketing or accommodation of either suppliers or consumers, because its search engine was only a URL away, and as consumers realized it was the best, suppliers (i.e. the rest of the web) went out of their way to make their data available to Google. When it comes to the enterprise, though, being the “best” — particularly when you, the vendor, are narrowly defining what “best” means — is only one piece of the puzzle. You need a breadth of services, you need a reputation, and you need to sell. (...) BigQuery Omni goes in the other direction: it accepts that many enterprises have already committed to AWS or Azure, or are unwilling to move data off-premises, and offers one of Google’s best tools (BigQuery is a way to store and query massive data sets, and it is one of Google’s most differentiated tools) to those customers wherever they wish to use it. To put it another way, Google’s new position is that implementation details, like where your data is stored, shouldn’t prevent enterprises from having access to Google tools; like Google’s old strategy, it assumes that Google’s tools are the best, but it is far more humble about meeting customers where they are.
Privacy:
In addition to security, Google also has a very firm commitment to privacy of your data. We recognize, at Google Cloud, that your data is your data and no one else’s. When you move data into a cloud, we do not sell your data to any third parties. We do not use it for advertising. We only use it to deliver the cloud service that you are consuming in Google Cloud. We guarantee the integrity of your data by encrypting it at rest and in transit and with confidential computing, even when it’s being processed. With Access Transparency, Access Justification, and Access Approval, you have sole control of who can access your data. And you can even deny Googlers access to your data. No one at Google has standing access to your data.
On one hand, duh, of course enterprise data is distinct from Google consumer data. How could you think to run an enterprise business otherwise? In fact, it seems like that was the reaction of Google previously. That is why this sort of statement was never really made before. But then again, why wouldn’t enterprise consumers be worried about this? Perhaps it would be prudent to check and see if Google’s consumer business is not simply an asset but also a liability in enterprise sales? What this section of the keynote says to me is that Kurian has spent the last year actually meeting with and listening to potential customers, and that data privacy was actually a very real thing that potential customers were worried about. And so Kurian took the time in this keynote to address those concerns as explicitly as possible.
Google Is Selling: This is, frankly, the most un-Googley slide possible. The truth is that the technology underlying all of those solutions is the exact same, just with different wrappers and websites attached. It is enough to make a 10x engineer’s skin crawl! The reality, though, is that customers don’t buy technology, they buy solutions to their problems, and it is on enterprise software companies to make the effort to meet customers where they are.
👉 Tweetstorm très intéressant sur la stratégie d’Oatly (Twitter)
His rationale with this organizational decision is that traditional marketing teams waste too much time engaging in process with briefs, meetings, and a need to have every little thing approved.
Oatly took this 174 page lawsuit and published it online. Then, they ran full-page ads in all the Swedish newspapers publishing the lawsuit. In the ad, they tell everyone that the milk lobby feels threatened so they have to resort to being bullies.
While they eventually lost the case, they decided to pour fuel on the fire. They spent $700,000 bringing their controversial slogan to the UK instead. They bought billboards across key UK stations, print media, TV, and podcasts.
🏥 Santé
👉 Walmart crée des supercentres de santé qui pourraient transformer la consommation de la santé aux US (Medcity News)
The company rolled out two Walmart Health clinics this month, in Loganville, Georgia and Springdale, Arkansas.
They’re more like a one-stop shop for healthcare, with primary care, urgent care, diagnostics, x-rays, behavioral health and dental care.
Walmart Health’s other big differentiator: a primary care appointment costs just $40. For children? $20.
The team began referring to the concept as “supercenters for healthcare,” with the idea of bringing all of these disparate services together and cutting out the middlemen to reduce costs.
👉 Doctolib victime d’un vol de données au travers d’une de leurs API (Le Monde)
Le service en ligne de prise de rendez-vous médicaux Doctolib a annoncé jeudi 23 juillet avoir été victime d’un vol de données, « qui a permis d’accéder illégalement aux informations administratives de 6.128 rendez-vous ».
La faille de sécurité semble donc avoir concerné non pas le service en tant que tel, mais une interface de programmation (API) qui permet à des logiciels spécialisés (pour la prise de rendez-vous ou la gestion d’agendas) de se connecter à Doctolib.
💚 Les publications d’Alan et sur Alan
👉 Q&A: life as an Engineer at Alan (blog Alan) : entretien avec Alexandre Gerlic et Rémy-Christophe Schermesser pour découvrir le day to day d’un ingénieur chez Alan.
👉 Lettre aux actionnaires (Q2 2020) (blog Alan) : nous partageons en français, notre lettre aux investisseurs, où nous parlons de nos progrès et de nos avancées.
👉 Tout savoir sur la dispense mutuelle (blog Alan) : petit guide à usage des dispenses de mutuelles, et comment on les gère chez Alan.
🎁 On publie un livre ! Le titre ? Healthy Business: culture d’entreprise, bien-être, excellence. D’ores et déjà disponible en précommande numérique (Amazon) et papier (Fnac, Furet du Nord, Cultura, Decitre), et dans quelques jours chez tous les libraires dans les deux formats !