Half-formed thoughts and musings

Traps to avoid when you do another startup

I have had the ‘doing another startup’ conversation many times with serial founders, startup execs and periodically, on long walks, with myself. For all the various founder illuminati groups that exist, it remains a woefully under-discussed topic in public (and is as relevant for founders and senior hires as it is for investors). Jason Lemkin’s¹ recent X-tweet on hiring repeat VPs prompted me to unify a bunch of previously disparate notes into what emerged as three general traps to avoid when either starting or joining another startup.

The best books I’ve read this year

I can only assume that Amazon has literally forgotten they acquired Goodreads (in their defence it was ten years ago so possibly it has been so effectively amortized that they are now invisible to the naked eye in Seattle). The site has inadvertently become a shrine to the early 2000s internet, both in terms of overall UX but also general response times. I suppose it’s a reflection of just how fragmented the content ecosystem is, that a single alternative hasn’t displaced it? Anyway. This really, really didn’t mean to start as a rant but rather to share the top books I’ve read this year.

A culture of profit

(Currently writing from Tokyo so bear with my somewhat sleep-deprived cognitive functions) Dave Madden is one of my favourite people in the ad world for many reasons, one of which is the brutality of the post he wrote about the near future of the adtech world being mostly liquidations rather than consolidation.

Some thoughts on LEGO Fortnite

Okay so now I can finally stop giving a polite smile to the people asking me what Epic is actually doing with LEGO. Based on what seemed to be the former taking over most of the world’s media this weekend¹, I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about but in case you missed it, the LEGO Fortnite survival crafting game (and several other things) has been announced.

Why is the internet still (mostly) a dumpster fire for kids?

For those that watch the general kids-and-internet space, the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy. Ireland rolled out a framework to allow parents/teachers regulate phones in schools and the UK issued their Codes of Practice for companies to comply with the Online Safety Act. Meanwhile in the US, a Californian District Court ruled that Meta, Alphabet, ByteDance and Snap must face lawsuits alleging they designed their platforms to attract and be addictive to children, thereby harming their mental health. Over the years countless parents and teachers have cornered me with the question: why is the internet STILL such a dumpster fire for kids?

The Cambrian explosion in startup financing

The basic premise of punctuated equillibrium¹ theory in evolution is that everything muddles along between disruptions (usually some form of disaster) with the consequences of those disruptions (and occasionally the more resilient remnants of the previous era) shaping the next period of evolution. This generally makes sense to people when you mention dinosaurs but it increasingly feels like a useful description for what’s happening in the VC/startup financing ecosystem.

Fortnite and the Lindy Effect

Fortnite’s reactivation of its player base has been quite extraordinary and reminded everyone just how big the platform still is. It seems to be a good examples of the Lindy Effect which broadly states that the longer something has survived, the longer its remaining life expectancy. While this has all sorts of fairly obvious exceptions, as a probabilistic model it’s increasingly helpful to think about what the next ten years of consumer digital platforms might look like.

Thoughts from the MadTech Money conference

Earlier this week I was speaking at the MadTech Money conference, an excellently named event which is delightfully blunt about the business of both building and selling adtech and martech companies. I feel like we need more conferences like these.

Where are the investment opportunities in the kids digital media space?

My Gandalfian methods¹ for deciding what I’ll do next are as much about wandering into the past as they are about mulling the future. Thinking about some of the long-term opportunities in the kids and teens digital media space, I realised it was much easier to think about this through the recent market successes (i.e. what doesn’t need to be solved). So let’s take a quick look at the material acquisitions and one IPO over the last few years to see what they crossed over the list.

Layoffs from the founder’s perspective

This isn’t a post about the layoffs in Epic Games this week, there’s been plenty written about that and I’m incredibly sympathetic to those affected (there are some amazing people so if you’re hiring, go and chat to them). Instead I wanted to write about the layoffs we did in SuperAwesome a few years back and reflections from the perspective of the founder.