Dear friends,
🚀 I’ve added this week two new sections at the end:
📘 My reading of the week
🔨 A Useful tool
Do not hesitate to let me know what you think by replying to this email!
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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read.
Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!
💡Must-read
👉 The Mythology of Red Bull and how to build a product through brand (Read the Generalist)
There's no evidence whatsoever, and there's no logic to suggest that there's a massive gap in the market for a drink that tastes worse than Coke, costs more than Coke, and comes in a smaller can. And indeed, if you'd have done market research on Red Bull, everybody would have told you to get lost. And indeed, when they tested the taste, people did tell them to get lost.
Red Bull uses its hefty marketing budget to buy distribution and manufacture history.
Red Bull buys distribution by investing in media outlets, events, and sports teams. While Coca-Cola is happy to spend significant money on sponsoring a major sporting event — think the Olympics or World Cup — Red Bull takes this process a step further by hosting the event or even creating the sport.
Over time, the result of this decision is profound. Red Bull effectively changes a cost (paying for distribution) into a revenue opportunity (accepting sponsorships). While the company bears the cost of creating a new magazine, TV show, or motocross event, it can subsequently sell sponsorship slots across these distribution channels — in print, on the side of a car, on TV — all while ensuring prime visibility for its products.
The best solitary instantiation of this is the Stratos project — Red Bull spent $50 million to break a world record and capture global attention. But the purchase of Formula One, soccer, and other sporting teams are more sustainable examples.
Take the example of RB Leipzig, the company's most prominent soccer team. In 2009, Red Bull purchased the right to play in Germany's lower divisions from SSV Markranstädt for the princely sum of €350,000. RB Leipzig co-opted Markranstädt playing staff and expunged the old team's history as part of the deal.
For years, RB Leipzig climbed through the lower ranks of German football. Along the way, the team garnered fans from the local city, building a state of-the-art stadium that began to fill with fans. By 2016, Leipzig had reached the Bundesliga, Germany's top division, an impressive achievement. The following year, they qualified for the sport's most prestigious club tournament, the Champions League, which they would reach again in 2019.
Through this lens, Red Bull's marketing strategy comes into clearer focus. In creating RB Leipzig, the company achieved the following:
Brand exposure to hundreds of millions of TV viewers
Media mentions, week after week
Natural placement in the conversations of sports fans
Heritable devotion within a growing fan base
Opportunity to be a part of sporting history
I love this contrarian approach of Redbull of building their own franchises to differentiate their brand. They invest very long-term and build progressively differentiated assets.
🏯 Building a company
In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally every Wednesday.
👉Alaners are biased to action
We deliver high-quality work at high-velocity, it is important to focus on the fastest path to value creation. Delay occurs when too much time is spent planning and nothing is delivered. We must be able to deliver quality with velocity.
When we believe a problem needs to be solved, we handle it. The best example we can have at Alan is the use of a "stale bot" on Github. This allows us to make a decision quickly within 3 working days. It's better to make an incomplete decision than to make no decision.
👉 Dare to be great, be different and be wrong (Dare to Be Great II, Howard Marks)
The real question is whether you dare to do things that are necessary in order to be great. Are you willing to be different and are you willing to be wrong? In order to have a chance at great results, you have to be open to being both.
“You can’t take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform.” Non-consensus ideas have to be lonely. By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular, widely held or intuitively obvious are an oxymoron. Most great investments begin in discomfort.
In the course of trying to be different and better, [people] have to bear the risk of being different and worse. This is really the bottom-line: not whether you dare to be different or to be wrong, but whether you dare to look wrong.
[By the way, looking right can be harder than being right]. Well-founded decisions that eventually turn out to be right are unlikely to do so promptly. This is because not only are future events uncertain, their timing is particularly variable (i.e., it’s impossible to look right on time). Successful investing requires the ability to look wrong for a while and survive some mistakes.
👉 Dee Hock (founder of VISA): the Father of Fintech (Net Interest)
Hock was able to convince them that Bank of America would benefit far more from its share of a larger, more efficient market, than it could from royalties from the existing market.
Hock used advertising to promote trust among consumers. In particular, he pitched Visa not as a “credit card” but as a medium of exchange.
Visa’s marketing tagline became “think of it as money”.
Yet in 1979, Hock did a deal with JC Penney – then one of the three largest American retail stores – to participate in the system directly. The backlash was furious. Seeing it as a challenge to their role as merchant acquirers, banks resolved not to allow any more merchants to sign with Visa directly.
Interesting story about the founder of VISA, how to build trust, how to align all stakeholders to become the central one
🗞In the news
📱Technology
👉What Instagram really learned from hiding like counts (Platformer)
It highlights a lesson that social networks are often too reluctant to learn: rigid, one-size-fits-all platform policies are making people miserable.
Think of the vocal minority of Instagram users would like to view their feed chronologically, for example. Or the Facebook users who want to pay to turn off ads. Or look at all the impossible questions related to speech that are decided at a platform level, when they would better resolved at a personal one.
There are already signs beyond today that this future is arriving. Reddit offered us an early glimpse with its policy of setting a hard “floor” of rules for the platform, while letting individual subreddits raise the “ceiling” by introducing additional rules. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has forecast a world in which users will be able to choose from different feed ranking algorithms.
I love giving more power to users!
👉App Store arguments (Stratechery)
This is, broadly speaking, the same concept as Google’s FLOC proposal; Google, though, is clear that cohort creation happens entirely on-device, while Apple’s language suggests that they create segments on their servers.
We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:
Account Information: Your name, address, age, gender, and devices registered to your Apple ID account. Information such as your first name in your Apple ID registration page or salutation in your Apple ID account may be used to derive your gender. You can update your account information on the Apple ID website.
Downloads, Purchases & Subscriptions: The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download, as well as any in-app purchases and subscriptions. We don’t allow targeting based on downloads of a specific app or purchases within a specific app (including subscriptions) from the App Store, unless the targeting is done by that app’s developer.
Apple News and Stocks: The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from.
Advertising: Your interactions with ads delivered by Apple’s advertising platform.
Interesting to see how Apple is positioning themselves as the pioneers of privacy while in fact just pushing the tracking within their walls and blocking it for others.
🏥 Healthcare
👉Ada Health raises $90m from Leaps by Bayer, plans further US expansion (Sifted)
Ada already has 11m users around the world and covers 10 languages
And, if it can pull off its latest big idea — to move beyond symptom checking to help people monitor their health continuously and take proactive steps to keep it in tip-top condition
and a peer-reviewed study published in the British Medical Journal last year found that Ada was by far the most accurate symptom-checker on the market
👉Healthcare Has Left the Building (A16Z)
your doctor came to your home to take care of you.
Hospitals will not disappear altogether. But whereas your care used to come to you, then centralized hospitals made you come to them, now we are seeing various ways of how your care is coming back to you in a very personalized way.
First of all, the idea of going to pick up your medicines is going to disappear.
💚 Alan
👉 🇫🇷“Chez Alan, ni réunions ni managers et vacances à volonté” — Le Figaro
A nice article on Alan's corporate culture, how our team works and why we like transparency so much.
👍 What I like
📘 My reading of the week
👉 Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (2021) — Brad Stone
🔨 A Useful tool
👉Facilitate the collaboration of its team that Work From Home (Threadit)
This free tool was developed at the Google incubator (Area 120). It allows teams that are not physically together to communicate more easily: Very simple to use, it is useful to film your screen and add your webcam. Make a video with a link that can be shared for free.
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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!