CY's Profile

Interesting post! It’s going to be very exciting to see who wins in this market, it might be about the right partnership between Old Industrials and New Tech and making the right bets on the technology that they’ll use going forward.

Interesting post! It looks like they’re adopting what Burberry did for their digital strategy in retail stores, but taking it one step further. With new technologies emerging such as facial recognition, the process of scanning for user ID, customer history and payments could be much quicker. I think smarter screens in stores are paving the way for the future.

I hear your point. It’s true that headhunters have been able to leverage digital networks such as LinkedIn and others, and it’s going to be increasingly difficult to add value because their job scope is shrinking. I think it spells opportunity for the talented headhunters, but many of the basic services offered by headhunters will become increasingly obsolete.

It’s interesting that you wrote about Easy Taxi. They expanded to Southeast Asia as well but has now exited the market due to insufficient localization and intense competition from Grab Taxi. Now that Grab Taxi is the main player in the market, Uber is also aggressively growing its presence in this region. Customer loyalty is weak and it truly is about who has the deeper pockets in this competition, which places Uber in a great position.

Lending Club is definitely a threat to the big traditional banks, and I believe a lot of them are looking to build their own capabilities with this model. Regulation remains key in this industry, and political lobbying from the incumbents could deter the growth that Lending Club has been able to sustain.

Agree with many of your points Noam. With food delivery businesses, the concentration of orders in locations is key in keeping costs down and it’s ultimately a cost play when you’re dealing with logistics. I think DoorDash could do well to target their locations (or sub districts within cities) instead of focusing on expanding their reach so that they get the critical mass required within a location to make the economics work. It comes with a trade off as you’re giving up potential users in other locations but building a strong network of orders on the ground is key.

Thanks Cal for the comment. I believe that today the users of Quora are very diverse and a lot of the answers that I read come from a wide spectrum of views. It’s refreshing to read the point of view of an industry veteran and also that of a high school student. It might be true that this segment of people answering are probably more confident with sharing their thoughts online, but at least we get to tap into their knowledge collectively.

It’s true that it’s difficult to get the network effect of the platform started. One key advantage that Adam and his team had was that they were Silicon Valley insiders who worked in Facebook before, and could tap into their strong network there to get this going. It definitely isn’t easy but I believe their experience in the early days of Facebook helped a ton.

Interesting post! I wonder if companies like Hudson’s Bay could leverage the data to bring the analytics in-house, to prevent its data and trends to be used by other competitors that are using these data analytics companies as well. It must be a challenge given how scarce analytics resources are and how difficult it can be to build this competency.

Very interesting. Zara’s vertical integration and speed of response is difficult for other competitors to replicate. Furthermore, the company understands that consumer behaviours are too fickle and leave the decision making to consumers. It’s interesting to watch a fashion company that executes so well on its operations and demand forecasting.

I love Glassdoor! One concern I have is its ability to scale internationally. Adoption in non-Western markets are comparatively low, and I think it’s due to the consumer behaviours that do not share as much information about jobs and interviews online. Perhaps a more localized solution for Glassdoor in these emerging markets can help it take advantage of the platform that they have built.

Great post! Our programming course CS50 has also used a version of Stack Overflow for homework discussions, and it has been tremendously helpful! Sometimes it can get hard to discover the right questions because there are so many variations of the same question, but the ratings that Stack Overflow implemented deals with the quality control problem.

This is very interesting. We faced a big fraud problem in the Indonesian startup that I worked with this summer. Fraudulent behaviours can be individual-specific and scaling across different companies from this insight can bring huge value to both customers and Foster.

I agree with your point that WeChat is having difficulties expanding abroad. With a huge customer base in their home market, they are perhaps channeling more resources into the domestic market by offering various types of services on their platform that will touch many parts of the consumers’ lives. An interesting analysis would be to compare them to LINE, which is Japanese-based and has successfully expanded to international markets such as Indonesia and Brazil. These demographics are very attractive and represent a huge opportunity going forward. One way LINE has been able to do this is by localization of the product and truly connecting with local consumers in these international markets.