Learning in Public: 10/25/21

Bits and bytes

Bill Ferrell

Oct 25, 2021

Links + Comments

Counting people

The devil is always in the details. Interesting thread:

We don’t have an accurate population count both at a local and national level - in the US nor really in any country.
When you look at vax coverage for a specific area — the percentage may not have significant meaning.

John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch

In Miami-Dade, vax coverage among over-65s exceeds 100% in *more than half of all zipcodes*, in some cases passing 200%. This is the "snowbird" effect: thousands of older folks went south to Miami in winter, got jabbed, then returned north

John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch

FL had a brutal wave, setting records for deaths. It looked much more like Georgia than Maryland, whose Delta wave has been much more muted.

The strategic value of Anchorage

AeroDork @AeroDork

Flight times from Anchorage, where huge amounts of air freight transit.

The aerial proximity of Anchorage to the world.

Sky Scans

Hit play on the first video in the tweet below.

John Wiseman @lemonodor

I think N300WQ was doing bathymetric LIDAR scans along the coast of Los Angeles last night. A couple nights before someone took this video of it doing the same thing in San Diego.

Advisory Circular LA @SkyCirclesLA

N300WQ is circling over Los Angeles County at 1375 feet, speed 169 MPH, squawking 0207, 1.63 miles from King Harbor Yacht Club #N300WQ https://t.co/iid9oD0ExX https://t.co/znJhRm5AF1

I love it for the science and the data gathering.

Flight Simulators for Management Education

"The Beer Game"

I’m hoping to play the beer game in the next couple of weeks. What other business “flight simulators” do you know? I’d love a list to play both for fun and at the office.

Read the details of the game and the takeaways here: http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html

Hyper-Local 15 Minute Delivery and Dark Stores

Turner’s Blog

Jokr and Personalized Instant Commerce

In April of 2021, Ralf Wenzel and his team launched JOKR, a global platform for instant grocery and retail delivery at a hyper local scale. Within six months, the company operated in seven countries and its annualized revenue run-rate surpassed $100 million, showing no signs of slowing down…

8 months ago · 18 likes · 8 comments · Turner Novak

This is a detailed bull case for Jokr, one of the many 15-minute delivery services operating globally — and in the USA mostly present in NYC. These companies have raised significant capital and I’m fascinated to see if they are able to become viable businesses. Will we see a WebVan 2.0 OR something more akin to an Uber — a business that CAN operate profitably in certain markets — but that I believe (Uber) still operates at a significant loss. There are so many of these new 15-minute delivery services we will have to see significant consolidation. I’m mostly including this so that in a year’s time we can revisit and learn something.

One tidbit from the above:

CPG brands spend $500 billion on trade promotions every year. On average, manufacturers spend between 11-27% of their revenue on trade promotions,

Source: https://www.repsly.com/blog/the-amount-of-money-you-could-be-losing-to-poor-promotion-execution

So here again, as with Instacart and soon DoorDash, is the real business Advertising?

Digging out from the container backlog

Ryan Petersen @typesfast

Last night Flexport brought a taco truck to the Port of Long Beach as a big thank you to the ILWU laborers there working like crazy to clear this container backlog. A thread on what we learned! /1

Flexport continues to be an impressive and interesting company
Taco truck idea - such a great, low-cost way to create goodwill
Lots of interesting tidbits on the situation at the ports. For all the soundbites and articles about ships stuck outside the ports — interesting to learn where the real bottlenecks lie.

Read this second thread for more insight into the bottleneck

Ryan Petersen @typesfast

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

and how to re-prioritize such that the most capital intensive part of the operation line is the bottleneck

Ryan Petersen @typesfast

When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.

Streamer Home Shopping Network - China leading the way

Dan Liu ✦ lu.ma @danqing_liu

Two Chinese streamers sold 18 billion RMB (about $3B) worth of goods in a half-day livestream yesterday. 🤯🤯🤯 That's almost as much as Twitter's annual revenue ($3.72B).

Who: 2 Streamers in China that review and sell products in live streams.
What:
- They sell everyday products (skincare, make-up)
- Daily ~20M people tune in to watch their stream (This big sale a few days ago 200M showed up! Why? I think because it is the start of the big shopping week which is semi-equivalent to post-Thanksgiving shopping in the US)
- They are popular because they are trusted — maybe equivalent to The WireCutter in the US.
Click the tweet above and read the whole thread. The bit they call out about how the internet and e-commerce are now so large it is impossible to know what is the best product or how well a specific product does its job. This creates the need for curation and shows the value these streamers bring in reviewing everyday products and in some sense negotiating an incredible deal for their customers (because they can push so much volume). There is a degree of Costco in here in so far as the Streamers aren’t trying to sell products with high mark-up — rather they win by helping users find great deals — and the OEMs love the extreme volume and prestige of being associated with the trusted streamer.