What We’re Reading

Here are a few good articles the Collaborative Fund team came across this week.

Efficiency

Chase realizes how much of the internet is a dead end:

As of a few weeks ago, advertisements forJPMorgan Chase were appearing on about 400,000 websites a month … [now] JPMorgan has limited its display ads to about 5,000 websites it has preapproved … Surprisingly, the company is seeing little change in the cost of impressions or the visibility of its ads on the internet.

Assets vs. Ideas

This is a good comparison about the types of companies we now have:

Tesla’s big problem is that it has too many customers chasing too little product. It needs to spend billions of dollars to build infrastructure that will allow it to meet surging demand for electric cars. Most other Silicon Valley companies have the opposite problem: They have plenty of spare capacity, but they’re essentially spending their millions (or billions) to buy customers.

Etiquette

Albert Wenger gives email tips – increasingly important as people’s inboxes balloon:

Avoid attachments when you can. For instance if you want someone to look at one or two charts, just paste them right into the email. Use text to summarize the key point of the charts in addition to that. So much email is read on mobile devices today and opening up an attachment is a big extra step, especially if it is massive in size. If the recipient needs more detail, ideally just link to a cloud resource. This cuts down on all the “I couldn’t open the attachment can you please resend” emails.

Skin in the game

This is an interesting idea to make college a good investment:

The Learners Guild in Oakland pays each student $1,500 a month to take a 10-month coding course and only gets paid the $25,000 tuition once the student graduates and is employed in a tech job, making at least $50,000 a year.

Volatility

The Wall Street Journal has a great piece on Amazon’s dynamic pricing:

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Prospective

The internet doesn’t seem to have had much impact on the decline of newspaper sales. They’ve been plunging for half a century:

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Have a good weekend.