Snigdha Shahi's Profile

This is a fascinating post – I would have never guessed Oracle’s products would have applications in bee-keeping. Amazing company identification Heili! I was curious to think about the market size of this opportunity – would help frame if we might expect more companies to start doing this. Or, given low costs of doing this at scale and the social impact – could this potentially be open source and made available to a lot more farmers through agencies on the ground….

What a cool company – I had no idea about this! I am wondering though, what does the customer base here look like – who is willing to pay for the predictive work being done in trends? Is it small label fashion brands? Also, I’m thinking it might be cool to have some extension of this service in a way that another startup is doing – where you can upload pictures of clothes that you have and an algorithm can mix and match outfits for you. This could be cool for people who want to figure out how to keep up with what’s “trending” based on whatever outfits they have!

Nice post Alex! Loved this especially cause I delved into Etsy for a past blog post and it’s fascinating to see how important a custom search algorithm is for them. When I think of craft/customized arts projects, Etsy has been very helpful for me even when I search random keywords that include “emotions” like whimsical, dreamy, etc. – which is where I think the true power of the SEO lies.

Really enjoyed this post and kind of agree with the founder – it’s brilliant that their consumers are helping them build the database (which is similar to the company I wrote about as well)! It seems like there’s a lot of scope for both value creation and capture since there could be a lot of revenue streams from this (regulation permitting). I’m curious though if they’ve thought about the misuse of this information – especially in the vein of misuse of information to marginalize certain racial communities or individuals based on test results/patterns. Although it does seem like it could be used for a lot of good and myth-busting as well.

This was so interesting – I had no idea this is how much Starbucks had and how little regulation is around it. Makes me wonder how much money MBTA holds through Charlie cards and if that might also be enough to constitute a “bank” – or honestly just any of the other kinds of cards we hold. Given that a lot of coffee chains are experimenting with the same + more (coffee subscriptions like Panera) — I’m wondering how Starbucks would react to this kind of competiton…

I have never used BlaBla car but been absolutely fascinated by how it works and its benefits to both drivers and riders so thanks for sharing more information about this! I’m wondering if there might be natural barriers to geographic expansion for BlaBla car given safety/trust challenges in different cultures despite the existence of Lyft/Uber. I’m thinking specifically of my country, India – where I would be hard pressed to think of someone comfortable with such a model. Not to mention, I think a big regulatory risk is thinking of the physical safety – especially of female passengers – and who the legal liabilities and risks reside with.

What a cool post – Ethereum would have never come to mind as a platform which is why this was a great post to read. One of the use cases I’ve been fascinated with is donations to nonprofits across borders through crypto and ETH. UNICEF Office of Innovation is in fact doing some amazing work on funding organizations through the ETH they received as a donation from the Ethereum Foundation. Your post did lead me to wonder about what work would have to be done to increase the absorption capacity/receptiveness of the users to realize the true network effects and scale of ETH.

Hi Heili, super awesome post! Much in line with what others said – curious as to how you see the rise of competitors like Blind. I’m personally much more attuned to Blind than Glassdoor (mostly cause it feels like Blind is more frictionless to follow due to their active social media engagement) rather than Glassdoor with its paywalls. I’m also curious about impacts of government legislation (like New York City mandating the disclosure of salary with job postings recently) on a key value proposition of Glassdoor… I feel there’s definitely some value that GD could add there!

Great read! Was introduced to Discord back when WhatsApp had the whole privacy policy change but somehow never found it super intuitive to use. I’m curious as to how you see Discord continuing to grow post-pandemic as we see people craving offline connections after 2.5 long years + the growth of competitors like Slack (which is allowing communication across workspaces)!

As someone with no knowledge of grocery stores in Texas, this was pretty cool to read about! Any thoughts on what enabled them to see through a successful digital transformation? I see the value of the tech tools employed but also curious to dive deeper into policies/people/processes, etc.

As an aspirationally frequent user of Duolingo, really enjoyed this! I like the online to “offline” or real world transition of Duolingo re. English tests. Curious as to what other avenues you see of Duolingo translating this success in the offline world as the pandemic declines?