💡JCNews #39
Penser son entreprise comme une équipe de sport.
Bonjour,
Chaque semaine, je partage quelques ressources que j’ai trouvés particulièrement enrichissantes. J’espère qu’ils vous aideront autant qu’ils m’ont aidé.
Cette semaine (entre autres) :
Comprendre le succès de Shopify
L’histoire de MongoDB et les leçons à en tirer
Comment créer sa propre demande en pensant son entreprise comme une équipe de sport
Ma tribune dans les Echos pour revenir à une culture de l’écrit
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
👉 Daniel Ek (le fondateur et CEO de Spotify) va investir 1 Bn$ dans la tech européenne avec l’aide de l’excellent Shakil Khan - qui a investi dans Alan (Sifted)
👉 La note d’investissement de Bessemer dans Shopify en 2010 ou comment Shopify a créé un app store très (très) tôt (BVP)
Shopify was founded in 2007
Shopify has grown at an impressive rate. With limited marketing, customers have increased from 5,500 a year ago to nearly 10,000 today (+81% Y/Y). Over the same period, monthly recurring revenue has grown from $164K to $438K (+151% Y/Y).
(in 2010) Shopify’s 24 employees are located in Ottawa, Canada.
There’s so much to love about the simplicity of the Shopify and the way it enabled small merchants to easily sell online. One of our colleagues described it as “minutes to learn, a lifetime to master” because it was both so simple to set up but the app store made ecommerce powerful and robust.
They were one of the first cloud companies to successfully create a third party app ecosystem that enabled customers to get access to functionality without having to rely on Shopify to develop it. However in the early days they didn’t have many customers so it was difficult to attract third party developers. They resorted to running contests for the best third party app, taking a page from our portfolio company Twilio which has also had success building an ecosystem of third party apps.
For capabilities that a high-volume retailer might need, Shopify has made available an open API that enables third party software to integrate into its platform.
Customer take-up has been impressive, with roughly two-thirds (66%) of customers using at least one third-party app. The App Store was launched a year ago and now has over 54 applications. ... Growth has been almost entirely organic. Until just two months ago Shopify had not talked to a single company in the app ecosystem.
Like most businesses selling to SMBs, there is a sharp drop-off in the first few months following sign-up. For Shopify, this is no different. By month 3, Shopify retains roughly 75% of its customers. By month 12, 50–60% of customers remain. Once stabilized, monthly churn ranges from 3–5%. Overall, Shopify’s retention curve looks quite similar to that of Wix.
There weren’t any big internet exits in Canada in 2010 and some of Shopify’s existing shareholders and advisors thought the biggest possible outcome for the company was ~$50m.
👉 L’histoire de MongoDB et beaucoup d’apprentissage sur l’open source et le product marketing(Pete DeJoy)
The AGPL allows for all of the things you’d expect from an open-source license except that the AGPL license must extend to all derivative works (new distributions, modifications, etc). This essentially means that any forks or projects that are built around MongoDB also must be fully open-sourced. ... However, Mongo noted in their open-source documentation that “In some cases, we may have alternative licenses available for AGPL licensed code.” That gave them the creative freedom to “break the rules” and build derivative products that were not governed by the AGPL.
Moving into 2015, Mongo had simplified the packaging of its offerings significantly. While the services they offered still looked quite similar to their predecessors under-the-hood, they had received a product marketing facelift.
Their product marketing team also introduced this absolutely epic slogan that I think perfectly appeals to their entire TAM with a single sentence: “For startups that want to be enterprises and enterprises that want to be startups. MongoDB for mission-critical apps.”
🏯Construire une entreprise
👉 Business is the New Sports (Not Boring) : où comment créer sa propre demande en pensant comme une équipe de sport.
Own your own demand or get stuck handing all of your venture dollars to an aggregator.
We treat our favorite companies more like our favorite teams, and our favorite business leaders more like our favorite athletes -- with all of the passion, frustration, and booing that implies.
Rivalries between titans make commenting, debating, and picking sides even more fun. Being a Facebook person or a Twitter person says a lot about who you are, now more than ever; it becomes a part of your identity.
Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, and Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lutke, have both gone on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best podcast over the past few months to discuss the nuts and bolts and strategies of their companies in a refreshingly unfiltered way.
CEOs’ direct connections with fans humanize them and their businesses in a way that wasn’t possible before. It makes us more likely to root for them.
How are they connecting with investors, customers, and fans? Product launches like Apple’s and Tesla’s serve to both rally the fan base and provide free marketing
👉 Les enjeux des boîtes d’AI (et comment c’est différent du software) (a16z)
Many AI companies have: 1) Lower gross margins due to heavy cloud infrastructure usage and ongoing human support; 2) Scaling challenges due to the thorny problem of edge cases; 3) Weaker defensive moats due to the commoditization of AI models and challenges with data network effects. AI companies appear, increasingly, to combine elements of both software and services.
Training a single AI model can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) in compute resources. While it’s tempting to treat this as a one-time cost, retraining is increasingly recognized as an ongoing cost, since the data that feeds AI models tends to change over time (a phenomenon known as “data drift”).
First: training most of today’s state-of-the-art AI models involves the manual cleaning and labeling of large datasets. This process is laborious, expensive, and among the biggest barriers to more widespread adoption of AI.
Second: for many tasks, especially those requiring greater cognitive reasoning, humans are often plugged into AI systems in real time.
In the AI world, technical differentiation is harder to achieve. New model architectures are being developed mostly in open, academic settings.
🏥 Santé
👉 O. Thierry et A. Maisonneuve (Qare) : "Notre objectif consiste à moderniser le parcours de soins" (Décideurs)
Grâce à Qare, il est possible d'être mis en relation avec un dermatologue dans la journée.
Vous pouvez être mis en relation avec plus de quarante spécialités. Au premier rang desquels, des médecins généralistes bien sûr mais aussi des dermatologues, des pédiatres, des gynécologues, entre autres. Des professionnels de santé, qui ne sont pas forcément médecins, comme des sages-femmes, nutritionnistes et psychologues, nous ont rejoints.
Nous mettons l'accent sur les téléconsultations de psychiatrie et de psychologues parce qu’elles nécessitent un suivi régulier et dans un domaine qui s’y prête particulièrement bien puisque qu'il n'y a pas besoin d’auscultation physique.
À cela s’ajoutent des partenariats avec un certain nombre de syndicats. C’est notamment le cas du syndicat Jeunes médecins ou du Snar (Syndicat national des anesthésistes-réanimateurs de France).
👉 L’IPO de GoodRX : quelques informations intéressantes
In the US drug prices vary depending on the pharmacy. GoodRx, created in 2011, proposes a comparator tool that finds prices of every prescription in several pharmacies.
The executives and shareholders of GoodRX must be thinking, right about now, that they’re glad they didn’t sell the company a couple of years ago.
In 2018, the pharmacy-discount service was in talks to be acquired for between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. Instead Silver Lake ended up buying a third of the company at a valuation of $2.8 billion.
On September, 22th the company was expected to price its IPO at a valuation of about $10 billion, and its stock started trading the day after.
📕📺Livres et séries
The Great Mental Models Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology écrit par Rhiannon Beaubien et Shane Parrish est un livre incroyable pour comprendre comment appliquer des modèles de la science au business et interactions humaines. Quelques exemples :
Relativity helps us to understand that there is more than one way to see everything. That doesn’t mean everyone’s perspective is equally valid, only that we might not have the most complete view into a problem or situation. (...) When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.
Reciprocity: Why we should view giving as being as valuable as having. (...) It pays to “go positive and go first.” Also, remember that people make mistakes. Assuming there is no maliciousness, it pays to forgive.
Interia: Our natural inclination to reject the new is in part normal resistance to the effort required to change. (...) Once an idea gets rolling, it can be hard to stop. (...) Getting started is the hardest part. - Once something is moving in a direction, it’s much easier to keep it in motion. But once something is in motion, it’s hard to stop. The bigger the mass the more effort required.
Velocity has direction. You must go somewhere in order to have velocity. It is much more important to pay attention to where you are going and not how fast you are moving.
The Law of the Minimum states that the yield of a crop will always be dictated by the essential nutrient that is available at the lowest level.
💚 Les publications d’Alan et sur Alan
👉 Apprendre à déconnecter avec Alan : Il faut parfois apprendre à lâcher prise, à se ressourcer afin d’améliorer sa santé. Dans un monde où nous passons plus de 6h par jour sur nos téléphones cela peut être synonyme de déconnection et de refus de l’hyper connectivité. Retrouvez tous nos conseils pour arriver à rester zen en vous déconnectant.(Blog)
👉 Se réunir moins pour travailler mieux : Le Covid fera peut-être plus pour la culture d'entreprise que 20 ans de fausses révolutions managériales. Il faut cesser les réunions et revenir à la culture de l'écrit. (Les Echos)
📚 Healthy Business Toujours #1 des ventes en Ressources Humaines (Amazon) !
