VC, legendary movie kisses and the car industry
Ephemeral Reviews, Essays and Opinions s°02.ep06 - 2020.03.25
DTC (Direct-To-Consumer) startups are having a hard time. TL;DR: maybe raising VC capital wasn’t sensible; most are focused on single-purchase models (e.g. you don’t buy a new mattress every week) that can’t make the economics work; Google and Facebook through their ads are the real winners of the trend. Link (T)
One more example Amazon is emulated. And here it is for good. Hennes & Mauritz (aka H&M) just made its former sustainability chief its CEO with a bold plan: to share its leading sustainable supply chain with its competitors. Link (S)
Located in the middle of the United States, Tulsa launched a competition to offer $10,000 grants to 100 remote workers to relocate the city. They got 10,000 applications, but can they retain the winners? Link (T)
This is a difficult moment for the VC industry. Was this asset class meant to go so big? I am not making the point for a new witchbubble-hunt but the big guns like Sequoia or Softbank (once again) are having tough times these days. (S)
Infectious, we live
The great synchronicity.
Welcome unknown spring.
(S)
The French Cinematheque has been sharing a picture of a legendary movie kiss every morning since the social distancing. (S)
There is something even more cruel than a mirror. In true transparency, this is a question I ask myself very often these days. I presume some may be interested in the answer. Link (S)
“KidKraft’s new product, the Alexa 2-in-1 Kitchen and Market, is a $299 kitchen set equipped with 100 items of fake food and cookware, all tagged with RFID and Bluetooth so that Alexa can identify them and comment on the kiddos’ fake cooking and fake grocery store purchases.” I guess toys are meant to mirror their era. Link (T)
If social distanciation is here for a while, I bet private cars may be a fancy and useful mean of transport again and hopefully, the next generation will be electrical. But how come the European strongest economy and world-leading car industry is suffering so hard from this shift? Link (S)
Of the old incumbents in our economy, automakers are probably the most innovative bunch (maybe due to the habit of presenting concept cars, they’re more open to the future?). French manufacturer Citroën recently launched a new model called AMI that packs a lot of interesting elements: a compact 2-seat car, 100% electric, no licence required, that you can buy, rent, or car-share and get delivered home. Link (T)
Autonomous vehicles were so hot 5 years ago. And as for any disruption, their B2B version, trucks, a vanguardish and sooner profitable market to look at. Starsky Robotics was the first street-legal truck to do a fully unmanned run and it just shut down. A drive full of early learnings. Link (S)
Back to the future. The most famous car in modern cinema would deserve its own movie. Link (S)
In an interesting turn of events, legal startup Atrium shut down at the beginning of the month. The reason: “failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm”. The glorified AI is not quite there yet. Link (T)
Since employees spend most of their time in specific teams, maybe we should pay more attention to individual teams’ culture rather than company culture, and study the best-performing ones to spread their best practices. Link (T)
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Edited by Stéphane Distinguin (S), Founder and CEO of Fabernovel, and Tom Morisse (T), Fabernovel alum and Knowledge Manager at Spendesk, Stéréo is a digital-oriented newsletter highlighting the main developments and weak signals affecting the world’s societies and economies.
Fabernovel is a talent company that creates digital products and services to support companies in their transformation and innovation trajectory.
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