Agatha Christie's Profile

Great article. I remember being very impressed that a start-up that relied on crowd-sourcing could be a better platform than Google Maps. Then was only more impressed when Google ultimately bought Waze – which for a company like Google is effectively admitting that they, with all their engineering resources, were incapable of building something better. Apple acquiring Shazam is a similar story in my opinion.

Interesting piece. Wonder what Lay’s R&D department thinks about consumers now doing their job for them! Also, given our discussion on Boston Beer today I wonder what the supply chain ramifications will be on having many more, niche SKUs. I would imagine that Lay’s distribution model is much more straightforward than Boston Beer’s, but still think that there may be some additional overhead burden involved with this product strategy.

Good piece. Agree with the relevance of physician burnout (unfortunately compounded by physician shortage). You briefly mention the ramification of medical errors on Microsoft but I think another point here is once health insurers get involved (and they will at any opportunity to improve/better standardize treatment) will they mandate physicians to act on the software’s recommendations? If so, then at what point does loss of decision making autonomy only serve to worsen the same burnout that this software was trying to solve in the first place?

Super relevant read, especially given US population demographics. Seems like this product would be highly relevant to insurers, who are increasingly focused on tracking and/or behavioral health solutions for their elderly members. Humana in particular comes to mind – they have a Medicare-heavy membership base and recently spent ~$4bn to acquire Kindred’s hospice operations.

Interesting read. There’s a public company called Conformis that offers custom/3D-printed surgical implants, so bet there’s some interesting market-related information in their 10-K. One additional point is that surgeons are creatures of habit: they are notorious for favoring/using the same devices from the same manufacturers over and over again. While 3D-printed implants may be superior I wonder how their adoption will play out from a cultural perspective.

Great piece – very well laid out. Makes me wonder whether open source facial recognition software exists or if companies that want to build this into their product development offerings (like Olay) need to build these technologies from scratch.