East Meets West Tencent Music and the Future of Spotify A deep dive into the history, product, and strategy of Tencent Music, its relation to Spotify, and how Spotify can add social features in the future.
East Meets West Understanding Ant Group As Ant Group gears up for potentially the world's largest-ever IPO, people are wondering what the company does. I read it's 600-page S1 and break it down for you here
East Meets West Aspiring Super App Series #1: WhatsApp + Facebook A mini-series covering the Super App ambitions of the American tech giants. This issue will focus on Facebook’s properties (WhatsApp, Facebook App, Instagram).
East Meets West How to Build a Super App Demystifying Super Apps by looking at their history, common characteristics of existing ones, why they aren't prevalent in the West, and how that could change.
Personal Blog Posts Big Sky Health Building one really good consumer app is tough. Building two is impressive. Building three deserves to be studied. Below is the folder on my iPhone where I keep all of
Crypto The Bear Case for Yield Farming This post originally appeared in the Bankless newsletter on August 27, 2020 and was co-authored with Baptiste Vauthey. You might also consider subscribing to Bankless, one of the top paid
East Meets West Uber v. Gojek (Nationalist Marketing & Gov't Relations) Contrasting how American ridesharing companies market themselves and work with governments compared to their eastern counterparts
Personal Blog Posts Writing in Pursuit of Clarity The skill of writing is the skill of creating clarity.
Meditation for Skeptics During 2020, I've been able to make meditation a regular practice. This was kickstarted in April of 2020 when I attended a "virtual mediation retreat" with teachers from India. I
Personal Blog Posts Remote Work Impact on Software Salaries How will the mass shift to remote work impact salaries in the software industry?
East Meets West WeChat (Part 2/2): A Not So Brief History WeChat is one of the world's most used mobile applications. Today it is a SuperApp with dozens of functions and billions of dollars in revenue.
East Meets West WeChat (Part 1/2): A Not So Brief History WeChat is one of the world's most used mobile applications. Today it is a SuperApp with dozens of functions and billions of dollars in revenue.
Personal Blog Posts How to set up a blog (I'll edit and add more detail to this post over time) 1 Get a custom domain. Use Cloudflare. Cloudflare has started offering domain registering services at no mark-up. Their domains
Personal Blog Posts Switching to Ghost After two free-trials, I finally decided to switch over to Ghost(Pro). I used to run my blog/personal site on Tumblr (100% free), which was easy for posting and
Crypto Aggregation Theory Applied to DeFi This post originally appeared on Deribit Insights and was co-authored with Baptiste Vauthey. We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the DeFi space could evolve and how it
East Meets West Grab: A Deep Dive Grab is a Singapore-headquartered Southeast Asian SuperApp. The company is best known for its ride-hailing services throughout Southeast Asia (SEA) but also offers dozens of other services including payments, delivery services, and a suite of financial products.
Post COVID-19 Predictions Shopping:Persistent adoption of mobile ordering platformsAs people are trying to avoid leaving their homes, mobile ordering apps (e.g., Instacart, Uber Eats) have had strong and cheap customer acquisition.
Personal Blog Posts Making Tough Decisions In high school, I was talking with a friend about Obama. My friend was critical of a decision Obama made (doesn’t matter which decision) and while I wasn’t
Personal Blog Posts Grocery Stores Going to the grocery store this morning (2020/03/29 8:30am PST) was a weird experience. I live near a Safeway and Whole Foods. I usually go to Safeway,
The Future of Work In a prior role, I was asked to write out what I thought were interesting areas of investment for a venture capital firm. For me, almost all of these ideas
Personal Blog Posts Reflections on the Past 2 Decades & Predictions on the Decade Ahead For many people, talk of the 1920s or 1970s brings immediate images to mind. Here’s my best attempt for those images of the 00s and 10s along with predictions
Personal Blog Posts Reflections on 2019 2019 was a good year and I am looking forward to a lot of change in 2020. Some lessons/reflections and random notes If I lived outside the US, I
Personal Blog Posts How I Use Twitter When used with intent, Twitter can be one of the best learning and growth tools on the internet. I had a semi-pseudonymous Twitter in middle school (~2008) that I mostly
Personal Blog Posts Tolerance There is a paragraph in Timur Kuran’s “Private Truth, Public Lies” which reads: Secret balloting would serve no purpose if everyone were willing to put up with every offensive
