The Connection Newsletter 52 - It’s My Party

The Connection Newsletter 52 - It’s My Party, I’ll Cry If I Want To

April 22, 2019

Hello!

This is edition #52 of

The Connection,

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

At Reforge we start all team meetings with an icebreaker. Last week it was:

“What is something you’ve been meaning to do for years but have not done?”

My answer: Family interviews.

Somewhere, there’s this recording of my grandmother talking about her experiences as a young woman in China, during World War II. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to continue building the family history archive.

There is a fine number of people in our family who grew up in China, who are knowledgeable about the old traditions. Every year, there are more and more first, second, third-generation immigrants… and many of us will have no idea what sacrifices were made to live in America.

I want to capture those sacrifices, and that history, while we still have the opportunity. While it never seems like there are enough hours in the day, I’m slowly getting there.

I’d love to get your help with one thing: microphone recommendations. I’ve been looking for a good mic to do these interviews.

I want to do a video recording and then rip the audio from the video, so ideally I could find a a wireless lavalier mic with 2 transmitter/1 receiver for under $500.

So far I’ve tried two mics and returned both because neither worked for me:

  • Comica CVM-WM200

  • Shure MV88 iOS Digital Stereo Condenser Microphone

If you have any recommendations, I’d really appreciate it!

Finally, I uploaded my notes for

by Ramit Sethi (in time for the publication of the updated edition) and

 by Danny Meyer, New York City restaurateur.  

Hope you have an amazing week. Onto this week’s articles.

(Want less email? No problem, you can unsub at the bottom. We'll still be friends.)

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

Harry Dry was lying in bed when he was struck with an idea: a dating site for Kanye West fans. He sprung to his computer and got to work. Six months later, after an Instagram campaign, learning to code a dating site, and buying billboards across 4 cities, he had a meeting with the CFO of Kanye West’s company.

A fun, well-written and well-produced story about the hustle it took to get Kanye West’s attention.

At this point, there isn’t much to tell you. There’s no secret ingredient. Just long days laying bricks. 10 months ago I hadn’t written a line of code before and it was too hard. One week into Yeezy Dating it’s still too hard. Webpack is a mess and I don’t know how to save geoJSON data. Boo-hoo. Nobody cares. I don't care. Figure it out. Everyone else figured it out.

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YouTubers big and small have used the platform to make a living doing what they loved. Some like the Philippou twins (their channel, RackaRacka has 5.4m subs) have built an estimated net worth of $1.4m off the back of YouTube. Smaller YouTubers like Christine Barger (8k subs) leveraged the platform to appear on national television (

Penn & Teller’s Fool Us).

Now it appears the party is over, and they are crying (some literally) about it.

YouTube relies on creators to differentiate itself from streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, it tells creators it wants to promote their original content, and it hosts conferences dedicated to bettering the creator community. Those same creators often feel abandoned and confused about why their videos are buried in search results, don’t appear on the trending page, or are being quietly demonetized. At the same time, YouTube’s pitch decks to advertisers increasingly seem to feature videos from household celebrity names, not creative amateurs.

I’m empathetic, but the sentiment reeks of entitlement. You get to make a living doing what you love. There’s nothing to cry about.

This is the natural evolution of channels. There’s a golden age, and then it becomes saturated, and then another channel (e.g. Instagram, TikTok) becomes a golden age channel. We talk more about this at

:

A channel reaches a saturation point where the return start to flatten off and our ROI decreases to a medium level. The ceiling is still very high and low risk, but we might not get as much out of it because there's more and more competition.

The real lesson we all can take away from this: don’t put your business at the mercy of a single platform.

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Scott “Scooter” Braun Modeled himself after David Geffen

Braun dropped out of Emory University in Atlanta at the age of 20 when he was hired by Jermaine Dupri as director of marketing. Everything was beautiful. A few years in, Jermaine Dupri’s mother fired Braun for perceived insubordination. At 23-years old, it looked like he flamed out.

That’s when he started putting together his strategic plan. The plan consisted of three linchpins: the third linchpin was a 12-year-old boy singing R&B covers in Stratford, Ontario named Justin Bieber.

As Braun tells it, Bieber had just returned from his home nation with the song stuck in his head and was absentmindedly singing it. “I was like, ‘What was that?’” Braun recalls. “He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a fun little song.’ And I was like, ‘This is more than a fun little song. This is big.’”

Quickly, Braun secured worldwide rights to Jepsen’s music. Then he concocted a bit of viral promo: a video of Bieber and his famous friends dancing along to the song on goofy laptop cam footage. “Oh, you mean the ‘organic’ video,” Braun laughs, putting up air quotes, when I bring it up. It would indeed rev up “Call Me Maybe,” which now has over a billion YouTube views. (The ancillary video itself would crack 75 million views.)

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  How Sears Lost 🔨 

(Paywall) A depressing true oral history about the cascade of strategic decisions that ultimately killed Sears, from trying to transform the retailer into a one-stop shop offering financial services, shifting focus away from appliances/hardware to clothes, buying Kmart, and finally, cost-cutting to please shareholders versus reinvesting back into the business.

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I’ve heard mostly good things about this app that’s being lauded as the Evernote-killer, and have been meaning to give it a test-drive.

If you’ve never heard of Notion, or have no interest in adding another productivity app to your stack, this lede alone makes this article worth the read:

They sublet their San Francisco office and moved to a cheaper city where they could focus: Kyoto. “Neither of us spoke Japanese and nobody there spoke English, so all we did was code in our underwear all day,” Ivan says.

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In case what you were

really

looking for before you started binging season 8 of

Game of Thrones

was an illustrated guide to all 2,339 deaths… well, here it is.

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I love this story of Daniel Schwartz getting his hands dirty and learning to “play every position” when he came on first as Burger King’s CFO, then later became CEO in June 2013.

At 29, Schwartz became BK’s chief financial ­officer. He sold the corporate jet. He told employees to use Skype to make free international calls. And to get a feel for the whole business, he worked shifts off and on at Miami Burger Kings, cleaning toilets, cooking burgers and manning the drive-thru.

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  Black hole 🌠 

Nerding out on how crazy is it to photograph something so dense that light can’t escape it. Like, what. How does that happen?

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I spent some formative years in Los Angeles in my writer’s group. This is a terrific call back to those times and hilarious in parts (at 03:32, you can see the girl in the background actively trying not to crack up as he describes melting his hands in acid). H/t Crystal Ro

Thanks for reading!

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