Read some great articles on Spotify's user-friendly interface.

Here are 8 notable UX decisions it makes🧵

1/ Dark mode (which Spotify was been using since early days)

◻️ White text on dark background is easier on the eyes
◻️ Visual comfort = more browsing
◻️ The color scheme is a major contrast to Apple Music

2/ Mobile player more spacious vs. Apple Music

◻️ Apple (L) has the volume control, which crowds the screen
◻️ Spotify (R) has *no* volume control (most people control mobile volume with side phone button)

BAD NEWS: My kid took a crayon to our walls.

INTERESTING NEWS: Kinda looks the NASDAQ’s double clappenings in 2021

Not a technical analysis person but...

Just asked him to add to the chart: people, the NASDAQ is about to go 90 degrees.

Gonna buy $100k worth short dated $QQQ call options.

Peter Thiel's 2014 Reddit AMA is full of nuggets 🧵

1/ His biggest investing mistake was *not* doubling down on Facebook

2/ Thoughts when he first met Elon

3/ Whether he has a "ban" on hiring MBAs

Read through Ark Invest's Big Ideas 2021 report.

Here's a tweet and chart for each of the 15 ideas 🧵

1/ Deep learning to create $30T of market value by 2037

• Automated code writing
• AI that "understands" language (GPT-3)
• Big Tech spends billions on AI chips, everyone benefits

2/ Data centres will be totally transformed

• Intel (which powers 90% of data centres) has fallen behind
• Next-gen data centres/PCs will run on ARM standard
• GPUs (workhorse for AI) hits run rate of $41B in 2030

Opening monologue pump: Elon giving Doge to his mom for Mother’s Day 🤣

Bearded Elon

Liberal arts Elon

Pretty interesting: the logos for Elon's companies each have an industry-specific background.

1/ Tesla (the "T" logo is a single rotor from an EV motor)

2/ SpaceX (the "X" in the logo matches the trajectory of of the Falcon 9 Rocket)

3/ NeuraLink (The logo resembles the wave form of a neuron when it fires AKA "action potential". It also forms an "n").

1/ Steve Cohen is the hedge fund manager that owns the New York Mets. Worth $14B, he's also the inspiration behind Bobby Axelrod from the TV show "Billions".

The day-to-day details of Cohen as a trader are quite interesting.

Here some takeaways🧵

2/ The rundown of Cohen's trading tactics come from Andrew Beresin, who worked at Cohen's firm (SAC Capital Advisors) at the turn of the century.

Beresin worked "four feet from Cohen" and has vidid memories of the experience.

3/ The elephant in the room: some of the tactics described led to an insider trading scandal.

◻️SAC paid a $1.8B fine for it
◻️ One of SAC's traders (Matthew Martoma) was sentenced to 9yrs in prison

Prob a good time to flag that Christopher Nolan planted 500 real acres of corn for “Interstellar” instead of using CGI.

He dropped $100k on the crop and sold for a profit after filming:

Where did he plant? The only land he could find was outside of Alberta 🇨🇦

Best part: he asked Zack Snyder for advice...because they had corn fields in “Man of Steel”

1/ A Redditor who runs in high net worth circles writes on the "gradations of rich".

He explains in minute detail the difference between being worth $10m+ and $1B+.

It' a doozy 🧵

2/ As background: the Redditor says while he's not super rich himself, he counts 8 billionaires as close friends.

He says there are 4 major breaking points of "rich:

◽ $10m-$30m
◽ $30m-$100m
◽ $100m-$1B
◽ $1B+

3/ At $10m to $30m

◽Needs met
◽Fly 1st class
◽Very nice house
◽Live 4/5 star life anywhere
◽ You can surive a financial disaster
◽At lower end, you still have to be "prudent"
◽Business stress remains (never goes away)
◽Banks don't classify you as ultra high net worth

How does Apple do M&A deals?

Previously wrote on why Apple didn't buy Tesla

Here's a fascinating breakdown on Apple's M&A strategy from 2000-2016.

All of its deals were hyper-focused on powering the platforms: from MacOS to iOS

A meta-threads of my top threads (that will make you smarter) sprinkled in with memes (that will make you dumber)🧵

1/ The best cross-industry innovations

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1381277018373771269?s=20

2/ The time Bezos and Musk had dinner to talk space

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1366405443136856068?s=20

In 1958, Warren Buffett spent $31,500 to buy a modest home (where he still lives).

If he slept in the street and put all that money into Berkshire Hathaway — when he fully took it over in 1964 — it would now be worth $882,000,000.

Lesson: Don’t buy real estate.

Could someone good at math tell me what a 2,810,526% gain on $31,500 actually is?

Follow @TrungTPhan for other big brain insights

https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1379210030877044737

One of the most interesting leaked Sony emails from 2014: Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Sony CEO Michael Lyndon.

Spiegel was only 23yo, writing crazy insightful notes on markets and valuation:

Some backstory on Spiegel turning down Zuck’s $3B+ offer ( $SNAP is a $94B company today):

Links

Turning down Zuck: bizjournals.com/bizjournals/ne…

Markets & Valuation: businessinsider.com/snapchat-ceo-e…

This late-90s video of Steve Ballmer explaining how Marc Andreessen and Netscape beat Microsoft to market is hysterical

PS: Here’s a story of how Ballmer got crazy Microsoft equity

https://twitter.com/trungtphan/status/1364961247716913152

Telling my grandkids this was Bill Belichek

uh oh, fadeaway phan is back

@ShotMechanics , pls fix

this one for @RampCapitalLLC: NBA line

1/ Brex raised new funding at a $7.4B valuation.

Interestingly, the corporate card startup launched in 2018 with a very successful $300k out-of-home (OOH) ad campaign.

Here's a breakdown of Brex's OOH strategy 🧵

2/ First, what are out-of-home (OOH) ads?

There are 4 major categories:

◻️ Street furniture (bus benches, phone kiosks)
◻️transit (taxis, busses, airports)
◻️place-based (arenas, shopping malls)
◻️billboards (traditional and digital)

Billboards make up 60%+ of OOH inventory.

3/ What's interesting about OOH is that if used correctly, the cost to reach 1k people (aka CPM) is cheaper than other ad options.

What my parents wanted:
◻️Ivy league
◻️Doctor or engineer
◻️Fluent in Vietnamese

What they got:
◻️Bush league
◻️Ability to doctor photos and engineer dumb laughs
◻️Fluent in the latest viral meme format

😂

https://twitter.com/amandaorson/status/1387385052363902978

100% true story.

My old man has quibbles with the above tweet:

No one:

Startups:

“We’re called Kan Opnr, a smart hardware company disrupting the $10 trillion global food industry.”

We move fast here at TRUNG INDUSTRIES.

Have a Zoom with 10 different Chinese manufacturers this afternoon for Kan Opnr.

Received 8 terms sheets at a $30-50m valuation.

And just paid $28k for 4 logo designs from Fivver

Let me know which y’all want.

Some crowdsourced ideas to make Kan Opnr a unicorn:
◻️ Make a fragile handle that breaks frequently so the customer has to subscribe for a monthly replacement (COAAS, Can-opening-as-a-service)
◻️ Customizable rubber grips (like Apple Watch straps)
◻️ Install Alexa mic

The world's most lux brands only use capital letters 👀

Absolutely shocked that @Wendys is *not* all caps.

Pls fix: @Cokedupoptions, @berkeneer, @JohnWRichKid

Source: medium.com/throughdesign/…

You've definitely heard of "The Hero's Journey", the narrative structure found in countless stories dating back to Homer's Odyssey in ~7th century BC.

A great way to learn the framework: comparing scene-by-scene images from "The Matrix" and "Star Wars".

Check it out🧵

0/ The "Hero's Journey" was coined by Joseph Campbell, an American literary prof.

He studied ancient myths and found many shared a similar character arc (AKA the "monomyth").

It follows 12 stages, with a hero venturing from an "ordinary world" to a "special world" and back.

1/ Ordinary world

The hero's normal life before the adventure begins:

◻️ Luke Skywalker lives on a farm in Tatooine
◻️ Neo is a corporate slave in the real world

A Redditor gives 12 examples of Barnes & Nobles failing to innovate or improve its business.

It’s scathing and none of the reasons are “blame Amazon”

OP: reddit.com/r/books/commen…

PS. Smash that FOLLOW for someone that loves pulling gold from Reddit @TrungTPhan

Like here:

https://twitter.com/TrungTPhan/status/1380655473897000960?s=20