💡JCNews #32
Les risques pris par Amazon sur le Kindle.
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) :
Comment One Medical a répondu au COVID
Podcast sur l’histoire d’Instagram
Ce qu’a appris Dan Rose en travaillant chez Amazon
Les Weekly Updates chez Alan
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
👉 Samsung, Google, Microsoft et les partenariats (Stratechery)
The problem with this otherwise happy state of affairs is that companies tend to give themselves credit for secular trends, particularly relative to their partners. In other words, Google thought it was responsible for smartphone growth, because it provided the software for OEMs like Samsung, and Samsung thought it was responsible for smartphone growth, because they made the devices and did the marketing and distribution for the biggest part of the Android base. The truth is that the biggest driver of growth was billions of people buying smartphones for the first time, because smartphones are really useful, and just because both companies helped enable this reality doesn’t mean they were the primary drivers of this secular trend.
Unfortunately for Samsung and Google, the implication of improperly claiming credit is that neither properly appreciated the other: Samsung thought it could do software just fine, thank you very much, and Google figured simply making phones couldn’t be that hard, forgetting that selling phones is far more difficult than manufacturing them. And so each went their separate ways, opening the door for Microsoft.
👉 Trump souhaite bloquer les applications chinoises (The Information)
Les applications d'origine chinoise telles que TikTok et WeChat seraient bloquées des magasins d'applications mobiles dans le cadre d'un nouveau programme "Clean Network" dévoilé par le secrétaire d'État américain Michael Pompeo.
Il n'est pas clair si le Département d'État peut faire appliquer le programme ou s'il s'appuiera sur une conformité volontaire.
TikTok est déjà en pourparlers avec Microsoft au sujet d'une éventuelle vente afin d'éviter une telle interdiction.
🏯Construire une entreprise
👉 L'expérience de Dan Rose chez Amazon en 2004 et les risques pris sur le Kindle (Twitter)
Learn and adapt. Amazon’s second largest business was decimated when Apple digitized the music industry. CD sales had been important to Amazon, but they were dwarfed by book sales. Jeff took the lessons from iPod/iTunes and applied them to Kindle.
Ignore the “institutional no”. Amazon’s core retail business was pummeled after the dot-com crash, and we were still pulling out of the tail spin in 2004 when Jeff started the Kindle team (the same year he started the AWS team). Everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them.
Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business.
Don’t assume something can’t be done, just because others have tried and failed. 2 start-ups had already failed with ebook readers. Sony had a reader in the market that wasn’t getting any traction. These failures emboldened Jeff’s determination.
Just because it ain’t broke, doesn’t mean you can’t make it better. Jeff told us “Physical books are one of the greatest inventions ever and there’s nothing wrong with them. How do we make the reading experience even better?”. Our answer: lighter, portable, easy to sync.
Invent. Failed eBook readers had used LED screens, we embraced e-ink (first commercial use). iPods used cables to sync, we used WiFi and cellular. We added a keyboard for search (this was a mistake, but it was worth a try). We invented a novel way to digitize books. Etc
Set unrealistic expectations. Jeff wanted 100k books in store at launch for $9.99 each. This was my job and it seemed impossible. Publishers waffled between fear and indifference. But Jeff wouldn’t take no for an answer. Those were some of the toughest meetings of my career.
Make magic. Syncing over WiFi without cables was innovative, and our team was proud of it. But Jeff didn’t think it was magical enough. He insisted on syncing over cellular, and he didn’t want to charge the customer for data. We told him it couldn’t be done, he did it anyway.
Be inspired. It would have been impossible for a professional CEO to build Kindle (or AWS) in 2004 at Amazon. I remember sitting in so many meetings where people questioned why we were doing this, right in the middle of a turnaround in the core business. I was inspired.
👉 Long podcast sur l’histoire d’instagram (Podcast Investor Field Guide)
Do the simple things first
“Not invented here” should not be a problem
You have to solve a problem and have a deep understanding of the problem you are solving.....
Jobs to be done : people needs.... The social problems it solves
People assume that too many things will remain the same. Challenge the assumptions
Send engineers to the field
Do not try to half launch things. Go for it and deal with the consequences.
Solve problems you can solve today
Are you problem focused and try to find the technology that fits it?
Enormous prioritization of your time: no external meetings policy for months. Stuck to it until launch
If you're not hungry, if you're not paranoid, if you're not focused on building product you're going to be dead
Figured it out over time. Don’t try to figure it all out too early
🏥 Santé
👉 Comment One Medical a répondu au COVID (Masters of Scale)
Our model starts with this concept of you're a member. So you're at One Medical, we're going to look after you. You want to text me, you want to message me, you want to call me, you want to video, you want to see me in person during this time? You want to see me in a parking lot and I'll stick a Q-tip up your nose? Any of those are fine. Moreover, since we know who all our members are, because they're signed up as members, we'll reach out to you, which we did.
And part of, I think, health care is, certainly you want to help people medically when they have acute conditions or help them with chronic conditions to change. But often it's about alleviation of anxiety, it's uncertainty, "How's my child, are they going to be okay?" There's no worse feeling and there's nothing scarier.
We have a program, we call it “One Medical Healthy Together”. This is really about ongoing screening. Sure it could be about testing, but are we really going to test every person every day before and after their commute? May not be practical. At a minimum, we could screen every person every day by asking them questions: Do you have any symptoms? Anybody in your house have any symptoms? Have you traveled? Have you been exposed? Anybody in your house been exposed? By asking these questions on a routine basis... And do you have a temperature? We've actually run some machine learning models so far, and these are looking highly, highly correlated with PCR positive testing, right? So we want to be vigilant. We want to be screening. We've built this into our app. An employer can roll this out, an employee can fill it out on a daily basis. They can also push a button and get their tests and they can get their test results. If they're positive, they can talk to a provider, right? So we have the full suite. But on the backend, we can do reporting to the employer. Here's your 5,000 employees. Here's how they’re risk-assessed today.
I would say that even before COVID, the current system was not meeting the needs of all of its stakeholders. Spending 18% of GDP in the U.S. on healthcare, many studies show over a third of it is considered waste. We actually under invest in primary care and healthcare. In the U.S. we spend about five to 7% of the premium dollar on primary care versus about close to 14% in OECD nations. The average wait time to a family practitioner in the U.S. is about 29 days. So we spend a lot of money, and the average premium for a family is $20,000. So we spend a lot of money, there's a lot of waste, and it's really hard to see anybody. Now, we have excellent providers, excellent hospitals, and for those who can have access, there can be really high quality care. But that's frustrating to all the key stakeholders – 50% of family practitioners in the U.S. show symptoms of burnout. They're typically compensated on a fee-for-service basis. (...) And physicians are frustrated by the... we call it the burdens of desktop medicine, all this electronic health record and billing and coding and authorizations. And that's not what they got into this for. And then we see the health networks, the health systems, the plans, they're trying to develop these coordinated care networks, but they're frustrated. They're spending a lot of money, but the care isn't more coordinated.
👉 Teladoc va acheter Livongo pour 18,5Md$ (The Information)
Cette opération va réunir deux des plus grandes entreprises américaines de télémédecine (consultations téléphoniques et vidéos, prescriptions de soins en ligne, gestion des maladies chroniques).
Cette annonce fait suite à celle de Donald Trump, qui souhaite étendre l’accès à la télémédecine à 57 millions d’Américains.
💚 Les publications d’Alan et sur Alan
👉 Pourquoi on fait une pause dans les contrats individuels (Blog Alan) : au moment du premier bilan début 2020, un constat s’est imposé et nous a conduit à faire une pause dans les contrats individuels.
👉 Les Weekly Updates chez Alan (Blog Alan) : on vous explique ce que sont nos Weekly Updates, et pourquoi elles sont importantes chez Alan. Also available in English.