Divinations: Recent Episodes
Nathan Baschez
This week on the Divinations podcast, Adam Keesling and I are interviewed by our pal Dan Shipper about our Quibi prediction piece!
How to Listen
If you want to listen, the best way is to click the “Listen in Podcast App” link above by the audio player. That way you can listen in your favorite app — assuming it’s not Spotify — and subscribe to new episodes there.)
One Good Quote
At minute 10, Dan asked us what it was like to try Quibi for the first time after spending days writing a contrarian essay arguing they’d succeed.
I said:
Yeah, I mean it was terrifying. [nervous laughter] I really didn’t want it to suck but I also didn’t want to go into it biased. It’s a funny illustration of how you judge something when you’re obviously biased and you know you’re biased. Do you trust your gut reaction? You get all mixed up and it’s not a natural way to try a new thing. Frankly, I didn’t even really trust my opinion of the shows or the app design because I’m either being to harsh on it because I’m over-correcting, or I’m being too positive because I’m just going with my confirmation bias. That’s why I wanted to write the article before it came out.
In This Episode
Minute 1–7: We tell the story of how we ended up changing our minds about Quibi in the process of writing the article.
Minute 7–9: Why Quibi raised so much money, and what it’ll take for them to generate a good return for their investors.
Minute 9–12: What it was like to use the app for the first time, after we’d spent days writing and researching a contrarian bull take.
Minute 12–23: Dan introduces a new segment! It’s called “stick or switch?” In light of the news that Quibi only had 300k downloads on the first day, do Adam and I stick with our prediction? Or switch to the bear side?
Minute 23-31: Why do people hate Quibi?
Minute 31–37: Has Quibi become a habit for us? Adam watches in the morning at breakfast, Nathan watches at night before bed.
Enjoy!
PS — Want to try Quibi but not sure what to watch? Our recommended shows are I Believe, The Shape of Pasta, and The Most Dangerous Game.
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Whether or not you’ve already had the chance to read Does Sonos have a moat?, I think you’ll love this week’s conversation with Adam Keesling.
Tip: to subscribe to Divinations in your podcast app, click the “Listen in podcast app” link by the audio player above!
Here’s what we talked about:
Minute 0–5: So, does Sonos have a moat? Not in the same way that Google or Facebook does, but they do have a premium, differentiated product with a good brand and probably have good unit economics. Also they can “land and expand” because people buy multiple speakers.
Minute 5–14: How did Sonos start? What was the problem they were solving? How’d their launch go?
Minute 14–18: Once streaming music became a thing (Pandora, Spotify, etc), how did Sonos respond?
Minute 18–25: Should Sonos have made headphones? Why didn’t they?
Minute 25–32: What impact have smart speakers and voice assistants had on Sonos’s strategy? Why doesn’t Apple allow Sonos to integrate Siri into their product, but Apple and Amazon do?
Minute 32–49: How does Clay Christensen’s Law of Attractive Profits help us decode Sonos’s strategic position?
Enjoy!
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The Divinations Podcast is back!
(If you want to add it to your podcast app, press “add to podcast app” by the audio player above!)
This week, Dan Shipper and I discuss our interview with Jesse Beyroutey, and dive deeper into the idea of “Dominance Friction.”
Here’s a rough outline:
In the first 8 minutes we introduce Dan and his relationship with Jesse
From minute 8–11 we introduce the general concept of Dominance Friction
From minute 11–20 we use the example of Transfer Wise to illustrate the principle of customer alignment. (It’s a really fascinating example that wasn’t in the original post, but will be written up in a forthcoming post for paid subscribers. Jesse invested in their seed round and now they are a billion dollar business, all because they had better alignment with customers than the incumbent banking industry.)
After minute 20 is my favorite part. We add some additional nuance to the idea of incentive alignment. We talk about Lambda School, General Assembly, Substack, Medium, Casper, Vanguard, etc. We talk about the limits of incentive alignment, and Dan comes up with an awesome metaphor, how incentives are like the climate and individual decisions are like the daily weather. I talk about how the problems with incentive alignment alone are pretty similar to problems with democracy and capitalism, and we get into a conversation about Leo Strauss. It gets deep, folks :)
Anyway — I hope you love this discussion, we had a ton of fun with it!
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Hey! Something special today :)
I always wanted to release the raw audio of the interviews I do. But part of the magic of the original interview is it can ramble and meander until we converge on an interesting, publishable idea. So it’s actually critical that the audio doesn’t get released publicly.
Thankfully I figured out a solution: After the article is written, then record a conversation!
So this week we’re launching the podcast! It’s a discussion with Hiten Shah about the article we published this week, “Great strategies depend on great inputs — here’s how to find them.”
Tip: to listen in your podcast app, click the “listen in podcast app” link next to the audio player above.
If you didn’t get a chance to read it, that’s ok. We summarize it in the podcast. We also get into all sorts of interesting topics, such as:
How to avoid the “faster horse” problem when listening to customers
A teardown of the strategy behind Divinations
Why Hiten’s not a fan of “jobs to be done” terminology (it doesn’t land well when you try to implement it in an organization).
Thanks, and enjoy!
Links
Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, on YouTube
Why People Switch Document Apps
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Hello again!
Yesterday after I published the Sahil Lavingia interview I received a tweet from my friend Alex:
So now, I am sending out this audio edition, narrated by Sahil and me.
Pay up, Alex! ;)
In all seriousness, if you want me to keep doing this, let me know! It was fun to put together and I could release it as a podcast if there is demand.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and have a good weekend!
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