Top articles of the week | August 11th

August 11, 2018

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

Drinking From The Crypto Firehose AVC

Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are quite bullish on crypto. In this blog post, Fred details why thinks crypto is in the installation phase and how to approach the crypto category. He likens it to the installation phase when the technology comes into the market and the infrastructure is built (rails for the railroads, assembly lines for the cars, server and network infrastructure for the internet).

Business Lessons from Rob Hayes (First Round Capital) 25iq

Tren Griffin always has great lessons from smart people that are actually applicable. The business advice category as a whole is replete with charlatans, which makes blogs like 25iq special. This week features Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. There are some great tidbits of wisdom particularly for tech startups.

Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination Fast Company

This is fascinating bio of Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of Spotify. For all intents and purposes, this company shouldn’t have lasted this long given how competitive the music industry is. Ek’s goal? Get the music industry so dependent on Spotify that even the doubters can’t live without it. How he intends to do it is with velocity, moving faster than their competitors like they launched their mobile app in 2013 before it was even ready.

The Scapegoat Irrelevant Investor

Capitalism has led to massive inequality in income distribution. The top 1% of income earners is capturing more wealth and the bottom 90% is capturing less – the gap is growing. This has led to baby boomers struggling with retirement and downward mobility for the younger generation. The author Michael Batnick is a director of research at a wealth management firm and he argues that share buybacks are not to blame for this. He doesn’t argue against capitalism but rather against the misguided notion that buying back shares are the root cause.

Culture Manual Wealth Simple

Wealth Simple wants to democratize wealth by giving the financial tools of the rich to everyone. They’ve built a beautiful site that showcases their values, mission and culture. Many startups aspire to create the next “Netflix culture deck” but very few put deliberate and sincere thought into it.