What’s Next — Music, Predictions, Internetby Jordan Gonen
by Jordan Gonen
Hi there 👋 Tons of interesting reads this week! Hope you enjoy.
10.30.2017
Articles to Read.
Steve Jobs Didn’t Get It Right; The Future of the Music Industry:
Will record companies look the same in ten years as they do today? Almost assuredly not, but a bright spot may be emerging for the record company veterans. Music streaming is thriving.
Steve Jobs was famously a critic of music streaming, but it didn’t matter. The market ran towards the idea of an infinite music library for a fixed cost. After the height of iTunes, people stole music. Despite conventional wisdom, stealing music isn’t free. It is the time, risk, and guilt of the thief. This caused the music industry to face the “true market price” of music. The price a user is willing to pay to avoid the headache of consuming stolen music. Users are willing to pay for experiences. A premium experience is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for companies.
Predictions Made by Ray Kurzweil (in 1999):
Inventing the Internet Again (1997):
As the technology advances, the broadband radios will be ideal to offer video teleconferencing, World Wide Web, and other image-rich wireless content, including CDMA bandwidth on demand. Data, not voice, will be the critical application. As people brandish their dataphones around the globe, linking to convenient displays through IR connectors, users can break out into a tetherless telecoms where they can work or play, study or pray, anywhere they go.
The Greatest Sales Pitch I’ve Seen All Year:
No matter what you’re selling, your most formidable obstacle is prospects’ adherence to the status quo. Your primary adversary, in other words, is a voice inside people’s heads that goes, We’ve gotten along just fine without it, and we’ll always be fine without it.
How do you overcome that? By demonstrating that the world has changed in such a fundamental way that prospects have to change, too.
How we made $1M in 3 Months — The Story of Morning Recovery:
From working at Facebook, Uber, and Tesla to quitting my job and making $1M in the first three months of our new mission ridding the world of hangovers, the last few months of my life have been wild. So how did it all happen?
My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51 — not even old — I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.
Lost On Purpose: (24 minute read)
Today is my 40th birthday. I made my first million dollars after turning thirty-one. By thirty-seven I had sold one company and my new tech company was, in startup bro talk, “crushing it.” Sales had grown over three-hundred percent for the third straight year. I was living with my new fiancée in a waterfront condo in Williamsburg, with a beautiful view of Manhattan. This was a few years ago. I should have been loving life, but I wasn’t. None of it felt right. I didn’t feel right. I wasn’t even sure what feeling right felt like.
The Real Story of Automation:
There’s a chart I came across earlier this year, and not only does it tell an extremely important story about automation, but it also tells a story about the state of the automation discussion itself. It even reveals how we can expect both automation and the discussion around automation to continue unfolding in the years ahead. The chart is a plot of oil rigs in the United States compared to the number of workers the oil industry employs, and it’s an important part of a puzzle that needs to be pieced together before it’s too late.
What should be immediately apparent is that as the number of oil rigs declined due to falling oil prices, so did the number of workers the oil industry employed. But when the number of oil rigs began to rebound, the number of workers employed didn’t.
Walnut was founded to solve the biggest pain points in household moving. We outlined our approach in May, but it boils down to this: moving is a consumer service, so companies should aim to deliver hospitality to their customers.
Despite our early successes, we’ve decided to close Walnut. Our tests revealed that we could create an experience customers loved, but we doubted our ability to be profitable long-term. Building a sustainable business depended on transforming poor unit economics, and that wasn’t a future we were excited to invest in.
This story explains what worked, what didn’t, and why we’ve shut down operations.
More:
– This Company Added the Word “Blockchain” to its Name and Saw its Shares Surge 394%
– [guide] How to Get What You Want Professionally
– Omni Rentals
– Is $100,000 Middle Class in America?
– 20+ Cool Side Projects
– Under 16? Get Paid More Than A Facebook InternshipSee My Full Reading List
You made it to the end! Thanks for reading 👋
If you enjoyed, would really appreciate if you shared this link!
Want to read more? I write daily, and tweet too!
My Update:
– Wrote this Tweet about how I am bullish on what Omni Rentals is doing and the societal transition towards a pay per use reality.
– Lots of new things coming out soon.
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Thanks for reading! Really hope you enjoyed! (If you did, would be really awesome if you could share this link with 5 friends)
– Jordan
Personal Website
By jordangonen on October 30, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.