🌌Adding Value, Challenging TikTok, Wheels
Quarantunes, Q&A w/ Jessica Li, 4 startups to watch, proper ways to spend $200.
Quarantine tunes to make you isolation immune. What have you been listening to?
Audiohabits.co shows you the top 20 artists and tracks from your last 4 weeks, last 6 months, and all-time Spotify data. New features for music recommendations, playlist creation and discovery are in development, so stay tuned. Check out more of his projects!
If you’re anything like us, your lists might be full of Taylor Swift’s new album and nostalgia, but that’s a surprise you’ll have to see for yourself.
This reminded us of the two viral Instagram trends (Spotify Rewind and Bill Clinton template) where people post pics on their story of what they’ve been jamming to. What if we started a new viral trend.. together? 🤔
After learning about your habits, plug them into Gnoosic (part of Gnod, the Global Network of Discovery) for ai-powered music recommendations based on your faves!
Demystifying VC w/ Jessica Li
Jessica is an early-stage investor at Soma Capital, a distance runner, and head of content at Elpha (YC S19), among various other things! Previously, she worked with startups including Morning Brew, Luxe (acquired by Volvo), and Allo (YC W19), various early-stage venture capital funds, and in public markets investing.
What are common traits of founders you admire? What separates them from the rest?
I look for people who:
Have done something ridiculously challenging just for fun (shows they are process, not outcome, oriented)
Have had to rebuild again and again (shows their resilience)
Have a deep personal connection to the problem (shows founder market fit and that they will keep giving even during hopeless/tough times)
Have experienced rejection or failure at a young age (shows they are desensitized to rejection/failure)
Have the ability to balance contrarian thinking with data-driven approaches (shows they are innovative but grounded in reality)
See more on this here.
How did you find your niche in venture coming from a background in various industries?
I worked in startups but wanted to work with more companies. I worked in public markets to see more companies but wanted to go back to being hands-on with them. I worked in investment banking to be more hands-on with more companies but felt the industry was too deal-oriented/short term oriented. So I went to venture where I felt I could work closely with founders in a hands-on way, have long term capital and incentive alignment, and see many different companies.
With your portfolio cos, how does your role as a pre-seed or seed-stage investor differ from a fund who invests at a later stage?
Sourcing: later-stage investors usually get their deal flow from earlier-stage investors. But in the earliest stages, there are no investors (or relatively few) who are upstream, so you have to think of creative sourcing strategies like university partnerships or tracking talent as they leave senior positions at rockstar companies.
Diligence: Evaluating founders is crucial early-on. When there is less data to work with and when the product, and subsequently the market, can still change many times, the focus is heavily on the founders.
Supporting: early-stage founders need a lot more help in finding customers, hires, and product-market fit, so you can play a more crucial role, as an investor, in really shaping the foundation of the company in helping them on all these fronts.
How do you maintain work-life balance as an active investor, writer, advocate, etc?
Scheduling: I set a task level goal for every 30-90 minute period of the day from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. This helps me achieve every single goal, no matter how large, since I know I can execute these tasks at specific allocated times of the day.
Technology: I set my phone to airplane mode for the first few hours of the morning to just read, listen to podcasts, and exercise (ideally in nature). This helps me start my day with a clear head. I set aside no-phone periods during dinner and family walks so I can really be present.
Wellness: Eating healthy is super important to feel my best, so I am really careful about the food I eat. I use apps like Breathwrk to focus on breath work (an active form of meditation that I find more achievable). I always close the day with phone-less reading of an uplifting book. I get at least 7 hours of sleep a night - a non-negotiable for me (I make sure sleep is a priority and not a plug or buffer).
Which of your projects are you most excited to work on right now?
I am really excited about our fall fellowship at Soma Capital and for our summer fellows to go through the incubation program, launching their own ventures after a few months of working with our early-stage portfolio companies.
I am looking forward to publishing meta-analyses of my articles (~100 interviews completed so far).
I am also eager to write a newsletter for the ~300 people in my female founders mentorship network to fill a white space in the content market.
*This was awesome. Jess, thanks for taking the time to answer our questions and giving us a window into navigating personal & professional life. Check out Soma’s fall fellowship!
Reels & TikTok. ReelTok. Real Talk.
After months of threatening rhetoric, President Trump gave ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) an ultimatum - sell the popular social media platform to an American company within 45 days or be barred from the U.S. market for good. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump cited national security concerns, along with China’s blatant theft of intellectual property that has gone unchecked for years. The most likely candidate to purchase TikTok at the moment seems to be Microsoft, better known for its hardware devices and cloud software. Some are worried that even if Microsoft could negotiate an acquisition in the next few weeks, the process of separating TikTok from ByteDance and moving its operations to the U.S. would be a headache for Microsoft and regulators alike. Microsoft hasn’t yet been a candidate for big tech hearings and anti-trust concerns. Maybe this is their golden ticket!
Sensing an opportunity, copycat companies and startups are jumping into the market, hoping to capitalize on the uncertainty. On Wednesday, Instagram launched Reels, its own take on short-form video content, in over 50 countries.
If you’ve tried to use Reels in the last day or two, actually finding it must’ve been an accident. Much like IGTV, Reels is buried deep in the app’s Explore page, making it hard to organically discover content. TikTok is ultimately successful because discovering and sharing relevant content is simple and anyone can go viral.
As long as TikTok, Byte, and others are around it'll be hard to steal users away from the apps they're already using. Given Instagram’s massive user base, people will definitely use Reels, possibly playing to a different demographic or use case. Byte is home to “Alt-TikTok”, after all. After Facebook and Instagram adopted stories, Snapchat differentiated itself with new features (TikTok may do the same)! It will be hard for something like Reels to match user adoption for some time unless TikTok and other competitors magically disappear or it can differentiate itself far beyond the rest.
Some people aren’t so jazzed about Microsoft’s TikTok grab:
I sent $5. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tech Trends & Startups We’re Watching
Will quantum computing soon become a commercial reality? (Rigetti raises $79M Series C)
Hypercasual gaming, high-profile Zynga acquisition, more money pumping into gaming/esports (Epic Games raises mind-boggling $1.8B, July esports rounds)
Blueridge AI ($1.9M, Seed) ⛰️ - Combines proprietary IIoT, secure AI cloud and ML models to maximize uptime, product quality and worker safety
Krisp ($8.5M, Series A) 🎧 - Machine learning speech enhancement technology designed to turn background voice audio into crisp audio
Guilded ($10.32M, Series A) 🎮 - Chat platform designed for competitive gaming and esports keeping gamers organized and connected
Deliverr ($70.1M, Series C) 🚚 - Delivery platform intended to allow any seller to delight their customers with fast and cost-effective fulfillment
NoCode Tools of The Week
Voiceflow - design, prototype and build apps for Alexa and Google Assistant
Stacker - create custom software powered by data from Airtable or Google Sheets, with a nice UI, auth and rich permissions
Roam Research - Note-taking tool for networked thought
Our Light Bulbs 💡
-What’s ahead for NoCode and LowCode startups?
-Hypergiant and the U.S. Air Force have teamed up to launch the 36-satellite Chameleon Constellation into orbit, featuring newly developed AI tech
-Easy AI-powered code completion in your Jupyter Notebooks with Kite
-Another one bites the WFH, round 2: Facebook employees to WFH until July 2021
-Gender bias in major computer vision APIs and AI gender verification product (ha, ironic)
-Read The Takeoff for long-form interviews with Founders, Investors & Operators
Thing of the week
Reinventing the wheel 🎡
For some reason, Apple released $700 “custom-designed stainless steel and rubber” wheels for the Mac Pro back in May. Why people need wheels for their desktop computer is beyond me - that’s the same price as a new iPhone! You’d expect them to float or do something wacky, but nope. They’re just wheels. Someone made a skateboard with them. Others make ridiculous unboxing videos like this one:
That is 7 mins and 45 seconds you and 5 million other people won’t get back. Sorry.
This week, OWC came out with $200 wheels to undercut Apple by $500. Funny enough, the knockoff product has the one (and only) important feature missing from Apple’s absurd wheels, a wheel lock. They’re still $200 though.
Here are 3 things you could buy with $200:
33 Oatmilk Honey Lattes from Starbucks
A Chromebook, so you don’t need wheels for your desktop
A roundtrip flight from LA to DC and a night in this fancy DC Airbnb
That’s all for this week :)
If you missed the last newsletter, find it here!
Hi! 👋 Thanks for reading The Void. We’re Zach and Jack, Partners @ Practicum and Students @ WashU + Georgetown. Leave some feedback, check us out on LinkedIn or contact us!