covid lessons

I recently read a great article by one of the greatest modern thinkers – Yuval Harari… 

Multi-line chart with smaller detail chart showing employment in agriculture from 1400s for various coutnries. Inset chart is detailed from 1991

It reminds me of the Wear Sunscreen speech that we should adapt to our current predicaments… (see adaptation in next post!)

A couple of things standout from the article:

. humanity is far from helpless

. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature

. Science is great! 😉

. Covid has underlined the power of information technology

. One of the most remarkable things about the Covid year is that the internet didn’t break

. As humanity automates, digitalises and shifts activities online, it exposes us to new dangers – potential digital infrastructure crashes (our next “covid”)

. Science cannot replace politics – and it is a pity…

. Our scientific achievements have placed an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of politicians – a lot of them have failed us…

. One reason for the gap between scientific success and political failure is that scientists co-operated globally, whereas politicians tended to feud

. we have to be beware of future digital dictatorships

. we should never allow too much data to be concentrated in any one place.

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. People of all political camps should agree on at least three main lessons:

First, we need to safeguard our digital infrastructure. It has been our salvation during this pandemic, but it could soon be the source of an even worse disaster.

Second, each country should invest more in its public health system. This seems self-evident, but politicians and voters sometimes succeed in ignoring the most obvious lesson.

Third, we should establish a powerful global system to monitor and prevent pandemics. In the age-old war between humans and pathogens, the frontline passes through the body of each and every human being. If this line is breached anywhere on the planet, it puts all of us in danger. Even the richest people in the most developed countries have a personal interest to protect the poorest people in the least developed countries. If a new virus jumps from a bat to a human in a poor village in some remote jungle, within a few days that virus can take a walk down Wall Street.

 

 

Trends to expect for 2022

The Top 10 Technology and Business Trends of 2022

The Top 10 Technology and Business Trends of 2022

Momentum in Life Science Technologies

Networking and Interconnectivity: Expansion of 5G-6G and Satellite-Based Internet Usage

High-Performance Computing Becomes Mainstream

Continued Growth in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, and Cloud Computing

Internet Security and Privacy Dominate

The Metaverse Will Shine in 2022

NFT Platforms Will Boom

The Robotics Sector Will Become More Prevalent

Increased Urgency in the Renewable Energy Technology Sector

Blockchain Technology Prevails

 

Ultra delivery

Another great Sacra article to slowly read and think through the whole ultrafast delivery phenomena!

Read here the whole thing

Today, there is a new crop of companies looking to push the envelope on shipping even further. Dark store-enabled, “ultrafast” delivery companies are getting funded and expanding across Europe, Asia, Russia, South America, and the United States.

Their big brand promise is 10 to 15 minute delivery—or “faster than you can,” as the tag line for Gorillas goes—on grocery items.

With dark stores in densely populated urban areas on the back-end, and armies of delivery people on bikes and scooters for the last mile, they’re betting that delivering items in just 15 minutes can be as powerful a wedge as Amazon’s promise of two-day shipping was in 2005.

The strategy is largely out of the same playbook as other on-demand apps—capture customers, consolidate control over a high-frequency behavior, expand and cross-sell to other higher-margin categories. But their challenges are significant as well, from spoilage rates on grocery to hard-to-predict inventory requirements and building relationships with upstream suppliers.

Key points

  • Ultrafast delivery services operate out of 3,000~ square foot dark stores in urban core areas. That enables 10-15 minute delivery within their .75-1 mile service radius, as well as reducing supply chain costs and minimizing spoilage.
  • Dark store profitability is measured with contribution margin, which excludes fixed costs. With $25 average order value in a mature ultrafast dark store with 500 orders per day, we project about 13% contribution margin.
  • In 2020, the growth of the online grocery market rapidly accelerated in the United States. The share of all grocery spending that took place online grew from 5% to 7%, with $96B in total online sales for the year up from $62B the previous year.
  • We expect the total volume of online grocery sales in the U.S. to continue to grow, hitting $192B by 2025. 60% of people bought more groceries online during COVID and said they plan to buy groceries online at the same frequency or more often in the future
  • The ultrafast vision is to replace the local grocery store the way Uber disrupted car ownership. By turning groceries into something summoned at the touch of a button rather than something planned and scheduled, ultrafast services want to change how we shop entirely.
  • But the economics of ultrafast are hard, and micromobility is a cautionary tale. Both are capital-intensive industries with no customer loyalty, low switching costs, and limited network effects.
  • Non-perishables with a high premium on fast delivery are where the ultrafast model makes most sense. Convenience store-type products like detergents, tobacco, phone chargers and grocery staples have low spoilage and consumers want to get them quickly, which fits the dark store model.
  • Ultimately, CVS ($110B) and 7-Eleven ($42B) should be ultrafast’s real targets, not Kroger ($28B) or Albertsons ($9B). Online grocery is a massive challenge both in logistics and demand generation, and ultrafast services are better off building a better convenience store than challenging for the whole of the online grocery market.

The things I’ve seen #2

Enjoy things I’ve seen, read and listened to last week…

Is america “normal” again?

Link to lyrics

Full transcript


Education is so important. A lot more than politics… unfortunately in Portugal we are losing this battle… we should focus on deploying a real strategy and less on politics or marketing big plans that are just promises that never see the day of light…

tech at the service of education – a recent McKinsey research

The Edtech opportunity- an article by dealroom


More thoughts about tech trends for 2021… always a good read!

3 tech trends that COVID-19 will accelerate in 2021


Philosophical teaser that I enjoyed

 

and tools that I had a look at…

 


One last (insanely weird) thing… market games that might end really bad sooner or later…

GameStop playing around with its shares

The things I’ve seen

A shortlist of things I read, saw and heard in these last days…

Goodbye and good riddance to 2020! Read about the expected trends for 2021!

Crypto is growing – one trillion and counting

I’ve been using signal (and telegram) for some time now… and now I am less alone

Cloudflare reviewing 2020 with great fashion and a lot of intel 

I finally finished a podcast about superhuman and now I have a dilema… I want to try out it!


A great podcast from the knowledge project, interviewing the CEO of Automatic and one of the fathers of WordPress

Voice enabled tech is a thing to follow – Alexa just announced some cool things

An in-depth great article about Didimo that we invested in at Bright Pixel along side with our friends from Armilar

Top social media monitoring tools

Weforum.org article about remote working

Singapore – a place I have to visit ASAP 

A nice tech crunch article about the Portuguese startup ecosystem

Sizzle.Io – Perhaps a cool and data driven way to promote more sales

Issunboshi – a graphic novel that deserves funding

 

best conversations of 2020

2020 best of The Knowledge Project that I dearly recommend.

it has helped me fight insomnia, as well 😉 (true story)

One of the best ways to learn is a good conversation.

While there are many advantages to a good conversation, perhaps the best is that you can benefit from the lessons that other people have already paid the price for. Of course, that’s not all. Good conversations can also offer a new way to interpret your past experiences, discover something new, and remind us of something we already know.

A good conversation updates the software in your brain. But not all updates are the same. Learning more isn’t simply a matter of having more conversations, but rather getting more out of each conversation that you are apart of. Deep conversations with ‘people that do’ offer the richest source of learning. Conversations that skim the surface, on the other hand, only offer the illusion of learning.

With that in mind, we’d like to invite you to join us in the top conversations we had on The Knowledge Project in 2020.

It’s time to listen and learn.

  • Episode 82: Bill Ackman: Getting Back Up — Legendary activist investor, Bill Ackman talks about lessons he’s learned growing up, raising a family, what drives him forward and back up from failure, consuming information and ideas, and facing criticism.
  • Episode 94: Chamath Palihapitiya: Understanding Yourself — Founder and CEO of Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya sits down with Shane Parrish to chat about what it means to be an observer of the present, how to think in first principles, the psychology of successful investing, his thoughts on the best public company CEOs and much more.
  • Episode 74: Embracing Confusion with Jeff Hunter — CEO of Talentism, Jeff Hunter, teaches how to rewrite damaging narratives that hold us back, how to give and receive helpful feedback, and why confusion can be a good thing.
  • Episode 80: Developing the Leader in You with John Maxwell — Leadership expert John Maxwell breaks down the four traits every successful person possesses and how to awaken the leader within you, no matter what your job title says.
  • Episode 85: Bethany McLean: Crafting a Narrative — Best-selling author of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils are Here, Bethany McLean, discusses how to write a story, the behaviors of CEO’s, visionaries and fraudsters and so much more.

Honorary mention to Derek Sivers: Innovation Versus Imitation [The Knowledge Project Ep. #88], who was only 131 downloads away from making the list.

In other news this year, we released a TKP youtube channel with full-length videos of our conversations so you can see the guest, as well as a “Clips” channel, where we are building the world’s best repository of nugget-sized information you can use in work and life.

If you’re still curious, check out the 2019 list.