Top articles of the week | October 13th

October 13, 2018

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

Snap CEO Outlines New Strategic Goals for Employees Cheddar

Even if you don’t follow Snap (aka Snapchat) closely, this is an insightful read. Evan Spiegel, their CEO, exposed the company’s strategic plan publicly. There are great tidbits on their strategy and how they think about values, competition and core product values.

The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook Wired

Stripe is the world’s most valuable FinTech. If you conduct an online transaction today, there’s a high likelihood that Stripe is powering that purchase. Started by two Irish brothers, the company nurtures entrepreneurship across the globe. The company processes billions of dollars worth of payments throughout the year and is used by Lyft, Facebook, DoorDash, The Guardian, Salesforce, Shopify, Indiegogo, Asos and TaskRabbit (to name a few). It’s a remarkable story. I’ve been following Patrick Collison (one of the founders) in particular and their unique philosophy and approach to building a company.

How AI is helping Amazon become a trillion-dollar company FastCompany

By this point of time, most executives know that Amazon is winning. Understanding how their winning is one of immense interest to me. The company is infusing machine learning into almost every part of their business. This FastCompany exposé dives into the mechanics of how they are using AI. The applications range from well known examples like Alex to fulfillment centers and of course AWS. Its lead in AWS is also giving the company an advantage when it comes to its machine learning offering.

The pyramid of clarity Asana Blog

Asana uses something called the pyramid of clarity to get everyone aligned on the high-level purpose of the work and the concrete results expected the work to produce. Asana built a great framework to help companies achieve their goals and align the entire organization.

The Demise of Blockbuster, and Other Failure Fairy Tales Greg Satell

We like stories of success and failure and simple stories are often used to communicate complicated events. The same happens in business. Everyone has heard about the failure stories of Blockbuster and Kodak; however the reality behind these stories is much more complex.

Bonus:

Raised by YouTube The Atlantic

For many parents out there, YouTube has become an indispensable tool. This article discusses the most popular YouTube channel for kids, ChuChu which has over 19 billion views; their videos have effectively become a babysitting service for parents. There is also a dark side to this; no one understands the effect this is having on children’s development.