Friday Fuel - June 26th, 2020
Good morning and welcome to the fourth edition of Friday Fuel, a weekly collection of things that I’ve been enjoying and learning from recently. Last week I focused specifically on my favorite Twitter accounts, but we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
📕What I’ve Been Reading - For the last few weeks, I’ve been reading a book called the Business of Venture Capital. VC is a topic that I’ve always been interested in, but never really known much about. This book was recommended by someone online as a great starting point, but when the author of the article described it as “more of a text book,” I didn’t realize he meant it was an actual textbook. Took me about one hundred pages too many to connect the dots as to why it cost $75 on Amazon, but now I’m in too deep. The book doubles as an insomnia cure, but the concepts themselves are still pretty interesting. If you’re looking to learn about venture capital but want to dive into something a bit more digestible, consider another book from this list or listen to the Village Global Venture Stories Podcast.
If the Business of Venture Capital sounds more your speed, shoot me a message and I can send you my copy of the e-book.
🎧What I’ve Been Listening To - Earlier this week graphic design app Canva raised an additional $60 million landing them at a $6 billion valuation. If you’ve never heard of Canva, it’s a drag and drop graphic design tool that requires no previous design or photoshop experience to use. Unlike many billion-dollar tech companies with unjustifiably high valuations, Canva has the numbers (and profits) to back it up. Over 30 million people use the app ever month with 1.5 million of those being paid subscribers to their Canva Pro model. Upon hearing about the new funding, I decided to go back and listen to founder Melanie Perkins share her story on the How I Built This Podcast. Like Tobi Lutke’s Shopify story, Melanie had no intention of building a graphic design empire. She was a nineteen year old who wanted a tool to help her better design school yearbooks. Moral of the story? Start small because you have no idea what something can turn into.
If you give this a listen and want to hear more from Melanie, she made a second appearance on HIBT a few weeks ago.
🤯What’s Blown My Mind - In every successful individual’s journey there is always at least little bit of luck. In 1998, angel investor K. Ram Shiriam’s life changed when he took an elevator ride with two young, ambitious Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They briefly pitched him their tool that could scrape the internet for relevant information based on a keyword search. Impressed by the idea, he later wrote them a check for $500,000. This start-up was Google and his stake in the company earned him over a billion dollars. Add this to the list of reasons why you should practice your elevator pitch.
🧠What’s Made Me Think - On June 16th, James Clear posed this question on Twitter:
After reading this, I knew I wanted to include it in my newsletter but I was having trouble settling on an answer. Finally, it hit me.
Find people in your life who aren’t afraid to tell you that you suck.
Our generation (and those of the foreseeable future) are growing up in the participation trophy era where you get a gold star for having a pulse. This contributes to a host of issues when it comes to delivering and receiving professional feedback. Older managers I’ve spoken to have admitted that they are told to go easier when giving feedback to younger reports in an effort to not hurt their feelings. While on the the flip side, many young managers are not well equipped to give harsh feedback as they often haven’t received it themselves.
I’m twenty-three years old, have under a year of corporate experience, and go into each day with little to no clue of what I’m actually doing (like many twenty-somethings do). I need to be doing something wrong.
You can’t possibly tell me that I’m doing everything right and quite frankly, a higher-up doing so is detrimental to the progress of both of our respective roles.
My biggest learning lessons have come from when a few brave souls have had the courage to tell me that I sucked at whatever I was working on. This gave me a much needed wake-up call and the motivation to improve.
That’s it for this week. If you like what you read make sure to pass this along to someone you care about. If you’re that lucky recipient, make sure to subscribe to Crashing Up here. Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter while you’re at it too.