Friday Fuel - August 28th, 2020
With August winding down, Crashing Up is capping off another month of double digit growth! Welcome to all of the new members of the Crashing Up family who’ve joined since last Friday.
If you’re reading this, but haven’t subscribed, make sure to do so here.
Hi friends👋,
Here’s your weekly fix of Friday Fuel, a collection of things that I’ve been learning from or enjoying recently.
📕What I’ve Been Reading - Did you know that there are an average of 550 new social media users each minute and over 80,000 search queries on Google every second? As we immerse ourselves deeper into the information era, we subject ourselves to content overload. There’s simply too much content to consume, leaving us in a flux of analysis paralysis and the paradox of choice. Last month, I shared an article from investor and Stanford student Gaby Goldberg about building hype around product launches. Her new article tackles the hot topic of content curation. Businesses don’t need to be built by creating content. Curating content can also be a very lucrative business model. Netflix and Spotify are billion dollar examples, but small scale content curation businesses are equally as prevalent. Take this newsletter, for example. Part of the reason you keep reading Friday Fuel is because it weeds out the nonsense and aggregates interesting information for you. To learn more about the psychology behind curation and how newsletters, podcasts, and other information crowdsourcing platforms can monetize the aggregation of content, click here.
🤯What’s Blown My Mind -
Yes, you read that right. On Tuesday, 25-year-old Austin Russell sold his lidar (light detection and ranging) sensor start-up, Luminar, for 3.4 billion dollars. Lidar is a key technological component of self-driving vehicles. The deal was structured as a merger with Gores Metropoulos, a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) sponsored by The Gores Group. SPACs are companies with no real consumer facing operations, that are created solely to raise money through IPOs to acquire other companies. Over the last few years, they’ve become a popular strategy in the world of mergers and acquisitions.
If you couldn’t tell by now, Austin isn’t your normal 25 year old. He’s a prodigy. A prodigy that had memorized the periodic table by age two. To learn more about Austin and his company, I’d highly recommend checking out this CNBC feature.
🤯What’s Blown My Mind Part Two -
Who knew people took the “teach a man how to fish” quote so seriously?
📰What I’ve Been Fall-owing: Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, a fun and colorful battle-royale style video game developed by indie publisher Devolver Digital, has quietly taken the gaming world by storm. Amassing over 1 million Twitter followers in only a month, the game has sold over 7 million copies on Steam, making it the most downloaded Playstation Plus game of all time. More to come on this later.
🎤A Quote I Enjoyed -
Big thank you to everyone who offered feedback on Monday’s post. Based on what I’ve been hearing, it was very well received. I’ll make sure to include more personal insights in the future. Still have something you want to say? Let it rip.
If you’re new here and want to catch up on some old editions, here are a couple of my favorites: A Whole Lot of Socks and It Is What It Is?
If you like what you’ve been reading recently, it would mean the world to me if you shared it with your smartest, most fun friends, family members, and co-workers. You can also follow me on Twitter or check out my website randymginsburg.com for more content.
Thank you for the support as always,
Randy