Kevin Kwok
@kevinakwok
Followers
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Statuses
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Joined July 2010
Google pays Apple $20B a year to be their default search engine. That's 75% of Apple's entire research and development budget. @narayanarjun pointed out to me that Google's basically funding all of Apple's r&d haha. Should put that on back of every device
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Waymo is executing a textbook pincer movement against SFO
Exciting news: @Waymo is beginning public service on the Peninsula, starting with Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Los Altos! Initial service area below.
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Larry Ellison's longevity is unreal. Putting up these numbers for the lifetime of modern tech industry while also being the true bryan johnson. When he was born for context we were still in world war 2
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Lee Kuan Yew has a line about how if you allow two generations of corruption you permanently lose an institution.- Good people leave.- Others normalize new incentives and become bad.- Entire system reshapes. I think this is true of all groups. And means we underweight its damage.
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We are learning in vaccines what most startups inevitably realize too late. Product is great. but most of the time, you live or die by distribution.
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New essay up. Why Figma Wins. - Why browser-first matters.- Figma is built for design, not just designers.- Intra-company network effects + bringing designers to decision making table.- Global network effects, pushing progress, & how to become a platform.
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tim apple is just going down the list of things zuck loves and taking them from him. ad targeting. VR/AR. next he's gonna announce he's a black belt at brazilian jiu jitsu. or has solved AI.
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Our industry will never got back the decade it spent cargo culting every part of google except the multi-hundred billion dollar revenue per year cash printer.
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My new quarantine hobby is taking stock photos of San Francisco
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When I was young I used to walk around malls with dad, and he would walk me through the unit economics of the different stores and restaurants. Friend brought up idea of coffee table book of the unit economics of different companies. And yes this is my dream coffee table book.
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Zoom founder, Eric Yuan, applied for visa 9 times before getting it. That might make one suspect our Visa system could be better. .
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Want to add your CA vaccine record to your Apple wallet?. Kevin Kwok Prime (@antimatter15) has made a little web app to make it easy for you.
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I’ve joined Sutter Hill Ventures to find and build companies with our next generation of EIRs and CEOs.
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New essay up. The Arc of Collaboration. - Slack is an Else Statement.- There is no distinction between productivity and collaboration.- The Slack of Gaming may be Discord, but the Discord for Enterprise is not Slack.
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Microsoft, Adobe, and Pfizer. Name companies that have done better transitions to SaaS business models.
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I heard people don't like reading 10 page essays, so now you can watch an hour long video. @eugenewei & I are launching a video series called Closing the Loop: we'll cover a lot of topics we write about. w/ some guests too. First episode, on TikTok, here:.
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Uber pool was such a fever dream. Can’t wait to try to explain it to my kids. Love things that carbon date their year or month so effortlessly.
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New essay up. How to Eat an Elephant, One Atomic Concept at a Time. - How Figma & Canva are taking on Adobe—and winning.- New use cases drive new needs.- Atomic concepts of companies.- Becoming platform ecosystems.- Dimensional reduction + narrative debt.
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Many stories on tech can be overblown. Not this one though. I have seen this app in use and it 100% works and is even more disconcerting than description here. Global facial recognition doesn’t exist only because of social norms rn. The tech is trivial.
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Interesting to see the rates at which COVID hit different social media platforms. Twitter: Has been freaking out for weeks. Facebook: Now freaking out. Youtube: Jussst starting to show up. Instagram: Covid? What's that! Who's he?!.
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OneTab failed on me, and I lost 10k+ saved tabs. And I can't for the life of me decide if this was a tragedy or a feature.
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Cursor and Anthropic are in that great dance. They love and need each other and are totally besties. And yet both know they need to know who's the irreplaceable one in the relationship. It's the question everyone waiting to find out.
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Reddit is so great haha. I'm just imagining this person. Immortal and 2000 years in the past, excited they can now finally buy that Tesla dip before the pump to the moon
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New essay up. The Mike Speiser Incubation Playbook. - Advantages of being interim CEO.- Betting all-in on secular transitions.- Optimizing only for incubations.- Local maximas of venture and function not form.- Breaking the wall of VC-company engagement.
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New essay up. Notes on Superhuman’s Acquisition Loops. - Superhuman's acquisition loops are driven by social capital, not personal utility.- Lessons from their onboarding process.- Scalability of social capital loops, and sequencing to network effects.
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[new post] Underutilized Fixed Assets. - Why every successful marketplace is initially built on underutilized fixed assets.- How marketplaces sequence eventually as their supply professionalizes.- Why chinese restaurants kicking you out fast is true love.
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People often ask me how valuations get negotiated. Normally I tell people there's no formula. But that's lie. Here's the formula (2021 edition). Founder proposes valuation.VC proposes valuation.And then you add them together. That's the valuation.
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I've come to believe everyone systematically underestimates how influenceable people are in the last inning of deciding major life decisions like jobs. The smallest moment magnifies. Managing the last mile so key. And conversely getting lazy for a second so fatal
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@delk took me long time to square the stories of many older family friends about a century ago having mansions in china. but also the family member funding them doing menial labor in US. until I connected exactly how far apart the currencies carried.
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@GrantSlatton Once you go pad mounted vs pole. Probably some minimum size they’ll make it. Plus room in case ever want to put anything else in there.
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Kris Jenner is the best accelerator program in the world.- probably eugene.
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No one needs to write life advice blog posts in tech anymore. Glad to announce I’ve solved it
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New essay up. On Making Uncommon Knowledge Common + the Rich Barton Playbook.
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Microsoft now joins the time honored cloud giant tradition of having two competing AI labs.
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If you are mindblown about what's happening with GME in finance. Just wait until you see it happen in politics.
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Google going to ban ad blockers from chrome. Welp. Guess that's goodbye to chrome.
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I think my replacement for book clubs. Is meetings where you both read a blog post and then discuss it.
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Add online branding to the list of things @AOC is just *better* at. Everyone talks about the big stuff, but she and her team are just better at the small details too. Whether you support her or not, worth understanding. Because the delta shows. And her Facebook ads tell the story.
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Everything about the financial markets makes sense once you think of it as a competition by everyone to make it into @matt_levine’s newsletter.
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Dune is everything. Best sci-fi movie I can remember seeing. And more true to the books than my imagination. Unreal. See it in full imax and sound as it was meant to be seen.
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how do we explain to interns how seriouesly 2010 vibes were about putting in multi-colored slides in the office and having everyone do brainteasers in interviews as a way to summon down cash like a rain dance.
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A very good proxy for how enjoyably walkable a city is, is the orange zones in google maps. Also makes it easy to compare cities, here's Paris vs SF at same zoom. Insane how much more walkable Paris is--and how distributed.
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Am consistently very impressed by vitalik's writing. Who else in crypto is anywhere close to his level of thoughtfulness x prolificness?. Fine if blogs, discourse, etc.
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@0interestrates Think answer is 2010. Which is not that early from product perspective. But from company stock perspective is very early haha.
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New essay up. Narrative Distillation. - modern IPO env is about owning marketing, not pricing.- increasing impt of narrative leverage as accounting too backwards facing.- product market fit as one facet of narrative distillation.- founder led narratives.
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I'm starting to think Call Me Maybe is a song about enterprise pricing and sales.
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Loops is the correct way to view the world. Eventually everyone will realize this.
3/ And some real-world examples I sketched out that combine multiple advantages into the flywheel engines driving growth:
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Star Trek Picard is the best of optimistic scifi. Especially the part where the federal government upzones the Presidio and Marin. And builds dense pedestrian plazas and skyscrapers
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There is a beautiful stage of startups early on where you report bugs and they get fixed within 24 hours. I get why it doesn't last. And few companies are even good at it. But wow it never ceases to be amazing.
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Scenes from writing last essay. Been so long it started in quarantine
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What’s needed is a firm that specializes in this. Maybe with a name that reinforces that focus like. Long Term Capital Management.
Early stage founders, find patient capital. - Notion took 3 years to PMF.- Airtable took 4 years to PMF. You need early VCs who are up for a long adventure. Feel lucky to have VCs on board who didn't give up on us when we didn't hit PMF right away. It makes such a difference.
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@arthgupta we asked for chat generated transparent pngs and all we got was super-human intelligent AIs.
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Morris Chang oral histories are so great. Recently reread one on plane ride. How can you not love this haha
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Whoever gave Quantam Supremacy its name is a genius. How can the US govt not invest in our Quantam Supremacy. This is like government catnip.
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founder next to me is explaining to first employee why they should file 83b. Never been so proud. Is this what breaking the cycle looks like 🥲.
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Caro on how encouragement and the moments when the people around you have significant impact on your ambition
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@alexeyguzey Yes. Most people who professionally post on both platforms do this now. The bigger reason is that Twitter debuffs the direct link I believe than YouTube. But YouTube may also count it less.
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Marvel made every kids company realize they can get much more returns by becoming IP for cinematic universes. And now Mattel and Sony fully pivoting to fracking your childhood as the business model.
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When we say Parler's decision was about free speech. This is what they were kicked off Amazon for. This isn't some case of partisan free speech being stifled.
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Talked to friend of friend who has offer at tech unicorn. They won't tell them what valuation the RSU pricing is at. Besides fact that that's unethical imo. Esp crazy in today's time where huge possible spread in valuation of employee shares. In way that massively matters.
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It's good to remember that sometimes things get worse over time
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Remember when Blake Masters was supposed to herald smart tech people running for office? lol.
AZ GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters: . “I think Trump won in 2020 . We saw states change the rules at the last minute to flood the zone with mail in ballots … Big Tech censored true information about Joe Biden in the weeks leading up to the election.”
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Stripe's payment link is pretty cool. There are so many products that really should have better implementations as shareable link.
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There have never been moats. It's always been loops. Once we all embrace that can start discussing the real questions. Like how to quantify them. Map then to user loops and internal resource allocation. How to sequence them. How to make new ones.
Moats are actually loops. Fun exercise—try to draw this for whatever business you work in or a company you love. From @maxolson .
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New post: aligning biz models to markets.- How internet is changing hospitality.- Why Shake Shack & USHG's biz models enable better employee retention & service.- How the trend maps to tech, from gaming (Fortnite) to productivity (Airtable, Figma, Notion).
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@Altimor Craigslist has the ideal design aesthetic. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
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When I used to talk to people at Amazon. They all said they hated that they were underappreciated vs SV peers on the way up. But once dominant loved that they had low radar profile. Shopify feels similar. Still so under radar despite being absolute elephant in room of ecommerce.
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Apple just needs to ship that all texts from Vision Pro are in gold bubbles. and this thing is locked in.
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Prop 13 makes property tax in California a joke. Here's property tax paid by houses on one street in SF compared to their market value. If you're wondering why you're paying $40k in property tax on your $2M house, it's because your neighbor with a $5M house is paying $4k
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My roommate.- caught wild salmon.- built smoker.- made smoked salmon. I.- ate it. This is peak synergy and collaboration
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Seeing demo of this was one of those times I’ve really felt the direction of where software is going. - models that understand my companies database *and* design system.- manage both ephemeral, exploratory, and enduring work.- text input but also higher order interface.
Meet Meter Command. A generative UI product for getting information, taking action, and building real-time software – all in natural language.
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Biggest takeaway from this should be that private markets people have HUGE information edge over public markets about health of tech companies when they go public.
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Costco delivery of frozen items uses frozen kirkland water bottles to keep it cool. That is some real big brain thinking.
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Le relais de L'Entrecote. Such a great restaurant format. Only serves steak and fries. No menu. Sit down and they just start bringing it until you tell them to stop. The kitchen must be like an overcooked level
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Dark forest is the most popular metaphor from three body problem. But in a few years it'll be sophon locking.
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This is so obviously true about what Buffet does. And a great strategy. Just like him "living" in omaha. Also, as always. Matt Levine is a national treasure
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There is no serious personal CRM as long as they cannot pull in imessages ala texts app. Personal CRMs are considered a tarpit market. But we don't know that's actually true. When they all refuse to include this prereq.
what is the best “personal crm”? anyone doing anything good with llms yet?.
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Finally going to find out if the internal McK book is all it’s hyped to be. So far have really enjoyed it. Fun reading about the stage of McKinsey when it was truly a startup in new space
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the nytimes should offer a subscription where I pay more money and they remove the opinions section.
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Status as a Service. I have been so excited for @eugenewei to drop this monster of a manifesto. Understanding social capital the way we do Financial capital is supremely impt. Eugene is my favorite person to discuss and learn from on it. Read this!.
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The societal surplus of tech. When consumer grade software like Eventbrite is now more reliable and scalable for govt use than Deloitte managed official projects . We’re barely taking adavantage of this yet though.
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It's clear Mary Meeker now has the ability to choose any companies and just ask them for whatever metric she cares about. And they'll provide the data. From now on when people ask me what superpower I'd like, I know my answer.
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