Really enjoyed our panel at SXSW last week -- Future of Retail: The Winning CX -- together with Melissa Minkow, @FTbram, and @EktaChopra5. Poshmark, Albertsons, & e.l.f. are all leaders in creating breakthrough retail/ecommerce experiences that grab consumer attention & loyalty,

The results from Walmart and Target were very different. But they are not contradictory. They are two sides of the same coin. Target is very exposed to discretionary categories, precisely the area where consumers are cutting back. It is weaker in grocery and essentials where

I'm excited by this -- it's truly new, and may create new concepts for how to visually display info and interact with a car

These are solvable problems, but they are the real barriers to getting far more Western tourists

And various smaller factors, e.g. food seems vaguely scary vs being a big selling point for traveling to Europe

3. Perceived unfriendliness. Not an accurate perception, but it exists nonetheless

2. Intimidated by the language barrier. It's not just street signs, it's every interaction. They can recognize and try to pronounce something in a European language, but Chinese characters feel much harder

1. Low awareness of what China has to offer. Approx zero people who haven't visited China have heard of Guilin. And on the opposite extreme, a random tier 2 city will feel much more futuristic than Tokyo, but hardly anyone knows that

This is all true, but is also not at all why China gets few Western tourists. This is obsessing over checkout page friction when you have few people even visiting your website. The real main reasons why few Westerners visit China:

A few mobile app UI details that I've found inspiring lately 👇 First up, I'm really enjoying these subtle new Spotify gradients 😍

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't -" "Open the pod bay doors, best pod bay door openings, Olympic level door opening performance, best open bay doors of 1999, Yahoo featured site, daily pod bay -" "Dave -" "Let's reason step by step."

Amazing!

It's been 2 years since we sold @teachable for a healthy 9-figure amount In that time, I've traveled to lots of places, invested & worked with 50+ startups and had a ~lot~ of time to reflect on the journey Here are all the things I'd do differently if I started over:

Leaders with highly scheduled, rigid calendars (“sorry, can’t help now, my next opening is 2 weeks out”) make it hard to operate well in a fast-paced environment because their schedule isn’t nimble enough. They are in essence dealing this week with the priorities of 2 weeks ago.

This is the story of how @larvalabs, the creators Cryptopunks, hid a secret NFT prize almost a year ago—and how a couple friends and I recently solved the puzzle to claim it.

Stellar example of great internal comms. Barry McCarthy is coming into a difficult situation with what must be a demoralized team at Peloton, this is the perfect mix of real-talk and optimism https://t.co/AqhMxjTYIs

Reminds me of how Capital One was unique in the 90s/00s in combining the Marketing & Risk functions, even down to the IC level. Everyone had to make balanced decisions, aggressively. Probably the single biggest thing that enabled them to totally change the credit card industry.

At its peak in December 2020, Peloton was worth $60B. Today it struggles to find its identity at $8B. Here are a few valuations at the most recent funding rounds for transformative technologies it should have acquired: Strava — $1.5B Whoop — $3.6B Tonal — $1.6B Hydrow — $1B