This quote from Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, is wild to me.
It’s like Apple saying they banned iPod employees to the company meeting or Microsoft treating Windows employees like second class citizens because Azure was the future.
I also found his comment interesting that he regretted saying Netflix wanted to be HBO before HBO could become them back in 2012 because HBO is actually a niche business and Netflix’s ambition (and current reality) was bigger than that.
Netflix is my textbook example of counterpositioning in strategy. Doing things your competitors can’t do because it hurts their business model. No late fees versus Blockbuster is what I always use.
Stephen Wolfram (of Wolfram Alpha fame) does the best job I’ve seen in explaining in simple terms how ChatGPT works and why I’ve described it as super smart auto-complete.
As I’ve repeatedly mentioned, the truly impressive part is its understanding of intent (e.g. write an analysis of the Cold War in the form of a gangsta rap) and less so that it’s good at text generation which is just autocomplete which we’ve had for years.
I THOUGHT: It derailed promising young careers to work on speculative high risk companies
I LEARNED: Risk-reward ratio applies to careers and founding a Y-Combinator funded startup out of school is relatively low-risk/high-reward for a techie
I THOUGHT: Expanding Facebook to include adults would kill it, no one wants to be on an app with their parents. I told MZ this in 2008 when FB had 100M users, today it’s almost 3B.
I LEARNED: People will stay if the network provides value
A friend asked what I think will happen to Twitter.
Twitter’s big problem was their ads business wasn’t great relative to peers. It’s mostly brand advertising which means companies buy it due to ego not ROI. No one can prove that a Twiter hashflag campaign drove $X in sales.
Elon is driving away brand advertisers and Twitter never figured out ads that drive sales (direct response ads) which is now harder due to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency.
A possible future for Twitter was someone coming in to cut costs and building a direct response ads business that was resistant to Apple’s ATT changes from scratch. This would’ve been extremely hard but possible.
11,000 of my coworkers were laid off today including many people I work with.
I won't be tweeting much today given other obvious higher priorities but will shout out people I've worked with personally who are looking for work over the course of the day. about.fb.com/news/2022/11/m…
Molli was an amazing community manager on the Metaverse team. You can find her LinkedIn here linkedin.com/in/molli
Helinda is a fantastic PM with a experience not only spanning Metaverse and Facebook Groups at Meta but also is ex-Apple & ex-Tesla.