Entrepreneurship
In Marker. More on Medium.
The nonalcoholic movement reserves 37% of the days in a calendar year, nearly three times as many as Meatless Monday
The first time Americans were asked to reduce their meat consumption was during World War I. With the help of soon-to-be president Herbert Hoover, the U.S. Food Administration coined a slogan: Food will win the war. It was an effort to care for struggling Allies and nourish U.S. soldiers overseas that included asking Americans to cut back on their fat, sugar, wheat, and meat consumption through Meatless Tuesdays and Wheatless Wednesdays.
The campaign returned during World War II when Presidents Roosevelt and Truman were called upon to help feed a war-torn Europe. …
From startup in 1998 to today, a detailed history of the strategy, metrics, and experiments Netflix executes to develop a personalized experience focused on delivering its members movies they love
Introduction
This essay details Netflix’s progress from its launch in 1998 to the recent launch of its “I feel lucky” button — a merchandising tactic where Netflix members rely totally on Netflix’s personalization algorithms. It’s a messy journey, with an evolving personalization strategy propelled by Netflix’s ability to execute high-cadence experiments using its homegrown A/B test system.
In 20 years, Netflix has gone from members choosing 2% of the movies the merchandising system suggests to 80% today. In the early days, a member would explore hundreds of titles before finding something they liked. Today most members look at forty choices before…
Founders with a small exit in their first company were much more likely to build a unicorn in their next, a new study of startups shows
Alex Tew isn’t your stereotypical Ivy League college dropout or software engineer at Google who founded a billion-dollar startup. Tew was a student at Nottingham University when he started his first project. His itch for building something and making some money had led him to create “The Million Dollar Homepage” in 2005. The website consisted of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid. The pixels were sold for $1 per pixel and the purchasers of these pixel blocks were advertisers. This is before “Display Ads” were a big thing. In four months’ time, word of the…
A new kind of agent could help creators navigate and negotiate a rapidly evolving landscape
Part of making it as a creator is the luxury of having an agent — someone who pitches your talent to others, advocates for your rights in contract negotiations, and makes sure the value of your talent is captured to the maximum extent possible in every situation.
Having an agent’s representation has long been the privilege of elite actors, authors, and athletes. But an agent’s core service — representing and amplifying a person’s talent to others — is something everyone should have the opportunity to benefit from.
One stellar literary agent was a game-changer for me as a writer and…
No Mercy No Malice
The economic flood gates are about to open wide
Post-crisis periods are among history’s most productive eras. London rebuilt after the Great Fire with grand new architecture, and Europe, after the worst of its plagues, underwent a commercial revolution. The Marshall Plan turned enemies into allies, fomenting peace and prosperity for more than half a century. Leaders also emerge from crises. Ulysses S. Grant was a washed-up soldier without prospects until war broke out, but that war created the opportunity for Grant to save the Union and advance the cause of freedom. This is all to say: In the next 36 months, I believe our economy will birth a…
The death of Indie.vc spells the end of a movement that valued steady profits over breakneck growth
This week, Bryce Roberts, a Salt Lake City–based venture capitalist and the brains behind Indie.vc, announced that his VC firm that focused on sustainable profits over rapid growth would no longer be accepting or making further investments after funding nearly 40 companies over six years. “This is not intended to be a pity party,” Roberts wrote. “Rather, a public acknowledgment that the initial Indie experiment has come to an end.”
It’s a surprising ending for an idea that many in the entrepreneurial community lauded as a step in the right direction to address some of the longstanding systemic issues and…
Nick Huber is leading a growing entrepreneurial movement that’s anti-unicorn—and pro-plumbing
It’s early evening in Athens, Georgia, and Nick Huber, entrepreneur and recently crowned startup expert, is about to record a podcast. Huber and his followers aren’t your typical founders. They don’t want to divine the next unicorn, launch a SPAC, raise a wad of eight-figure VC funding, or even break into a Y Combinator class. They have their eyes set on something more earthly, if not provocative: hatch a really solid pest control or lawn care business. “You ask anybody what entrepreneurship is, and they think of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Shark Tank,” Huber says. “The real, true…
‘Following his Instagram is like taking a master class in launching business ventures’
So much for Dry January. The new year began inauspiciously with the Slack outage on the first Monday back at work, and the chaos escalated rapidly from there with the storming of Capitol Hill, the second impeachment of President Trump, and fears over whether there would be a peaceful transition of power. Yes, 2021 has been so stressful that people everywhere quickly ditched their 31-day wellness and detox plans, reaching, instead, for their preferred alcoholic beverage of choice to numb their 2020 PTSD.
In other words, 2021 hasn’t been what the general public had hoped for. But growing consumer…
After New York magazine published a cover story cataloging 500 notable New York City businesses that shuttered for good during the pandemic, writer and director Julio Vincent Gambuto wrote about the heartbreaking loss that happens behind the scenes for entrepreneurs and their families. His own father’s entrepreneurial woes were one of the foundational experiences of his childhood, he writes, one that still seeps into his work as a film director. “Despite our family’s best efforts to save my father’s quest for the American dream from devolving into an American nightmare, we lost that business,” he recalls. …
They say everyone deserves a second chance, but Noa Santos may be pressing his luck. The entrepreneur is back with another interior design startup that somewhat resembles his last: Homepolish, the VC-backed company that crumbled in 2019, leaving designers unpaid — some owed as much as $32,000. “Behind the company’s glossy Instagram feed was a much messier reality,” wrote Marker contributor Courtney Rubin, when she documented the company’s spectacular fall.
Santos’s new venture, Freddie, is a membership-based network for interior designers. “Freddie is grounded in the idea of herd intellect,” he told Architectural Digest, “We all lift each other up.”…
Marker
Pop business for the intelligent reader. A publication from Medium.
