Lunch Links - April 2nd, 2014

Major Moves

Looking for delivery for lunch?  Apparently you're not alone - Grubhub, the Chicago-based online food ordering service, prepared for its IPO this week by increasing its price range from $23 to $25 per share, signaling it may have received a higher-than-expected demand from investors.  This change shifts their initial valuation close to $2 Billion.

Atlanta-based startup BitPay is raising between $20M and $30M in new venture funding to help more businesses process Bitcoin transactions.  Despite recent volatility, it seems many VCs aren't shying away from Bitcoin's potential as a widespread currency.  In fact, China's largest Bitcoin exchange, OKCoin, just landed $10M worth of backing from investors in Hong Kong and Beijing.

Personal Blogs

Entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster talks about "The Innovator's Dilemma" and why legal push-back on companies like Uber, Tesla, and TrueCar may be a sign of having the right startup model.

I’m sure you’ve all read about similar stories like Uber and Lyft being banned by cities for providing a transportation service consumers finally love or Airbnb for low-cost, more homey alternatives to hotels. Or when Viacom sued YouTube, the music industry sued Napster or even when Hulu was created (I think I was the first to publicly call out that Hulu was really formed like OPEC.)

Turkey or China? Twitter. Even governments don’t like losing their monopoly – control of the media.

If the industry you seek to disrupt isn’t fighting you back yet it’s just because you haven’t yet made a dent in their consciousness or pockets. No 800-pound-gorilla gives up control easily without a fight.

In an old post, Leo Widrich, the co-founder of social media scheduling app Buffer, pens a short piece in defense of reinventing yourself.

And then, after our attempt to change comes the sentence. It is being told to us by someone we know so well, maybe our friends, maybe our family. And it hits us like a knife being stabbed into our stomachs:

“But that’s not the <name> I know. You are a different person now!”

What follows in many cases is ridiculing, laughing, disbelief of your new actions. Your surroundings, your friends, your family, who have come to know you as this or that kind of person won’t accept the new “you” that you are exploring. Change is always hard; for everyone.

And so, slowly the shy guy becomes more shy again. The pessimistic girl gets back to smiling less and complaining more about the hard life. The feelings are getting suppressed again.

We cannot change without the environment around us approving of us. As hard as this truth may sound, it is something that I have found more persistent than anything else.

So what we have to do, if we really want to reinvent ourselves is to change our environment. It is to find a place, where we can change and become a different person.

Dan Martell, Canadian serial entrepreneur and 500Startup mentor, comments on Sean Ellis' method of testing growth hack experiments.

I think if you are hoping to generate ideas by brainstorming with people that know very little about your customers, product, market, etc, that you’re likely to be pretty disappointed with the result.

My recommendation is…

1) Study the growth engines of successful emerging companies

2) Learn about emerging platforms and best practices

3) Talk to 100s of your customers in a relatively short period of time

And finally, Marco Arment, coffee-enthusiast and initial lead developer at tumblr, pens a lighthearted defense of Keurig coffee machines.

We’re the ones who obsess over every little detail of brewing technique as if they matter much more than they really do, making good coffee ever more alienating and confusing to casual coffee drinkers who don’t have time to study and fuss over it as much as we do.

Can you blame people for enjoying a simple, automatic, one-button system, considering the alternatives that we keep making ever more complicated, fussy, and demanding of their time and technique?

The alternative that we present sends a clear message: “We are cool, this is fancy, and your coffee is crap.”

The latter is true, but at what cost?

Photo by Mathieu Thouvenin