This Forbes piece doesn’t cover recent news, but it is a neat profile of one Chicago’s entrepreneurship heroes. The author interviewed Sam Yagan to learn about his history founding SparkNotes (went well), eDonkey (ended badly), and OKCupid (eventually acquired to Match.com, where Sam became CEO of and took public). | learn more
On digital media companies vs networks.
Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks, discusses how the internet has fundamentally changed business models for media. Specifically, she’s saying that audiences are out and networks are in. I think she makes a great point! | learn more
Deepfakes go bigger with machine-generated copy.
Axios reports on the new technology from OpenAI that enables machines to write human-sounding prose. Combined with Deepfake technology to create artificial video and audio, “It could be used to influence people one-on-one on a massive scale, rather than distributing a small number of forgeries widely.” | learn more
What went wrong with on-demand, artisanal food.
With the recent failure of Silicon Valley startup Munchery, and the less-recent failure of Sprig, SF Chronical offers an interesting post-mortem of the on-demand food business model. It’s interesting to read some of the quotes from former Sprig employees about the lack of concern for quality as they scaled. I remember noticing this as a customer in Chicago – food quality went steadily downhill over the course of the first 3 months until I gave up on them. Thankfully I was introduced to Factor 75 shortly after! | learn more
How much of the internet is fake?
New York Magazine highlights fake metrics, people, businesses and politics. One excerpt: “For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was ‘bots masquerading as people,’ a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event ‘the Inversion.’” | learn more
The Future of Everything’s 10 best stories of 2018.
The WSJ’s The Future of Everything is a really interesting section. “From a flying-car test drive to the woolly mammoth’s potential return, our favorite stories from the past 12 months.” If you have trouble accessing this, I can help – let me know. | learn more
What is a visionary?
I’ve referenced the Visionary vs Integrator framework in a lot of conversations lately, so I figured I’d share a bit more detail here. I think this fits startups and entrepreneurial companies so well. “A Visionary is a person who has lots of ideas, is a strategic thinker, always sees the big picture, has a pulse on your industry, connects the dots, and researches and develops new products and services.” | learn more
First Round’s 30 best pieces of advice for entrepreneurs.
“We’ve rounded up 30 of the best insights from the articles we published over the last year. Read on for a time-capsule-like toolkit, full of the best tactical wisdom that seasoned company builders had to offer in 2018.” | learn more
China is producing 7 million college grads a year.
The question of how many came up in a conversation, so I looked this up. The article goes on to highlight the mismatch of skills coming out of school with workplace needs, but 7 million is up from about 1 million in 1999 when they changed policies, and way above the 3 million that the U.S. graduates annually. | learn more
50 best places in America for starting a business.
“With the new Surge Cities Index, Inc. and innovation policy company Startup Genome crunched the data to score and rank the top 50 metro areas in the U.S. on seven key indicators–from early-stage funding metrics to job creation.” Chicago is #36, behind Milwaukee, St. Louis and even Jacksonville. We have work to do! | learn more