The Connection Newsletter 51 - Yelper

The Connection Newsletter 51 - No lower human being than an Elite Yelper

April 15, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #51 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad you're here.

The whole family was under the weather last week, but we’re out of the worst of it. Feels great to be healthy again as we head into spring.

Squeezed in a lot this week in spite of the illness: Reforge Spring 19 programs officially kicked off, I started reading

Motherless Brooklyn

by Jonathan Lethem, Oliver met the Easter Bunny for his first time, watched Dustin Poirier beat Max Holloway for the Lightweight interim belt, 

and

caught the

Game of Thrones

 season 8 premiere.

Also, finally started a project I’ve had on the backburner for months now: publishing my books notes on my blog.

I’ve been taking notes on books I’ve read since 2009, and more recently, on articles and podcasts. I’m slowly working through the archives and publishing everything. Recent notes I published:

  • Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood's Creative Artists Agency by James Andrew Miller. A thorough history on CAA, one of the big four talent agencies in Hollywood and in the 90s, the only agency that mattered.

  • The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick. A deep dive into the history of creating Facebook. An important read to understand key decisions Facebook and Zuckerberg made early in FB's life and its ramifications on culture and media today.

  • The Art Of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. An excellent book on the philosophy of learning, high performance, and being a competitor. These notes are worth going through any time you’re embarking on new competition or new venture... it shows you the mindset to be a top competitor and ways to think about the proceeds. (I read this when I was working as an assistant at a literary management company and studying lit contracts, so that’s what I mention in many of my personal notes.

That’s it! Onto the articles:

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Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics. 

A terrific, thorough analysis on what exactly Amazon is, and how the company has managed to grow into the 1,000-pound business gorilla it is today.

Zack Kanter digs deep into how Amazon zeroed in on its constraints every time it ran into a wall:

  • First by removing the constraint of shelf space by selling books an on online retailer

  • Then, the constraint of adding vendors to its catalogs

  • Next, the constraint adding computer power and data storage to fill infinite shelf space

  • Finally, the constraint of developing features to put the right product (from its infinite shelf) in front of the right customer, at the right time

Or in Mr. Kanter’s words:

And so, circa 2002, we start to see the emergence of a pattern: 1) Amazon had encountered a bottleneck to growth, 2) it had determined that some internal process or resource was the bottleneck, 3) it had realized that it could not possibly develop and deploy enough resources internally to remove that bottleneck, so 4) it instead removed the bottleneck by building an interface to allow the broader market to solve it en masse. This exact pattern was repeated with vendor selection (Amazon Marketplace), technology infrastructure (Amazon Web Services, or AWS), and merchandising (Amazon’s Catalog API).

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When it comes to wielding real influence, Instagram is taking over… The late Anthony Bourdain said in a 2017 interview, “There’s really no worse, or lower human being than an Elite Yelper.”

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Disruption In Education 🍎

I did a lot of reading on higher education this week, three stand out articles:

1.

- On the college admissions scandal (h/t Amy)

As off-putting as most of us find the role that big-ticket fundraising plays in elite-college admissions, those monies go toward programs and facilities that will benefit a wide number of students—new dormitories, new libraries, enriched financial-aid funds are often the result of rich parents being tapped for gifts at admissions time.

But the Singer scheme benefits no one at all except the individual students, and the people their parents paid off.

The argument that the scheme hurt disadvantaged applicants—or even just non-rich applicants who needed financial aid to attend these stratospherically expensive colleges—isn’t right either.

Elite colleges pay deep attention to the issue of enrollment management; the more elite the institution, the more likely it is to be racially and socioeconomically diverse.

This is in part because attaining this kind of diversity has become a foundational goal of most admissions offices, and also because the elite colleges have the money to make it happen.

- Why do online college programs cost the same as the on-campus experience? (h/t Brian)

And yet nearly every academic institution, from the Ivies to state university systems to liberal arts schools, has refused to pass even the tiniest fraction of the savings on to students. They charge online students the same astronomical prices they levy for the on-campus experience.

This is because many colleges don’t actually run online programs themselves. They outsource much of the work to an obscure species of for-profit company that has figured out how to gouge students in new and creative ways. These companies are called online program managers, or OPMs.

OPMs are transforming both the economics and the practice of higher learning. They help a growing number of America’s most-lauded colleges provide online degrees—including Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, NYU, UC Berkeley, UNC-Chapel Hill, Northwestern, Syracuse, Rice and USC, to name just a few. The schools often omit any mention of these companies on their course pages, but OPMs typically take a 60 percent cut of tuition, sometimes more.

- Detailed Goldman Sachs report on the future of education.

The format and productivity of education provision have been largely unchanged over the past 100 years. In our view, a confluence of factors will transform who and what is taught, and how and where, as well as the productivity of education delivery in the coming years. The physical convening of students has been the biggest impediment to scaling education to date, but we believe that learning can migrate from a capital- and talent-intensive bricks & mortar business model into one fit for the digital era.

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A terrific podcast episode that covered a trifecta of Hollywood/Silicon Valley news: Snap’s new products, how Disney is approaching its original content play in its streaming services, and Hollywood TV writers fighting leaving their agencies over packaging fees.

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In case you’ve missed it, here are the dozen industries millennials are accused of killing:

  1. Cereal

  2. Casual dining

  3. Department stores

  4. Luxury goods

  5. Cable TV

  6. Gyms

  7. American cheese

  8. Beer

  9. Canned tuna

  10. Motorcycles

  11. Golf

  12. Raisins (hah!)

Thanks for reading!

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