1/3 My favourite podcast of the week is a three-part series by NPR's Planet Money on Antitrust law in the US.
The series talks about the first-ever antitrust case in the US - Standard Oil.
Twilio, with a market cap of $45B, is going to acquire Segment for $3.2 B.
Q: Why are these companies of such high value?
A: We need to first understand the modern software development stack and two essential concepts:
1. Abstraction 2. Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting.
🧵
2/n Software Development is about abstraction.
As a user, you don't need to know what's happening under the hood.
Ex - An iPhone Developer only cares about how her app works, not how Apple's hardware interacts with its operating system.
3/n
Similarly, a whole group of software development functions - hosting, payments, storage, analytics, communication are being abstracted by modern services such as AWS, Twilio, Stripe, and Segment.
A software developer can now focus on the core value of the product.
If you ever had to create a landing page or marketing asset for a side-hustle or an open-source project, you have struggled to find quality illustrations.
In this thread 👇
I am sharing some of the open-source illustrations we have been using in the last two years.
It has +100 illustrations that can be customized by changing colors. Thanks to her generosity, you can use it for personal and commercial projects without any attribution.
No talking. No reading. No writing. No communication.
I woke up a 4 AM and went to bed by 9 PM. I was eating simple vegetarian food only twice a day.
That's Vipassana.
In July, I finished a 10 Day Vipassana Course before starting @demandwork.
I lived the life of a monk. Living with basic necessities of life: - a simple vegetarian meal two times a day, a bucket of hot water, and a bed to sleep.
After three months of practising meditation for 1 hour a day. Here are the benefits.
1/ Increased awareness. 2/ Nothing is permanent. 3/ Focus and discipline. 4/ Physical/Mental wellbeing.
1/4 The best tech article I read this week is Outgrowing Advertising by @conniechan, Partner at a16z. In this post, she writes about the different business models of Chinese Entertainment Apps.
2/4 She suggests that startups should experiment with multiple business models and eventually outgrow advertising or subscription revenue. I learned that the podcast market in China is 3-5 billion USD, more than ten times the size of that in the US.
3/4 The business model of podcast makers is not just dependent on advertising; it's a mixture of subscription and asking for donations. There are also tiny paid MOOCs in the form of podcasts.