25 May 2020
This week's additions focus on founder stories, strategy, and mindset, with new digests from Founders, Masters of Scale, and Noah Kagan. Highlights include Refusing to compete on price made Leland's castings worth triple the market rate. Full-service restaurants can't survive below 80% capacity
Showing 13 digests for 25 May 2020.
Henry Leland: precision manufacturing and the founding of Cadillac and Lincoln
Founders
May 31, 2020
Origin stories
10
Resilience & grit
6
Refusing to compete on price made Leland's castings worth triple the market rate.
Henry Ford bought Lincoln to erase a rival — then broke every promise made.
Leland trained Horace Dodge and taught Henry Ford how to grind pistons.
Danny Meyer on reviving restaurants after the pandemic shutdown
Masters of Scale
May 30, 2020
Case studies
9
Long-term planning
7
Cash flow management
6
Full-service restaurants can't survive below 80% capacity
Percentage rent replaces fixed rent to keep landlords and restaurants viable
PPP forgiveness rules make loans a potential death sentence for restaurants
Strava's early days: low expectations, humble beginnings, big tailwinds
Noah Kagan
May 29, 2020
Origin stories
9
Goal setting
5
Success = Results minus Expectations: how sandbagging ambition unlocked freedom
Strava's segment feature came from one athlete's obsession with data visualisation
Facebook normalised sharing workouts publicly — without it, Strava couldn't exist
Writing web pages for four decision-making types
Joanna Wiebe
May 29, 2020
Copywriting
9
Conversion rate optimisation
8
Design thinking
5
The bottom half of your page isn't dead — it's for slow readers
Four buyer types need different page depths, not one message for all
Feature-led cross-heads look weak but are right for logical scanners
Business operating systems
Podcast
How One Medical's operational DNA enabled rapid COVID-19 response
Masters of Scale
May 28, 2020
Business operating systems
9
Business models
7
Case studies
5
Standardized daily operations let One Medical scale testing overnight
Symptom questionnaires predict COVID better than temperature checks alone
US primary care gets half the investment of peer nations — and it shows
Founder interviews
YouTube
How Strava built a global fitness community by going inch wide, mile deep
Noah Kagan
May 28, 2020
Founder interviews
10
Niche selection
7
Product-market fit
6
Targeting one obsessive niche beats chasing a broad market every time.
Why saying no to good ideas is harder — and more important — than saying yes.
Making your free tier too good is a silent subscription killer.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Managing multiple projects without burnout: Deep work strategies
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
May 28, 2020
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
8
Processes & SOPs
5
Burnout comes from deadline pressure, not workload volume; spread work across time to avoid stress
Michael Crichton published five books during medical school by writing opportunistically whenever possible
Email-driven work pushes deep focus outside office hours, creating inequity for people managing childcare
How to make your business more valuable by doing less
Bill Gallagher
May 27, 2020
Processes & SOPs
9
Automation & tools
8
Communication
7
Outsourcing first — before optimising — sets everyone up for failure
Indecision has a measurable 23x multiplier effect on team slowdown
A business tied to its founder can't be sold, funded, or scaled
How SpaceX disrupted the aerospace industry with vertical integration
Acquired
May 26, 2020
Business models
10
Case studies
9
Competitive analysis
7
SpaceX nearly went bankrupt on its fourth and final funded launch attempt.
Vertical integration cut rocket costs to one-tenth of NASA's own estimates.
A $1.6B NASA contract on Christmas Eve 2008 saved the company and changed spaceflight.
A masterclass in crowdsourcing with Duolingo's Luis von Ahn
Masters of Scale
May 26, 2020
Business models
9
Customer discovery
7
Growth hacking
6
Perfect mission alignment between company and crowd turns free labor into sustainable scale.
Crowdsourcing solves problems easy for humans, hard for computers—reCAPTCHA digitized books in seconds.
Duolingo's 50,000 volunteer course creators prove shared purpose outperforms paid teams.
Founder interviews
YouTube
How Noah Kagan built a $10M net worth across 20 businesses over 20 years
Noah Kagan
May 26, 2020
Founder interviews
10
Business models
7
20+ failed businesses before AppSumo finally made him rich
Gambit hit $30M revenue from a minimal page built in a weekend
Doubling down on one goal beats running three businesses at once
How to restart company culture and remove the wrong people
Cameron Herold
May 26, 2020
Culture building
9
Management
7
Fire all cultural misfits on the same day — cut deep, cut once.
Survivor guilt is real but fades within two to four weeks.
Presence beats policy: sit with the team, ask how they feel.
Larry Ellison: Visionary Founder of Oracle
Founders
May 25, 2020
Origin stories
10
Competitive analysis
6
Bootstrapping
5
Ellison exploited IBM's slowness to capture the relational database market first in 1977.
He hired arrogant geniuses, tolerated no mediocrity, and built Oracle through relentless intensity.
Fundamental contradiction: intensely ambitious public figure who was deeply shy and perpetually insecure.