Shout-out to my brilliant role model friend Yiren Lu on her business ventures: BookTime and Unit of Work.Â
BookTime gives intimate access to your favorite experts and creators.Â
Unit of Work reimagines the future of work as a passion economy that connects freelancers with flexible and distributed opportunities.
Yiren is one of the most admirable badasses Iâve ever known! She has killed it at everything she has ever done and constantly inspires me to keep chasing dreams.Â
See also her beautiful writing:
The Race to Fix Virtual Meetings
âMuch of the inspiration animating this bloom of spatial meeting platforms comes from video games. Yang Mou, the chief executive of Kumospace, was a competitive StarCraft player in college and, once lockdowns started happening, wondered why it was that he could spend hours and hours playing online with his friends and not want to stop, while Zoom meetings engendered only fatigue. In creating Kumospace, he was particularly influenced by massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. âOne of the jokes is that itâs a glorified chat room,â he says. âYou play the game, you run out of stuff to do and then youâre really just hanging out with friends.â He adds, âItâs like going to the mall... One of Kumospaceâs insights is that video games give participants a goal around which to center their social energy.â
Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon?
ââThe whole spirit of the D.T.C. space is owning the relationship with the customer, having that direct line, and Shopify gives you that control much better than Amazon does,â says Paul Munford...
In a landscape where customer attention is the scarcest resource, Shopifyâs very identity as a neutral platform and invisible infrastructure is perhaps both its greatest asset and its greatest limitation.
The story of the last two decades in e-commerce has been, to a large extent, the story of Amazonâs rise, from humble reseller of books to default shopping destination and computing engine of the internet. Books have been written to explain its success, but the simplest answer lies in plain sight, in Amazonâs mission to be a place where customers can find anything they might want to buy online at the lowest possible prices. What will make customers happy? What will make them want to come back and buy again? The company has sought to address these questions again and again...
The story of Shopifyâs rise, then, is in many ways a reaction to Amazonâs. Itâs about a new generation of e-commerce merchants who want a shot at securing control by going out on their own. If the key to Amazonâs success has been to put the customer first, for Shopify the key has been to put the merchant first...
Now that companies like Shopify have turned software into a commodity, what distinguishes you isnât whether you can write code, but whether you have something to say and an audience to say it to...
For these sorts of e-commerce brands, whatâs being sold isnât just some product with utility. Itâs a feeling, a community, an identity...
âAmazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.ââ