Shout-out to my brilliant role model friend Yiren Lu on her business ventures: BookTime and Unit of Work.
BookTime gives intimate access to your favorite experts and creators.
Unit of Work reimagines the future of work as a passion economy that connects freelancers with flexible and distributed opportunities.
Yiren is one of the most admirable badasses I’ve ever known! She has killed it at everything she has ever done and constantly inspires me to keep chasing dreams.
See also her beautiful writing:
The Race to Fix Virtual Meetings
“Much of the inspiration animating this bloom of spatial meeting platforms comes from video games. Yang Mou, the chief executive of Kumospace, was a competitive StarCraft player in college and, once lockdowns started happening, wondered why it was that he could spend hours and hours playing online with his friends and not want to stop, while Zoom meetings engendered only fatigue. In creating Kumospace, he was particularly influenced by massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft. “One of the jokes is that it’s a glorified chat room,” he says. “You play the game, you run out of stuff to do and then you’re really just hanging out with friends.” He adds, “It’s like going to the mall... One of Kumospace’s insights is that video games give participants a goal around which to center their social energy.”
Can Shopify Compete With Amazon Without Becoming Amazon?
“’The whole spirit of the D.T.C. space is owning the relationship with the customer, having that direct line, and Shopify gives you that control much better than Amazon does,’ says Paul Munford...
In a landscape where customer attention is the scarcest resource, Shopify’s very identity as a neutral platform and invisible infrastructure is perhaps both its greatest asset and its greatest limitation.
The story of the last two decades in e-commerce has been, to a large extent, the story of Amazon’s rise, from humble reseller of books to default shopping destination and computing engine of the internet. Books have been written to explain its success, but the simplest answer lies in plain sight, in Amazon’s mission to be a place where customers can find anything they might want to buy online at the lowest possible prices. What will make customers happy? What will make them want to come back and buy again? The company has sought to address these questions again and again...
The story of Shopify’s rise, then, is in many ways a reaction to Amazon’s. It’s about a new generation of e-commerce merchants who want a shot at securing control by going out on their own. If the key to Amazon’s success has been to put the customer first, for Shopify the key has been to put the merchant first...
Now that companies like Shopify have turned software into a commodity, what distinguishes you isn’t whether you can write code, but whether you have something to say and an audience to say it to...
For these sorts of e-commerce brands, what’s being sold isn’t just some product with utility. It’s a feeling, a community, an identity...
‘Amazon is trying to build an empire, and Shopify is trying to arm the rebels.’”
