Issue #2: Innovation Nation (7/13/20)
What the heck is Zettelkasten and how does it makes you smarter by giving you a "second brain"?
1. Hot Off the Presses: Zettelkasten & Airtable
How to Use Zettelkasten, Calendly, & Airtable to Optimize Opportunity Matching While You Network
Shubham Issar, co-founder of SoaPen, winner of the UNICEF Wearables for Good Challenge 2015, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 fellow recently asked me how I use Airtable to manage all of my meetings. Below is a detailed walk through of why networking is important, how to streamline scheduling, how to organize airtables, and how to use Zettelkasten to create opportunities for your network.
Read the Full Article on Medium.
2. Five Things I Learned This Week
The average venture fund in the U.S. is more than $100 million and can be upwards of $1 billion. (Biz Women)
The cost of producing energy from wind has fallen by almost 70% since 2009. (Oil Price)
Global corporate debt is skyrocketing due to COVID19 with companies taking on as much as $1 Trillion of new debt in 2020 which is 12% increase. (Reuters)
Earnings - not stock price - of companies listed on the S&P 500 plummeted nearly 45% in Q2 of 2020. (CNN)
One of the central theses of neoliberalism is that the prime objective of companies ought to be generating returns for shareholders and employees ought to be incentivized to maximize profits. However, at least one study from a Harvard Business School professor doing research on a Swedish bank concluded that strong company culture, not bonuses, are all you need to increase performance. (Bloomberg)
3. Demos, Demos, Demos
There’s a lot of bad guys on Telegram but it’s one of the hardest platforms to scrape. There’s an archived GitHub project by expectocode that shows you how to export chat data and history from Telegram using Python. It’s archived because it’s no longer supported but it lays out a great schema (that you’d need to update if you were into that sort of thing).
4. Cool Tools
Ever dreamed of wanting to wholesale your products to retailers? Check out Faire.com or Tundra. Just like there’s eCommerce for brand to consumer, there’s eCommerce for wholesalers to brands. H/T: Shubham Issar.
Nolt: Whether you’re building a website or an app, you’re going to want to get user feedback. We recently implemented Nolt on a client project. It’s super easy to set up and has great tools to get feedback from users. You can easily convert those feature requests into a roadmap.
NameCheckr: Ever start a new marketing project and you want to find all of the associated usernames across the web and social media? NameCheckr allows you to type in one name and it checks to see if its available as a domain and afcebook, twitter, slack, youtube, reddit, and more. They even have myspace (I had no idea it was still around!). H/T: Shahed Amanullah.
5. What I’m Reading
In Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell argues that one of the central tenets of the study of economics is productivity. A conservative, he’s critical of concepts like distribution of resources by the state rather than the market. He points out highly efficient markets are better at the distribution of resources than those distributed by the state. The following paragraph really struck me as insightful because it gives such a clear explanation of this principle.
"During the days of the Soviet Union, for example, that country’s industries used more electricity than American industries used, even though Soviet industries produced a smaller amount of output than American industries produced.{ 5} Such inefficiencies in turning inputs into outputs translated into a lower standard of living, in a country richly endowed with natural resources—perhaps more richly endowed than any other country in the world. Russia is, for example, one of the few industrial nations that produces more oil than it consumes. But an abundance of resources does not automatically create an abundance of goods." (Page 8, Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell)
Capitalism has gotten a bad rap due to it’s excesses which manifests in phenomenon like income inequality, climate change, and election meddling through social media. These excesses are definitely problematic and require some form of regulation. However, one thing we shouldn’t lose sight of is that America as a country is highly productive for it’s population size. A huge amount of that productivity is due to how our public markets have been set up.
6. What Should I Ask?
I’ll be interviewing Clare Burnham, an innovation leader whose worked at Amazon, Starbucks, and Marriot, for the Innovation Nation podcast. What should I ask her?
7. Opportunities
For Investors
Turtle Traders: Can anyone be trained into becoming a super wealthy investor? “In 1983, legendary commodity traders Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt held the turtle experiment to prove that anyone could be taught to trade.” (Investopedia)
Short Selling: The stock market seems completely divorced from reality. While the markets continue to rise, some are betting against it through a process known as short-selling. How much money do you need to do short-selling? The short answer is that FINRA requires that you have at least 25% of the value of a shorted stock in cash in your account. This article goes into more details about the ins and outs of short-selling.
Fractional Trading: Charles Schwab joins Fidelity, Robin Hood, and Sofi to allow investors to do fractional trading. Basically, if you don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a highly priced stock (say Amazon which is over $2,300 per share), you can buy a portion of it. (CNBC)
For Entrepreneurs
7/13/20: Application deadline for the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (Up to $20,000) - This deadline was extended to 7/19/20 (LACI Twitter)
7/23/20: Registration deadline for the 2030 Climate Challenge ($10 million in total available funds)
7/26/20: Deadline for the UNICEF Innovation Fund for Blockchain Startups (Up to $100,000)
For Professionals: Here are some job posts from people in my network.
MoveOn.org is hiring a Mobile Fundraising Manager.
National Journal is hiring a Managing Director for it’s Network Science Initiative.
Axios is hiring a Vice President of Communications.
Here are some jobs posts that are not from my network but I thought might share them anyway.
Buzzfeed is hiring for a social media strategist (project-based) for their Pets vertical.
Chicken Salad Chick is looking for a Director of Marketing.
Starbucks is hiring a Senior Manager for Government Affairs (Global Public Policy)
Closing: Photo Story
During one of our Fifth Tribe hackathons, we built a simple dashboard called “No Islamophobia” to track Islamophobia on Twitter. Not too long after we built it, we saw an 1800% Spike in anti-Muslim tweets after the the NYC Truck Terror Attack. It’s been running since 2017 and we’ve collected over 580,000 tweets since then. The No Islamophobia Dashboard was built with: Node.js, Express JS, React JS, Moment JS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, MongoDB, and of course, we used the Twitter API.