Conan's Newsletter: No. 1
Books
Startup CEO: This is a great book about startup management and is very useful for people who are first-time CEOs or aspire to be CEO one day but don't have any experience yet.
Startup
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups have been following a roller-coaster this year. The SaaS companies had rapid devaluation in the face of a global pandemic, but the valuation went up significantly after it became clear that SaaS may be benefited from the pandemic
Roadmap to a SaaS IPO: how to unicorn your way to $100M revenue
This is a useful article on the growth trajectory of SaaS companies. One useful information from the article is the T2D3 rule. From $2M, you need triple the revenue for two years and double the revenue for three years to reach the $100M revenue mark.
Artificial Intelligence
A great article by Eugene Wei on how TikTok became a phenomenon worldwide. One interesting idea of the article is one of the key things for the success of TikTok outside China is that it used algorithms to break the cultural barrier. More and more Chinese companies were trying to follow TikTok. At the end of the article, Eugene mentioned non of the engineers in the NewsDog App, a popular news app in India, could speak the local language.
Here’s why Apple believes it’s an AI leader—and why it says critics have it all wrong
This article demystifies Apple's AI efforts, which is least well-known among the big five (a.k.a Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google or FAANG). John Giannandrea (JG), the head of AI at Apple, was the lead of Google AI before he took the job. We had a short overlap before he left and he was very popular among the AI team in Google.
Interesting Things
Here is an interesting tweet from Jeff Dean about the metrics system in the US v.s rest of the world. There are only three countries in the world using the imperial metric system.
A really fun tweet about another usage of excavating shovels .