Friday Fuel - July 3, 2020

Good morning and welcome to the first Crashing Up of July. The good news is we’re halfway through 2020. The bad news is we’re halfway through 2020.

Here is your weekly boost of Friday Fuel, a list of things that I’ve been learning from or thinking about recently.

📕What I’ve Been Reading - A few months ago it was nearly impossible to scroll down your Instagram feed on a Saturday afternoon without seeing at least one person jumping into a pool of plastic, multi-colored sprinkles. While now the idea of something so unsanitary may make your skin crawl, this was the prized attraction at the Museum of Ice Cream, an experiential made-for-Instagram retailer. With permanent locations in New York and San Francisco and a slew of pop-ups in other high profile cities, MOIC has made a name for itself as a go-to Instagram backdrop for millennials and Generation Z. With over $40 million in venture-backed funding, MOIC set themselves apart as the leader in this new market, successfully fostering a happy, family-friendly environment where people would gladly fork over $40 to take a few pictures. But as we’ve learned from Instagram, things can be deceiving. Thursday morning, Forbes released a bombshell article revealing accounts of MOIC’s founder Maryellis Bunn’s toxic management style and a financial “meltdown” within the company.

If you found this interesting and want to learn more about broken cultures at trendy companies check out these tell-alls about Away and The Wing.

🎧What I’ve Been Listening To - In 2013, serial inventor and entrepreneur, Jamie Siminoff walked into the Shark Tank to pitch his product DoorBot, a WiFi-enabled doorbell with a camera that would connect to users smartphones. Jamie’s invention was designed to keep neighborhoods safer, but the Sharks didn’t see the need. Five years later, Amazon acquired the same company (now rebranded as “Ring”) for over a billion dollars. A couple of weeks ago, Jamie appeared on How I Built This to discuss his entrepreneurial journey. In the episode he covers his early life, how he moved to Bulgaria to start a Voiceover IP business, and the story of Ring from conception to present. Like Shopify and Canva, the idea for Ring didn’t come in the form of a crazy, “eureka!” moment. Instead, Jamie was simply looking for a way to hear his doorbell while he spent time tinkering in his garage on other inventions. I promise HIBT isn’t the only podcast I listen to, but it is the best!

🤯What’s Blown My Mind - James Altucher is a world-famous inventor, entrepreneur, writer and investor. For the last two decades, he has used his quick wit and intuition to build a fortune of over 15 million dollars…and then lose it all….and then build it up to millions again…and then lose it all. Then he finally sold another company and found wealth for a third time. Guess what he did? Lost it all. James Altucher was able to make the type of money people dream about four times, but was unable to manage it properly and found himself at one point losing over a million dollars a week. In this interview on the Breakfast Club, he shares some of the biggest lessons he learned from launching twenty businesses and insights on how to lose money once you have it. For anyone who plans to be successful one day and wants to know what not to do, I highly recommend tuning in.

🧠What App I’ve Been Using - A few months ago, I wrote a small piece about Pocket, an app that lets you save articles, videos, Tweets and more to your device for later enjoyment with one-click. It remains one of my most frequently used apps and is essential in gathering ideas for this newsletter. Since my audience has grown a bit bigger recently, I’ve decided to re-share it here.

With June officially in the books, the first month of Crashing Up has come to a close. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far, take a second to pass it along to someone who will enjoy it too. If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed yet, here you go. To keep up to date with the rest of my writing that doesn’t make it to the newsletter, follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading and have a happy Fourth of July,

Randy