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- The Connection Newsletter 72 - Play stupid games win stupid prizes
The Connection Newsletter 72 - Play stupid games win stupid prizes
The Connection Newsletter 72 - Play stupid games win stupid prizes
Hello!
This is edition #72 of
The Connection
, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad you're here.
Spent what felt like the last summer weekend visiting friends near Philadelphia and watching our kids play together. Hope you had a nice weekend as well.
Onto this week's articles:
(Want less email? No problem, you can unsub at the bottom. We'll still be friends.)
Technology and Business
Souce: Doug Chayka
If you’re in the meal-kit business (Blue Apron, Sun Basket, Home Chef) then you’re lucky to hold onto 15% of your subscribers after a year. But HelloFresh lays out the survival blueprint: aggressive sales, draconian operations, and the ability to raise another $85 million round before you burned through the last of your cash.
When I’m struggling to think about how to start solving a customer problem as a product manager, I find it helpful to revisit this blog post. The framework is:
Step 1: Crystallize the problem you are solving
Step 2: Align on the problem with your team and stakeholders
Step 3: Keep coming back to the problem
I've always (half) joked I’d trade all my privacy for 5 seconds of convenience. But Paul Jarvis makes a convincing argument for why we as individuals need to be more protective of our privacy, even if we "have nothing to hide."
Source: Alex Citrin
I've waited tables for over 10 years, and I know how a night’s tips can make or break you on this month’s rent or next month’s water bill. But I'm still not sure about the proper tipping etiquette when it comes to counter service (when you pay on those swivable iPads). I'm not the only one: in cafes, 48.5 percent of customers left tips, and for fast casual restaurants, it was 46.5 percent. The average tip for both was around 17 percent.
Profiles
I haven't watched any John Mulaney comedy specials and would have struggled to pick him out of a lineup before reading this profile. But I absolutely loved his reasoning behind why his next comedy special is going to be a children's variety show (“It’s something I’d like to watch and I don’t wanna do anything anyone else is doing.”) and how he carved out his niche in the comedy world:
Mulaney saw a sea of dudes on stages and in crowds dressed the same way he was, in flannel shirts and jeans. So he began wearing tailored suits onstage and inflecting his delivery with the retro tones and cadences of a fifties TV announcer absolutely crushing an Ovaltine ad.
He ignored the trend toward confessional, morally knotty, often filthy humor and dug instead into a finely observed silliness that he aimed at all manner of unlikely subjects: the strictures of his upper-middle-class upbringing, the oedipal weirdness of Back to the Future, the sublime preposterousness of Ice-T’s dialogue on Law & Order: SVU.”
In The New York Times’s recent profile of Brad Pitt, it sourced this infinitely more interesting breakdown on why Pitt is a scene-stealing supporting character actor trapped in the body of a movie star.
The narrative arc of Donald Trump Jr's rise to prominence in the Republican Party (and Ivanka’s downward spiral) is going to make a terrific HBO show 10 years from now.
Crisscrossing the country with Guilfoyle in the year that followed, Don emerged as a veritable right-wing phenom. At the University of Georgia, more than 2,000 young Republicans lined up to hear him speak. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, he was swarmed by fans clamoring for selfies and autographs. Charlie Kirk, the founder of the student organization Turning Point USA, recalled a summit in West Palm Beach that featured conservative A-listers such as Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld, and Jordan Peterson. Don drew a bigger crowd than any of them.
Well worth the 30 minutes to read, Alex Perry’s profile cuts through the chatter, speculation, and name-calling of Christian missionary John Chau to tell his final story.
In the fall of 2018, the 26-year-old American missionary traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet's last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die.
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