An exclusive with Nir Eyal and a weekly briefing
Hooked is a book every PM needs to read!
Let’s begin with some exciting news!
Axilor Ventures is organising an invite-only discussion with Nir Eyal, hosted by Anshumani Ruddra, VP of Products at Hotstar. Unfortunately, all the seats to the webinar were full as soon as Axilor announced it on Twitter. But don’t worry - we got you, boo! We’d be releasing the conversation, exclusively, on the Use Case podcast!
About Nir: Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" and "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" and has previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
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Key events from the startup world this week:
Blume Ventures is on a high! Remember when Karthik Reddy was on the Use Case podcast talking about “Why don’t more Indian startups IPO”, he said that every year he struggled when potential LPs asked them why aren’t Indian startups going all the way and getting listed. Well, seems like he gave them great answers because Blume just raised $102m (₹ 715crs), for their early-stage fund. Now we wonder if Blume’s strategy would be to go all the way with their existing portfolio companies and see them through to a great non-secondary exit or increase the number of seed/series A checks.
Unacademy, a Blume Ventures portfolio company in the ed-tech space announced that they’ve raised $110 million to fuel their growth. Unacademy started as a Youtube channel if I remember correctly. It’s great to see them come this far.
Get smart with some curated content for you for this weekend:
📖 Read
The controversial headline ““No handshakes, please”: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus” by Recode/Vox on the Coronavirus started a Twitter feud between Kara Swisher and Balaji Srinivasan - the piece + the tweets are an interesting insight into how the virus epidemic is impacting the world’s tech centre.
“Lambda School’s Misleading Promises” by Vincent Woo for Intelligencer
📺 Watch
Halt and Catch Fire - the most underrated tech/PM show ever! If Silicon Valley nostalgia and the ruthless advance of capital, spiced with dramatic tech competition excites you, this is the show we recommend you binge on this month. All 4 seasons of it - kept my heart racing throughout! Even if you aren’t from a tech background, you are sure to love it - the screenplay and characters are amazing!
👍 The name of the show itself has some interesting history to it. In the early days of computer engineering, a design flaw in old microprocessors was discovered by programmers. Due to incomplete opcode decoding, two illegal opcodes caused the program counter on the processor to increment endlessly, which locked the CPU until it was reset. The computer’s CPU would cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer - sometimes while repeating in an endless loop the microprocessor would catch fire! From this, the term “Halt and Catch Fire” became a humorous catch-all term for instructions that may freeze a processor, including intentional instructions for testing purposes, and unintentional illegal instructions.
If that little piece of history on the name doesn’t do it for you, watch this trailer for Season 1.
Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos, a heart-racing documentary by PBS Frontline on how one of the biggest forces in the world of technology and capitalism has come to dominate our lives and the multiple industries we depend on. We don’t want to reveal much, but it is better than any thriller you planned on watching this weekend. 1 hr 53 mins of animal spirits in a very well narrated documentary.
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