Overthinking
Overthinking. Twitter. Shiny Objects.
Quote of the day 🧷
“Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has” - Bill Gurley
Housekeeping 🧹
I got in! I was admitted to the Fuqua full-time MBA program @ Duke. I will be living for two years in Durham (North Carolina), starting in August.
This is a great opportunity to grow the Quick-tech community by leveraging the vast network Duke has to offer!
(i) Overthinking.
Founders are constantly overthinking when making decisions, and this could be their biggest mistake. When you develop a beginner’s mindset it is easier to be more innovative and tackle harder problems. Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel (both from YC) bring more examples during this conversation.
The Midwit meme means that the genius and the idiot approach come to the same conclusion, so what is the idiot approach? Being the Midwit means that your are making things more complex than you should, overthinking and wasting time and focus in the process.
(ii) Twitter.
Scott Galloway - Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern - believes Twitter is among the most important products in history, and that it has an untapped potential. According to Galloway, it should move to a subscription model shifting its revenue source from advertising to users, making it a recurrent revenue business.
Nothing better illustrates the value of Twitter to its users than Tesla - Scott Galloway
Twitter is useful for Elon Musk, who is a powerful asset for the platform as well:
Content: Musk wants free speech and is an avid content (meme) creator
Marketing: Tesla’s marketing department is basically Musk’s Twitter account
Business: Musk made ~$5M by selling 0.1%, after boosting the stock up*
*Going from 9.2% to 9.1% (~371,900 shares) of Twitter:
Price Monday $39.1
Price Tuesday $54.0
$14.9 * 371,900 shares = $5.54 million profit
(iii) Shiny Objects.
Clara Gold (Growth & Product @Rappi) shared a LinkedIn post about the “shiny object syndrome”, as more Latam startups raise capital and are able to pay higher salaries and poach employees. She explains it pretty well: “described as the tendency to continually chase new trends, new opportunities, and new ideas without evaluating their benefit first, to the extent that you end up losing the big picture.”
When you stay at one company doing something really hard for a long period of time, you get really good at it, and eventually you could find freedom. Having a long term career mindset is hard but makes total sense, so learn how to say no to tentative proposals.
Bonus 🍒
Top Twitter accounts
ALLVP - an early-stage VC for Spanish-speaking Latin America
Paul Graham - an English-born American computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author
Rest of World - a nonprofit publication covering the impact of technology beyond the Western bubble
Series to watch
WeCrashed - Adam Neumann’s co-working company and how it ended
Succession - highly dysfunctional NY dynasty fighting for power
Super Pumped - the story behind Uber’s founder and venture capitalists
Hi! I’m Elias Mufarech, currently Senior Operations Manager for Latam @ CloudKitchens. Thanks for reading Quick-tech - send feedback and feel free to tweet me @eliasmufa.