They're not terribly expensive for high-end wireless headphones with active noise cancellation. Sennheiser's better wired models start at this range (HD660 S my current favorite, is about the same price).
The market for smart speakers boggles my mind. Are people really willing to sacrifice their privacy for a minor upgrade in usability? Is it really that hard to just tap play on your smartphone instead of yelling out "Alexa play Despacito"?
These people are never going to come back to Facebook. No one moves to last generation's social network.
The lifespan of any social network is effectively only one generation long. Which is long enough to make a lot of money, but not long enough to build a business that lasts a lifetime.
I also don't think that food delivery is something that needs to happen at a global scale. The market is local enough that you can have one player for every city or region that can grow organically, charge lower rates, and be beneficial for everyone involved.
> Uber has to also pay for engineers, sales/marketing to get customers/restaurants onto the platform
I really wonder how much of this is a self-created problem. Would Uber really need that many engineers if it wasn't processing data at a massive scale to find the ideal surge price for every trip and maximize revenue? Maybe Uber would make less money without surge pricing (and the large scale data crunching it involves), but then maybe Uber also wouldn't need to pay for so many engineers.
Similarly, would Uber really need to pay for marketing if it attracted growth organically instead of trying to dominate the world within half a decade?
We live in rather strange time for business. It used to be that if you wanted to build a $100B company, you spent decades in the trenches, reinvesting profits and attracting growth organically.
Even a true "unicorn" (not that I care much for that term) like Microsoft was worth "only" $35B in 1995, 20 years after it was founded.
We've all somehow assumed that this order of things is natural when it is far from how the rest of the business world functions
The problem with the examples the author shared is that they only work in professions where your work and skills are easily demonstrable, aka "portfolio jobs".
How would you demonstrate a skilled manager's capabilities without a resume that shows rapid advancement and dealing with increasingly higher responsibilities?
I hated it at first. But the more I look at it, the more I like it. It's crazy and totally memeable, like a cross between Guy Fieri, Cosmo Kramer, and Jeff Goldblum.
I bet they'll get a ton of sales from people buying it ironically. Which, when you think about it, is why many people buy trucks in the first place - very few are buying it for utility.
John Cusack in his podcast with Joe Rogan made an interesting point: that BlueOrigin's slow and steady approach might be counterintuitive to space flight. He said that you want to be fast and test out as many crazy ideas - moonshots - as you can, and that having essentially limitless money can actually slow your progress down.
At a personal level, I'm not a fan of this generalization that being an IT admin (or any other boring job) is inherently inferior than, I don't know, skateboarding or playing the guitar for a living.
I worked with a client recently who ran a successful site comparing products in a very popular and lucrative industry. His affiliate income was in the high six figures annually. He runs the entire business by himself
Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music blog a while back (don't want to share the URL) just to test some SEO strategies. It's pulling in low four figures every month with very little work on my part.
Brand names matter more in food and health verticals. People are far more brand driven when it comes to putting things in their body than they are about ridesharing or office space
I didn't realize how great upgradable components really are until recently. I had a 2.5 year old Lenovo laptop with a fast processor (i7 at 2.8Ghz). Upgraded the RAM to 16GB and replaced the HDD with a SDD. The thing now runs way faster and feels brand new.