Here is what I have been into recently
Offspring founder, virologist, hot sauce entrepreneur (!?) - I saw a tweet last week and had to look into this. For people of a certain age, Offspring - a punk rock band - was a genre defining success. Their songs “Come out and play”, '“Kids aren’t alright”, “Pretty Fly for a White Guy” and more were hits during the 90s and were covered by endless cover bands (including mine). It seems the founder, vocalist and guitarist of the band, Dexter Holland, apparently had more up his sleeve than being an extremely successful musician. In 2004 he launched a hot sauce - Gringo Bandito. It’s currently one of the highest reviewed hot sauces on Amazon and sold more than a million bottles. That’s not where the story ends. In 2017 he earned his PhD as a microbiologist. His thesis is on mRNA vaccines for HIV and from what I understand it is highly credible research into a potential HIV vaccine. I am blown away by the multi-dimensionality of his talent. For those of you new to Offspring (or those of you who have missed them) check out the video below:
Y Combinator 21 demo days - just happened. You can see the list of companies which demoed in the highly anticipated annual event here. As ever, the event features a wide range of industries. There is some deep tech innovation type companies - i.e one that’s aiming to autonomously grow seaweed to reduce carbon reduction, there is a fair bit of copying existing business models to emerging markets stuff - i.e ghost kitchens for Philippines, of course Fintech - i.e a debit card that awards you fractional shares (sometimes even a whole one) every time you us it., some space stuff - i.e someone needs to clean the trash floating around in space and more…
Understand your performance - as a company you want to know how you stack up against your competition. This is of course very challenging as other than the top line metrics you can get from public companies’ quarterly results this data is simply not available. Varos.io is looking to change that. By sharing your companies’ data you can be part of an anonymous group of companies in their database. At the moment it looks to be focusing on digital marketing data. They might be able to extend into other areas where there are standard, established metrics. The challenge will be generating the trust (especially from enterprise level companies) to get them to share their data.
NFT craze continues - after an initial boom the NFT space had slowed down for a while. As the crypto currency values started to pick back up, the NFT space entered into another major boom cycle. While there is certainly a lot of interesting stuff happening, there is also some fairly insane news coming out. My favorite so far is someone paying 290K GBP (335K USD) for a fake Banksy NFT (his first ever - apart from the fact that it was fake). Luckily the hacker gave the money back. Looking at the NFT itself (see below) I think it’s fair to say he should have known better and expected more from Banksy.
Book of the week - How to Live by Derek Sivers. For those of you who don’t know Derek Sivers, he was the founder of a CD e-commerce company (CD Baby) and sold that company. He donated the majority of the money he made from that transaction and went on to live a life where he gets to spend time on things that amuse him (i.e programming, writing books, living in different places, time with his kid). He has a very interesting outlook on life and he this great, little book really captures it (in my humble opinion). Highly recommended and as we are on book recommendations he also keeps this handy list of the books he has read, along with a score and a short review for each.
Enjoy and feel free to share.