Dear friends, 

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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💡Must-read

👉 Whose Story Wins? (The Generalist)

​​➡️ Inspiring story about how to create content that is not about your brand but makes your brand a lot more powerful, because you own a story!

• In 1886, the duo had resurrected Michelin through a series of deft moves.

• The pneumatic tire, first for bicycles, then for automobiles.

• There were too few cars, and those that did exist weren't driving enough.

• The company would launch a guidebook designed to promote travel by car. In 1900, the Michelin Guide was born.

• Though it began as a free resource for motorists, featuring maps and automotive information, the Michelin Guide became a defining cultural and gastronomical resource. It succeeded in encouraging touring (and thus increasing the purchase of tires) and creating a story that others began to tell themselves to tie to their values and identity.

• By definition, marketing content seeks to sell. The text is scripted, geared toward producing a specific outcome. Its content makes a demand: will you do this? Language seeks an explicit end.

  • It focuses on the product, enunciates its benefits, and seeks to drive toward a purchase.

• Soft power acts more gently, like a story. No explicit demand is made of the listener, and as a result, a state of openness is achieved. The content of soft power is more symbolic or metaphorical, enforcing values and norms through narrative. Browsing a Michelin guide, by contrast, operates subtly. Few references to tires are made; it is possible to peruse many of them without making a connection between guide and parent company.

• Rather than trying to drive a specific outcome, then, Michelin guides' content bolsters the parent company's story, its worldview.

➡️ Really inspiring for Alan Media.

• Books or short films feel so out-of-kilter with modern digital marketing that it's almost hard to take them seriously as attempts to generate tangible ROI. That makes them the perfect, disarming vehicle for a soft power play.

➡️ This is why we are writing the books.

• Increment - A digital and print magazine about building software

• Stripe Press - By focusing on actual, physical books — and giving them a loving, literary treatment — Stripe shows this is a project situated firmly outside the world of "marketing."

• Indie Hackers (IH) is the final piece of Stripe's soft power architecture.

  • “[O]ur goal in acquiring Indie Hackers is to simply ensure that the site becomes as successful as possible. The Stripe upside we're hoping for is that more companies get started and that they're more successful. We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we're mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the overall number rather than to grow our fraction. (Our product has to do the latter part.)”

➡️ How would you approach M&A for healthcare content?

🏯 Building a company

👉 A thread with 7 high-value ideas & habits (By Shreyas Doshi) 

• In complex environments, Problem Solving is a misnomer. Solving one problem creates another set of problems. Problem Solving is in reality Problem Trading. A leader’s job is not to eliminate all problems. It is to wisely pick what problems we are willing to live with.

👉 Tony Xu - A Human and Math Problem (Join Colossus)

• To dream big, but to start small.

➡️ I really like this one :) 

• When we started, the goal was to transform every brick and mortar business, building them a marketplace to give them demand and also to build them a platform in which we can give them tools to create their own digital businesses. But that was way too big of a problem statement for the four of us to get started off. And so, we narrowed that problem down to delivery. We narrowed delivery down to restaurants only, not all types of stores. And then, we narrowed that down to one locale called Palo Alto, which is where we started. Even within Palo Alto, we narrowed that down to one street on Palo Alto, which at that time was University Avenue. There were a couple of main streets with restaurants, but at the time we focused on University Avenue.

➡️ How can we narrow it down better? I think we could definitely be more radical even if the product would not be perfect. 

• When we found out about some of these moms, we literally drove alongside the Dashers with balloons, chocolates, and other stuffed animals and brought them something special.

➡️ Send little Marmots or gifts for every baby added? 

👉 Building creative muscle

“Creativity is like a muscle,” says Sarah Stein Greenberg, a director at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school) and author of Creative Acts for Curious People. “The more you exercise it, the better you’ll be at coming up with innovative solutions and ideas at work.” Writing for CNBC, Greenberg shares three brain exercises they teach d.school students to become more creative: 

• Shadowing—“picking someone whose experience you want to understand, then spend a day following them around and doing everything that they do”;

➡️ I would like us to push for more shadowing at Alan.

• Seeing—learning to control your visual and mental filters to “help you pay closer attention and see what others might miss; 

• And studying how “someone else solved a problem similar to yours, but in a different context.”

🗞 In the news

📱Technology

👉 Web3 is Bullshit (Stephen Diehl)

• Every single problem proposed to be solved by blockchain hits up against three fundamental technical limitations that inescapably arise from economic or legal concerns. The three technical issues of the narrative are:

• 1. The Compute Problem

• 2. The Bandwidth Problem

• 3. The Storage Problem

➡️ Good read with good arguments to have both sides of the coin.

👉 How Snap is sidestepping the metaverse (Platformer)

• To date, Snap has signed up 250,000 people to create more than 2.5 million AR effects. More than 300 of those people have gotten 1 billion or more views on their lenses, the company says. Snapchat lenses are viewed 6 billion times per day.

👉 Rappi: The One Who Knocks (the generalist)

• Going multi can work. Most startups pick a narrow focus and grow from there. Rappi has taken a different approach, competing across multiple verticals from the beginning. That's paid off for the company.

• The early designs of Rappi catered to the free-form and obscure, replacing the menus of most ordering apps with an open-text form. Rather than pick from a set selection, customers could ask for anything they wanted and Rappi would deliver.

• The trio had seen all manner of requests come through since launching “Rappi Whim”: food, electronics, medication, clothing. It had been valuable to understand demand and build a direct, more intimate relationship with customers.

➡️ Very interesting way to learn by giving a lot of power to users at the beginning.

• Rappi has taken a leaf out of Sea Group’s book, too. The Southeast Asian giant has rapidly scaled its Shopee app in Brazil (and beyond) by gamifying the shopping experience. Customers can earn Shopee rewards by playing games within the app — a feature that improves conversion, time on the app, and frequency of usage. Thanks to its gaming division, Garena, which created mega-hit Free Fire, Sea is especially well-placed to offer this quirk.

➡️ It would be interesting to check what they do, and the impact to better our understanding of future token ideas.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 HTN Weekly Health Tech Reads 12/5 (Health Tech Nerds)

• Funding: Sword Health, a virtual clinic in the MSK space, raised $189 million at a $2 billion valuation after seeing 12x client growth over the last year. Link

• Christina Farr penned an overview of why digital health startups are all becoming virtual clinics, providing a helpful thought starter on a number of fronts. Link

👉 BetterHelp generated $700 million of revenue in 2021 (Link)

• With customer acquisition costs declining. 

• Teladoc notes it sees 20% - 60% higher revenue for patients who use mental health services + another Teladoc service versus just mental health alone. 

• Apparently, Teladoc onboarded over 10,000 therapists last year, and another 1,200 therapists in January 2022 alone. 

👉 Clover leaning heavily into its non-insurance business (Link), at one point referring to the Clover Assistant as the "digital on-ramp onto value-based care" for providers.

• Clover finished the year with 68k Medicare Advantage members and 62k Direct Contracting lives under management, which is some impressive growth, even if it missed its SPAC forecasts significantly (in its SPAC presentation, Clover claimed to have 200k Direct Contracting lives already contracted in 2021, growing to 450k lives by 2023). Clover does expect Direct Contracting to grow significantly to ~165k lives next year, with ~83k MA lives.

• It'd be really interesting to hear from some of the 3,000 providers who are using the Clover Assistant platform how much of it is because they like the software and how much of it is because Clover pays them for opening it.

• Clover also gets in on the startup insurer trend of throwing out a profitability target, raising the possibility of hitting non-GAAP profitability in.  

👉 Weekly Health Tech Reads 4/3 (Health Tech Nerds)

• Brightside Health, a virtual mental health startup, raised $50 million. Link

• Oliva, a UK-based workplace mental health start-up, raised $5 million. Link

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