The Past, Present, and Future of the Internet
💡JC's Newsletter #79
Dear friends,
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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 Past, Present, and Future of the Internet Matt Mullenweg (Join Colossus )
Tech giants at the time: each one had its own blogging system. So Microsoft had one called Spaces. AOL had Journals. Yahoo had 360 and then Google had Blogger. And that was kind of the environment where WordPress was starting. It felt very saturated.
Despite the feeling of saturation, they managed to build a very different offering. It is interesting as it happens in many “saturated” markets.
"Open-source is the most powerful idea of my generation. And I'm more motivated by impact than money." Those are two fairly controversial ideas. I don't think everyone would agree with it. And that's great, because I don't want to employ everyone. I want to employ only the people who are excited when they hear that sentence.
Very important to always remind ourselves that we are not for everyone to join us.
Wix probably captures 98% of the value in its ecosystem. Shopify is probably capturing high single digit. So between 10-50%.
Other companies that do this, historically, you could think of companies that bring you in really cheap and then upsell you or make it difficult to cancel.
I think that long-term, that creates the seeds of your own demise.
Capturing the right amount of value is really important when you think long-term. Being greedy short-term destroys long-term value.
The first 2005 to like 2014 was on a total of $11 million of outside capital. And so we went from 0% of the internet to, I think, 25 or something in that time, on very little outside capital. So we just got very frugal in a lot of really good ways. And we debate a lot internally, are we were working on the right things? Do you have people in the right areas?
Frugality in how we allocate capital and resources is super important, while being able to bet on the future. Finance should help us to measure how much we spend on each initiative.
We try to make Automattic affect the organization so that as you zoom in and out on the organization, a 20 person team inside Automattic looks and operates a lot like when the entire company was 20 people, how we looked and operated.
If you zoom out to a division, which might be 200 people, it has some version of that, where it has a CEO and it has an executive team and it has constraints in some ways and boundaries in some ways, and then no boundaries in others.
Usually what we do is we, as the CEOs of these businesses manage the P&L, they really just manage the P, they don't manage the L. We try to get them as much resources as possible to grow in a smart way, the same way an investor would.
And so the question doesn't become about how much resources, it's about, is it smart? Is there a positive ROI on each incremental dollar we're putting into it?
Allocate people away from something that is not having as much growth or as much promise to something that is." We do that a lot. We obsess about it a lot.
And where it gets really hard is I would say, choosing to invest in something that hasn't kicked off yet.
I hope our long-term ownership will help us here. We should be better at measuring and assessing the return on investment of each incremental dollar.
🏯 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 make provisional decisions guided by our intuition and 70% of the data, fail and iterate
The Alaners trust each other, but also their intuition to form an initial conviction.
They don't need to be 100% sure before they start something, otherwise, they would be circling the drain. They make sure they get enough data to be 70% sure, and they jump in very quickly and correct their course if necessary.
👉 Mark Zuckerberg Talks the Future of AR and VR in The Information’s Reality Check (The Information)
I think the job of not just CEOs, but probably most people, is to try to make sure that you’re not just reacting to things that are going on in the world and that you’re carving out time to work on the direction that you proactively want to be building and pushing things in.
What world do you want to create? A very important question for your product team.
The thing that we’ve always believed is that when you get to around 10 million active people using VR, that’s when the market is big enough that it really is worth it for every kind of developer out there to start developing for this
At what number of members do we become an interesting platform? What is your view? Send me an email ;)
👉Driving inclusivity
We’re holding leaders accountable to build diverse teams. In promoting someone, I always look to see if it was a diverse slate of candidates. Don’t make one up for me. If you don’t have one now, how will you make sure you have one in three years when this position is open again?
🗞In the news
📱Technology
👉iOS 15's New Privacy Approach, Mail Privacy Protection and Newsletters (Stratechery)
Apple has come under pressure to tighten its new privacy rules ahead of its annual developers’ conference on Monday, after experts warned that thousands of apps were continuing to collect data from users who had opted out of tracking. The new rules, which came into effect in April as part of the iPhone’s iOS 14.5 software update, force apps to get consent from users to track their behaviour in order to target them with advertising. However, many third parties are continuing to use workaround methods to identify users who do not consent, which critics argue has created confusion over what Apple’s new policies allow.
👉 ByteDance will begin selling access to its recommendation algorithm technology to corporate client (Reuters).
In the long debate over whether algorithms matter more than data, this is a point on the side of data: if algorithms were really that valuable, I can’t imagine ByteDance renting them out.
👉Five takeaways about Facebook's pivot to audio (Platformer)
Zuckerberg wouldn’t tell me what, if anything, Facebook plans to charge newsletter writers for using the platform. But it sounds like it’s going to be a lot less than 10 percent.
“The biggest part of our business is not going to be taking a small cut of things from creator tools. So that does give us the opportunity to build tools at potentially more favorable terms, and have more of the economics go to creators.
🏥 Healthcare
👉Antara Health: Natively Integrated Healthcare (NotBoring.co)
Global healthcare market at 10.2% of GDP, or over $13 trillion annually
Only 2.8% of Kenyans have health insurance.
And Kenya is actually the sixth most insured country of forty-one in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Without the habit of engaging proactively with healthcare, even insured people seek treatment too late in the game, when care is most expensive to deliver. As a result, almost every health insurance company in Kenya is losing money, and it’s so bad that reinsurers have stopped backing them. Until now, the only things they could do were to charge higher premiums, make more exclusions, and set stricter limits, all of which push people away from getting insurance in the first place, accelerating the downward spiral
In many ways, emerging markets present a better opportunity for healthcare startups: there is a large pool of customers who were previously unserved or deeply underserved. Globally, over 1 billion people entered the middle class over the past ten years.
Every Antara Member gets assigned a Health Navigator, a trained nurse whose sole job is to coordinate all that complex care for Members in a comprehensible, easily accessible, and cost-effective manner. In the beginning of a Member’s journey, Antara screens them for chronic conditions.
Today, Antara has 947 members, 100 that they signed up directly and 847 through a pilot with Kenya’s largest HMO, Avenue Healthcare. This no-fee pilot had one goal: to prove that the model works, for patients and insurers. The results point to a resounding YES
Based on the results of the free pilot, Antara is on the goalline for a deal with a payor in which it would receive $5 per member per month
👉🇫🇷 Santé mentale : le boom des solutions pour prendre soin des salariés (Maddyness)
Créée en 2021, Teale vient de lever 2 millions d’euros pour développer son produit. Analyse d’un marché foisonnant.
C’est notamment le cas de MonMartin, créé en 2017, qui propose un accompagnement de la prévention santé pour les entreprises et leurs collaborateurs. En 2020, la startup affirme avoir suivi 130 000 salariés. Moka.care a aussi, dès janvier 2020, développé une solution en collaboration avec des psychologues, coachs et thérapeutes pour proposer un accompagnement confidentiel des employés de ses entreprises clientes.
upfeel.io, une plateforme créée pour contribuer au bien-être des salariés en les mettant en relation avec des professionnels de la santé mentale
MidDay vient seulement de voir le jour
And very soon a big announcement from Alan :)
💚 Alan
👉Alan conducts its first carbon audit 🌱(Alan Blog)
As part of our commitment to transparency and after becoming a signatory to the Climate Act, we have completed our first carbon audit. It's all summarised in an article on the Alan blog. Take a look at it!
🔨 A Useful tool
👉 Stop getting lost in your notes and annotate documents easily (reMarkable)
I use the great reMarkable tablet when I read articles. It's connected and synchronised with my other devices. It allows me to easily annotate what I'm interested in and send it to my computer.
It is easy on the eyes, the tablet is light and thin, and there are a lot of features like turning my notes into text.
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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!