Raffi's Round Up - w/c 21st April 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from New York in glorious sunshine! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to understand what makes a hyper-scale startup tick, read this one)
Listicles are always a winner for me, and “6 Lessons from Palantir” doesn’t miss…
My favourite?
“Get your a** on a plane. Your customer may not be where you are. Shyam and Brian Schimpf (Head of Product and now CEO of Anduril), instilled a “forward deployed” culture by their own example. They - and all engineers at Palantir - get into the trenches with users to solve problems alongside them. Forward deploying, often across great distance and with high costs, resulted in building battle-tested products (sometimes quite literally). Ultimately, great products are built in the field.”
The full read is available on
below:
TWO (if you want to know what Taste has got to do with AI, read this one)
It’s cliché now but I am a firm believer that the non-negotiable for people building going forward is Taste…
Or as Ben Kuhn puts it “what does it seem like everyone else is mysteriously bad at? That’s probably a sign that you have good taste there.”
If you get a chance over the weekend, it’s a fun exercise to work through.
As a primer, I’d suggest diving into his full piece.
THREE (if you want more on Reddit and the future of search, read this one)
The FT are getting more and more into the Marketing game with some of their work. Most recently, it was a deep dive into the power of Reddit…
The key paragraph is as follows:
“Unlike other social media communities, there’s something oddly non-narcissistic about Reddit. Rewards aren’t as pernicious as those on other platforms; there are various badges and awards, none of which I pay any attention to. There’s no chasing the dopamine rush of likes or followers. It seems to be run by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts, with little of the appetite for viciousness that Twitter has always engendered. Only once have I incurred any wrath, by daring to suggest that room service was of no interest, and, even then, it was more mild contempt than death threats.”
Full piece here.
FOUR (if you want to see how owned/operated content is changing VC, read this one)
I wrote more about this in this piece with Thingtesting but it really is the time for proprietary distribution.
As a16z have shown with their latest partner hire…
Per TechCrunch’s piece, “Andreessen Horowitz’s hiring spree continues. On Monday, Erik Torenberg announced that the giant VC firm had acquired his Turpentine podcast, with him joining as a general partner.
Torenberg’s podcast focuses mostly on interviewing VCs at a variety of firms about their approach to investing. Recent guests include Accel’s Andrew Braccia, Seven Seven Six’s Alexis Ohanian, and Benchmark’s Sarah Tavel and Eric Vishria.”
FIVE (if you want a breakdown of how top B2B companies build pipeline, dive into this one)
