The Connection Newsletter #78 - 2020

Hello!

This is edition #78 of

The Connection

, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad to be back in this new year, and thank you for reading this email. Hope this is your best decade yet :) 

Updates:

I published a new

article about why I took a year off from writing

, and how I spent that time instead. Essentially, I decided there was a large “skill-gap” I wanted to bridge, and didn’t see a way to work on these skills without sacrifices. So I stopped writing. 

---

We’ve quietly started accepting applications at Reforge (professional development programs for mid-career professionals). We’re offering a total of five programs this year, the two newest ones are

Experimentation + Testing Deep Dive

and

Monetization + Pricing Deep Dive

.

(The

about the Experimentation program…)   

--- 

Speaking of Reforge, we’re hiring! Two open roles:

Senior Product Designer

and

Senior Product Manager

. If you’re interested in the role or company, let me know. Happy to chat more about it. 

Let’s get to the articles this week:

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  The Streaming Saga Continues

Scott Galloway predicted the winners of the streaming wars

, and he’s betting on Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+. Other fun analyses from Scott: 

• Takeaway: “Media has now become a customer acquisition vehicle, vs. a stand-alone business.”

• The one company where the above doesn’t apply? The current market leader: Netflix. Netflix essentially has one revenue stream, unlike Amazon (the Everything Store) and Apple (luxury hardware). 

• The HBO Max offering will tank. Their offering is confusing. It includes the HBO Library (The Wire) and the Warner Library (Big Bang Theory). The marketing will get more nebulous and the positioning and pricing challenges will compound. The start of a death spiral.

---

Quibi raises $400 million in their second round

. Reminder: they raised $1 billion in their first round. 

Director Catherine Hardwicke (known for

Twilight

but IMO underappreciated for her work on

Thirteen

and

Lords of Dogtown

) described the challenge of shooting a film where your perspective changes depending on the phone’s orientation (landscape vs. portrait). 

“With landscape, you see the external pressures on Helena,” said Hardwicke. “You can choose to turn it to a vertical format. Then it’s much more intimate. It’s much more focused on her.”

Takeaway:

As a creator this sounds like a fun, cool filmmaking challenge. As a viewer, it sounds similar to Netflix’s

Bandersnatch

, their foray into a choose-your-own-adventure film: fun to play with for 60 minutes, but little rewatch value. 

About Time

Of all the decade “wrap-up” pieces, this one was my favorite

. A gem by Katherine Miller of Buzzfeed, written a couple of months before the decade actually ended. 

Favorite quote:

“This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert.” 

The World of Money

Habits that save you money - automatically

. When it comes to personal finance, articles by Mr. Money Mustache typically strike the sweet spot for me and this one was no exception: he avoids the extreme-frugality rhetoric of the FIRE community, but still points out how bougie our (

okay, my

) life has become. 

Takeaway:

It’s very possible to enjoy a near-perfect day, without spending any money, by having the right habits in place. 

---

The World Has Gone Mad

. Ray Dalio breaks down why the current global financial system is unsustainable.

• Investors are giving away money and accepting low or negative interest rates, because they have too much money pushed on them from central banks. 

• This causes the price of financial asset to go up, while future expected returns to go down.

• Because there’s more and more money being invested, startups don’t need a clear path to profit, they only need to sell the dream of future profits companies.

• Takeaway: We are driven by incentives, not logic. If we’re incentivized to continue pouring gasoline on a dumpster fire, we’ll do so and fan the flames while we’re at it. 

---

What Happens When You Become an Overnight Millionaire?

A terrific profile on Peter Rahal, the creator of the Rx bar: 

• His work ethic: Rahal shaped himself after his father’s work ethic and general distaste for frippery. The family rarely celebrates birthdays, for instance, a tradition Rahal continues. “Don’t trust a guy who celebrates his birthday,” he says. 

• Instead of trying to sell the RX bar to big-box retailers, he focused on selling to the CrossFit community. 

• A minimalist packaging redesign catapulted RxBars into retailers everywhere. They finished 2017 with $161 million in gross revenue.

Favorite quote:

Rahal proposed to a woman he had been dating. “I put a lot of value in, ‘Oh, she knew me before,’” he says. They married in July 2018; in December, they divorced. “

I made something important urgent that shouldn’t be urgent

,”

he says

.

How To Be A Better Parent 

The Problem With “The Giving Tree”

. Still one of my favorite books, but I agree it’s teaching the wrong lesson. There’s a world of a difference between self-sacrifice and generosity.

---

How To Be The Best Parent During The Holidays

. Or anytime really. The article starts out really hand-wavey, but then got surprising good with very specific, tactical advice: 

• Have an anchor activity. This is the “main” activity of day everything else (naps, lunch, snacks, screen time) all revolves around, like going to the park or taking a trip to a museum. 

• Turn it into a tradition. If your kid asks you “why” they have to do something, tell them it’s tradition. (Then make it into one. Don’t lie.)

• Get out of the house in the morning. Ideally by 10am. This ties back to the anchor activity and the change in milieu helps keep them engaged (i.e. tires them out for nap time).

• Turn it into a game. Need help with something, like putting away groceries or putting away toys. Make it a game or competition. Bring joy to the mundane. 

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A Reminder We Don’t Have As Much Time As We Think

. This is a gut-wrenching read and that’s why it’s an important one. 

There’s less time than you think. 

Life gets busy. That’s acceptable. You don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations of what a parent is “supposed to do”, e.g. be home for every meal, zero screen time, breastfeed, be a super mom or super dad, bake cookies for the booster club and be on the PTA. Do what you want. 

But remember that your family deserves the best version of yourself.

Thanks for reading!

Last thing: Is there anything I can help you with?

 If there's any way I can help out, please let me know. Or if we just haven't chatted in a while, I'd love to hear from you. Just reply directly to this email. 

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