Business

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One friend recently opened a bookstore instead of a bookmobile.

Another is investing two years of his life to open a restaurant instead of a series of pop up dinners.

And a third is buying a boat instead of chartering one.

It’s easy to see why. A real bookstore has a lease. They post their hours. It’s solid.

And a real restaurant, the kind we’ve all been to, looks, feels and smells like a restaurant.

Leaving the ridiculous economics of boat ownership aside, it’s worth taking a look at the first two.

The key questions are:

1. what asset are you building?
2. what is the purpose of the thing you’re building?
3. who is taking a risk and who is getting the upside?

If the asset of the future is trust and attention, then it’s easy to do a new calculation. The purpose of getting a lease and a place on Main Street was to momentarily get the attention of passers by–and to earn their trust. After all, you’ve got a building.

But when we shift to a permission asset, when we cherish attention and use it to build trust over time, being on Main Street might not be the best way to achieve this.

The landlord gets paid regardless of whether the space does the job, and the upside is limited by the size of the space.

What happens to the life of a chef when they have 6,000 people who eagerly read their popup updates? When each person comes to two or three dinners a year, each held at a fascinating location, rented just for the night…

Instead of finding diners for their restaurant, they could create dining experiences for their diners.

The bookstore? Imagine a route, a series of partnerships with 50 or 100 organizations that value information and exploration. A curated selection of 400 books, ready to roll out at a community center, church or school…

In both cases, the hard work is earning attention and trust. It’s easy to avoid that when you’re passively sitting in a leased space waiting for people to come to you.

This applies to musicians, filmmakers or anyone who seeks to create magic.

Earn attention and trust. Spend time and money on that, and the rest will take care of itself.

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Amsterdam-based hospitality tech platform Mews has raised €255 million (about $300 million) in a Series D funding round as it pushes deeper into automation and AI-powered workflows for hotels around the world.  The round was led by EQT Growth with new participation from Atomico and HarbourVest Partners, alongside existing backers including Kinnevik, Battery Ventures and Tiger Global. The investment values the company at roughly $2.5 billion.  Founded in 2012 by Richard Valtr and Matt Welle, Mews builds a cloud-native “operating system” for hotels  software that ties together reservations, check-ins, housekeeping, payments and more in one platform.  Its technology is designed…

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That’s easy advice and a fine goal.

Except… if you look at the last hundred years, we haven’t seen many useful advances in mousetraps, despite the number of people who have tried. It feels like an infinite market, so it attracts a lot of entrants.

You probably won’t come up with a better mousetrap. But you might find the empathy and focus to find a small group of people with a more specific problem and solve it for them in a way that earns you trust, traction and word of mouth.

That’s enough.

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For decades, access to high-quality deal flow and sophisticated M&A infrastructure has been largely designed for well-connected investors and industry giants. Small businesses and independent founders, particularly those operating outside English-speaking markets, may often find the barriers even higher. Language, geography, and limited access to networks could mean that opportunity stops at the border.  Amidst this trend, Flippa, a platform for buying and selling digital businesses, is rewriting the script and dismantling those barriers. Under the leadership of CEO Blake Hutchison, the company has connected buyers and sellers across continents, linguistic differences, and price points, closing deals from $100,000 up…

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Paris-based fintech Pennylane has just pulled off one of Europe’s most noteworthy funding rounds of the year, announcing €175 million in new capital to accelerate its push into artificial intelligence and expand its footprint across the continent. The round was led by growth investor TCV, with participation from Blackstone Growth and a group of existing backers that includes Sequoia Capital, DST Global, CapitalG and Meritech Capital.  What makes this raise stand out isn’t just the size of the cheque, though €175 million is hard to ignore in a selective funding market, but the strategic timing and purpose behind it. Pennylane…

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Brands told ADWEEK they’re bracing for a “logistical nightmare” as TikTok tightens its grip on shopping with its latest policyRead More

In October 2021, the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn interpreted the first movement of Beethoven’s 10th unfinished symphony, which was completed with the use of artificial intelligence. A team of computer scientists, music historians, musicologists, and composers developed the ‘Beethoven AI’ to analyze Beethoven’s music style and life, using the sketches he left behind of the 10th symphony, plus works from other composers that had a notable influence on his life, such as Johann Sebastian Bach, to generate pieces that reflect what he would have composed. Beethoven AI, as others AI composition programs, produces music in the same way ChatGPT produces outcomes.…

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Who is Nicole Bennet and why does she keep calling me?

A few times a day, a voice pretending to be someone named Nicole rings my cell, and in a petulant, entitled voice, insists she’s calling me about a loan that I never applied for. I’ve never interacted, I block each number, but the calls keep coming.

AT&T certainly has the technology to block calls like this, but they don’t have an incentive to do so.

At the same time, many subscribers to this blog don’t receive their emails because Google has a clear incentive to move the emails to the promotions folder. Google benefits by forcing marketers and writers to pay them for access to folks’ attention.

Merged medical practices have an incentive to charge patients more, push doctors to work even more unreasonable hours and cut corners on medical outcomes.

Instagram has an incentive to make people feel as though they’re falling behind unless they adhere to the algorithm. And Amazon has an incentive to denature the business model of most of their merchants by charging for advertising, even though they know the ads serve neither merchants nor customers.

Tim Wu is our best explainer of how, without boundaries, networks always spiral out of control. His new book is twenty years too late or exactly what we need right now.

But we don’t need any more Nicole Bennet, thanks.

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