Content First, Studio Sales, Payrolls & Rare Genes 🧬

A live example: In 2017, two unrelated families in Norway and Germany each sought help from local doctors for their sons with an unusually triangular face. For both boys, tests for known genetic conditions turned up blank.

Luckily, an experimental algorithm from the University of Bonn in collaboration with FDNA helped them find some answers. It found that both the boys had faces similar to other children with progeria, a fatal genetic disorder whose patients also have distinctively triangular faces.

What the app did: It didn’t attempt to identify the specific disorder of a person in a photo. Instead, it calculated how similar a face was to those of other patients. 

Future course: Of course, identifying the disorder doesn’t always mean treatment options are available, but it could lead to subsequent research and funding.

Over the past couple of years, businesses and startups have started acting like media companies putting content at the center of everything they do.

• Last year, Salesforce announced a massive media arm called Salesforce+ — a Hollywood-style studio to produce entertaining content.
• Hubspot bought The Hustle — a free newsletter with 1.5 million subscribers, a subscription newsletter called ‘The Trend,’ and a podcast called ‘My First Million.’
• In 2019, Shopify launched a media arm called Shopify Studios, which produced a show called ‘I Quit,’ in conjunction with the Discovery Channel. The show focused on entrepreneurs who quit their job to start companies.

The idea behind these moves: product sales through entertainment.

How does it work: Marketing strategists have one very important question on mind — how to get access to more audiences or customers. The traditional method, which is using Facebook and Google marketplace data, is becoming increasingly walled due to privacy laws. But the global D2C subscription industry is certainly on the rise. 

So companies decided to acquire audience data themselves by creating OTTs and shows. Media subscriptions provide marketeers with an ocean of audience data. And companies can directly sell to those audiences by placing advertisements inside their own shows, thus forging a direct connection with customers.

Startups are increasingly turning away from demo events, trade shows and Shark Tank-like pitches. 

The flashy events that once helped floundering founders connect with investors is now an outdated tradition.

For one, with capital flows surging, founders are more selective about investors — they’re not just looking for deep pockets; they want mentorship and scaling assistance.

Second, nobody cares about showmanship anymore. In such events, founders stood on stage and pitched their companies in the best light. But having the most impressive pitch or personality isn’t the same as having a real business or an efficiently run company.

Lastly, a lot of investors tend to judge founders based on their charisma, storytelling abilities or personal biases. Investors have long opted for founders who look and think like them. In fact, research shows that among similar startups, “attractive” founders get funded more than “unattractive” people, men more than women, and less than 1% of investment goes to POC founders.

A growing number of US workers are turning their personal data over to private companies in exchange for paycheck advances.

When Dave Tulloch was in need of fast money, he signed up with B9 — a cash-advance app that requires no credit check and no interest payments. All Tulloch needed to do was give the app consent to access his employee data on his company’s payroll provider, Paychex. What he didn’t realise is with this consent a company called Argyle was retrieving his data.

Payroll data startups, like Argyle, have started propping up in large numbers in last 4-5 years. 

How do they work: 

• Payroll data firms work in collaboration with cash-advance apps. 
• They access other companies’ employee data once they are granted access by a worker creating an account on cash-advance apps. 
• Then they build API integrations with payroll systems to extract cosmic amounts of data such as the employee’s earning and spending patterns, shifts worked, promotions history, healthcare and retirement contributions, gig worker’s star rating, etc. 
• They use this data in two ways: One, by creating a score card for the employee to suggest how much money should apps like B9 loan him. Second, by obviously selling this data to companies and marketeers who can use it to sell their products. 

The payroll data industry is potentially worth up to $12 billion, by some estimates. There are 12 million annual payday loans borrowers in the US. Companies are in a race to gain access to over 250,000 payroll systems in the US alone. 

During a 2019 interview, Argyle’s founders said that payroll data carries “not only financial insights” but “a holistic view of a worker’s identity.”