DraftKings announces huge losses while also growing 100% YoY, venture capitalists turn their eyes to nuclear fusion startups and Replit is on a mission to bring the next billion software creators online.
Reduce the cognitive load
From Perspectives, by Deb Liu
🧠 A cognitive load affects how much working information we can hold at a given time. Reducing cognitive loads is a multi-layered success strategy:
For a new product: Make it clear, make it hard to make mistakes and make users feel smart, not stupid. How much work are you making them do?
Within your team: align on strategy and priorities, break down the barriers and create a broader concept of what a “team” is.
Within life: put things on autopilot, do small tasks asap, make things a habit and bring in an accountability partner.
Notion
From First 1000, by Ali Abouelatta
📝 In 2016 Notion launched on Product Hunt, becoming the most successful launch that year.
The vision: to democratize programming for creatives. The solution: wrap their powerful idea into an everyday problem → creating documents.
The power of Notion derives from its flexibility and adaptability, the software moulds to your needs.
The difficulty: this is a “you have to try it to get it” power. 99% of Notion’s growth comes from word of mouth through launching on discovery channels and then going viral.
Deep dive into Replit
From Not Boring, by Packy McCormick
👩💻 Replit has raised $80 million Series B, hoping to lay the foundations on which software creators can build the future online.
Its vision: to spearhead a transition from a stacked model of software creation to a networked one → a collaborative operating system.
The first step on its grand mission: be the first place where anyone will write a line of code. Writing code should be as universal as writing an essay.
Replit understands it needs to build something new for the underserved so it can harness an audience that will grow with the technology and help direct the software’s future.
DraftKings
From Huddle Up, by Joseph Pompliano
🏈 DraftKings has announced net losses of ~$1.2 billion over the last 9 months and its critics are becoming more vocal.
Yet it has also seen almost 100% YoY growth since 2018, taking +$1 billion in revenue this year.
Since the 2018 PASPA ruling, DraftKing started looking beyond fantasy sports and towards legalized betting and iGaming. Today it has reached 14 states.
This has also created a fragmented market, pushing DraftKings to sign as many new customers as fast as possible ($1 billion went to advertising in 2021).
The future of fusion
From Exponential View, by Azeem Azhar
Nick Hawker, CEO of First Light Fusion, is researching new methods to confront one of science’s most difficult problems: nuclear fusion.
There are 2 key approaches: magnetic confinement fusion and inertial confinement fusion.
Venture capitalist funding it increasing substantially in this sector ($2.5 billion flooded into startups this year).
Extra Reading
12 weeks in cryptolending, after 12 years on Wall Street (Recovering’s Newsletter)
Top 10 pieces of 2021 (Digital Native, Rex Woodbury)
The age of financial misinformation (Of Dollars and Data, Nick Maggiulli)
The future of CPG wholesale (Consumer Startups, Leo Luo)
Agriculture tech in China (Chinese Characteristics, Lillian Li)
Our insatiable appetite for speedy delivery (Axios What’s Next Newsletter)