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Structural Shifts

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Structural Shifts

My podcast discussion with Ben Robinson of Aperture

Brett.Bivens
May 29, 2020
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Structural Shifts

venturedesktop.substack.com

Late last year, I committed to more actively seek out opportunities to “learn in public”. That meant getting more active on Twitter, starting Venture Desktop, and joining public conversations (podcasts, talks, etc.) when the opportunity arose.

This week, I had the chance to jump onto the Structural Shifts podcast run by Aperture, a very interesting strategy firm based in Geneva, to pull together a bunch of the ideas and concepts I’ve been writing about over the last six months.

You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your audio fix. I have also embedded the YouTube recording here.

Below, I’ve pulled out a few quotes from the transcript that draw on many of the things I have written about over the last six months of Venture Desktop.

  1. Audio as a wedge for mass market VR

  2. Top down vs. bottoms up investing

  3. Business Model Leverage

  4. Evaluating company culture

  5. Accumulated accidents and the carte blanche innovation moment we are currently in.

Hope you enjoy!

Twitter avatar for @brettbivens
Brett Bivens @brettbivens
~ New Podcast ~ Had a great discussion with @RobinsonBenP from @Aperture about a bunch of my favorite concepts: 1/ Audio as a wedge for mass market VR 2/ Top down vs. bottoms up investing 3/ How to analyze company culture Discussion and transcript below ↓
Twitter avatar for @RobinsonBenP
Ben Robinson @RobinsonBenP
The podcast, the transcript and links to Brett's articles can all be accessed here ➡️https://t.co/M6riaETbuJ https://t.co/GRdf5pgVR0
10:37 AM ∙ May 28, 2020
11Likes4Retweets

Ambient Audio and the Metaverse

I think that most people look to gaming as the first path for immersive social media. And they’re definitely not wrong about that. I mean, we’re seeing that play out in real time with things like Fortnite and these massive games that have created virtual universes, but if we think about the things that create immersive, kind of these metaverse-like experiences, even on a partial basis, and you have things like persistent worlds and synchronous collaboration and communication and the ability for the platform to be populated by content that’s created by a wide range of contributors, and even interoperability across platforms — I think all of those things work well with audio. And so, I think that a lot of people might actually get their first onboarding into VR-like experiences through audio-first experiences.

Read Spotify: The Ambient Media Company →

Read Spotify’s New Customer →

Twitter avatar for @brettbivens
Brett Bivens @brettbivens
Spotify is taking the Amazon approach of being its own first, best customer. → Gimlet & The Ringer for streaming ads → Joe Rogan for a path to video & social @sidharthajha & I wrote about why buying Sonos should be the next step in this strategy.
venturedesktop.substack.comSpotify’s New CustomerAfter Joe Rogan, why Sonos might be Spotify’s next big buy
8:05 PM ∙ May 21, 2020
128Likes18Retweets

Business Model Leverage

The way that I think about ‘business model leverage’ is you build up your core business on what might be considered a low margin business that presents opportunities to then scale in a way that helps you expand the margin or sets you up to at least scale in a way that helps you maintain margin. And so, when I think of Spotify with […] by owning the consumer demand via the lower margin streaming business, they have the opportunity to expand into those areas. Lululemon, as I talked about, is a similar company — they have a high-margin business, to begin with, relative to peers, but because of the fact that they’ve invested in digital, they’ve invested in all of these community-level features, they also have additional areas to grow that help them maintain their high-margin status.

Read Business Model Leverage →

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Brett Bivens @brettbivens
Business Model Leverage > Gross Margin
Image
Twitter avatar for @aleximm
Alex Immerman @aleximm
Even before COVID-19 but more so now, many lower gross margin companies are not being well-received. We’ve observed a bifurcation in the market of “haves” & “have nots”: those w/ high gross margins are worthy of investor attention 🔦, but those w/o are quickly dismissed 🛑 /1
3:52 PM ∙ May 28, 2020
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Evaluating Company Culture

Company culture is the bridge between theory and action. It is the operationalization of a company’s values and it expresses itself as a set of frameworks that a company uses to make decisions under uncertainty.

Twitter avatar for @brettbivens
Brett Bivens @brettbivens
Wrote this years ago based on observing the "best" founders I had interacted with. Everything I've learned since has strengthened my belief in the importance of storytelling in company building. Hiring, selling, fundraising...storytelling is central. venturedesktop.substack.com/p/the-storytel…
Image
Image
Twitter avatar for @fdestin
Fred Destin @fdestin
@malsamisa @Ljungman It’s always about the narrative and never more so than now.
12:05 PM ∙ Apr 17, 2020
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Bottoms Up Investing

The (venture capital) investment thesis […], surely becomes sort of a marketing vehicle, a way for you to tell the market who you are and what you stand for and how you think. The challenge comes when you start to overly believe your own view of the future and close your mind off to the ideas that founders are coming to the table with and some of the emergent opportunities that develop in the ecosystem. And that’s really where the friction comes in between bottom-up investing and being overly thematic.

There’s a new paradigm — places where there’s a significant gap between engagement and monetization, where companies have been positively impacted by shifting spatial economics, where there is network effect developing or positional scarcity developing. But, the market hasn’t quite caught up to that or understood that yet.

Read The Merits of Bottoms Up Investing →

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Brett Bivens @brettbivens
Benchmark has set the standard for more than two decades. I wrote a deep dive on why. 1/ Seth Klarman & the perils of thesis driven investing 2/ Uber as the ultimate bottoms up investment 3/ “Liquidity Quality” in an increasing returns world
venturedesktop.substack.comThe Merits of Bottoms Up InvestingSeth Klarman, Benchmark, and seeing the present clearly
12:45 PM ∙ Feb 14, 2020
608Likes82Retweets

Accumulated Accidents

A really interesting term that I learned about a couple of months ago, called ‘accumulated accidents’, […] and it basically prompts us to say about different societal behaviors or institutions, whether this is actually representative of an ideal expression of society, or whether is built upon a series of accidents that can actually be unwound in the right circumstances. And, really, for lack of a better term, it’s creative destruction. It’s how new innovation comes to market. And in a lot of cases, you can unwind some of these accidents via a better business model or via better technology but some of the really, really big things, some of the things that we’ve really screwed up in the past that have just accumulated on themselves and where incumbent interests have become extremely entrenched and difficult to pull away, I think that’s what this crisis is giving us — an opportunity to rethink and reset with.

Read Accumulated Accidents →

Twitter avatar for @brettbivens
Brett Bivens @brettbivens
The "Accumulated Accidents" that lock us into our default behaviors are powerful and often misunderstood. I wrote about how our Daily Active Crisis is spurring innovation and unwinding some of society’s most deeply embedded "Accumulated Accidents".
venturedesktop.substack.comAccumulated AccidentsUnwinding society’s suboptimal defaults
12:11 PM ∙ May 8, 2020
17Likes2Retweets

“Clampetition” and Innovation Carte Blanche

The pandemic has given a lot of companies this carte blanche to do innovative stuff that they may have not had the boldness to do before. The way that I think about this term, ‘clampetition’, it’s a word that just joins together competition and classiness, which is essentially companies using this totally disjointed economic situation to make moves that are classy in terms of helping their customers or helping their suppliers, but also double as these smart customer retention or acquisition tactics.

Twitter avatar for @brettbivens
Brett Bivens @brettbivens
I wrote about Spotify's Cash App partnership, the rise of "clampetition", & streaming's hard reset. Spotify finally has carte blanche to innovate & its moves in the coming quarters will be a good indication of their prospects for the next decade.
venturedesktop.substack.comSpotify, Cash App, and “Clampetition”Why Spotify finally has carte blanche to innovate
10:52 AM ∙ Apr 24, 2020
30Likes5Retweets

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Structural Shifts

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