Welcome back to the 7th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Here’s what we have for you this week:
📙 Antitrust Posturing
Benedict Evans—June 15th | 7 min
Congress recently proposed a set of new bills aimed at reigning in the power of big tech platforms. Benedict Evans, a prominent tech investor & writer, recognizes the need for regulation in the space, but has regularly used his platform to point out the nuance & complexity in finding real solutions to controlling entirely new business models (and the low probability of government regulation nailing the solution). One example from this essay covers the “Ending Platform Monopolies” law, an effort to prevent tech platforms from competing with those doing business on their platforms:
The 'Ending Platform Monopolies' law is impossibly broad. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft would be banned from doing anything on their platforms that anyone else might do, and from anything that might be a conflict of interest. They would not just be banned from favouring their own products - they'd be banned from having any products at all that they could theoretically favour…
There's a very basic misunderstanding at play here - you can't ban a platform from having 'any' feature, service or product that someone else might want to make, because that describes literally every single thing that a platform does…
But, you'll need to spend a lot more time thinking about how this stuff works and what the word 'platform' really means, because this law wouldn't just ban Apple Music and Google Maps - it would ban iOS and Android.
—Mike
🎧 Pinduoduo: Rise of Social Commerce [Ep. 12]
Business Breakdowns—June 9 | 56 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Lately I’ve been really interested in China’s tech scene—as a country, they skipped the desktop revolution and went straight to mobile, which shaped the type of businesses that were built and the things consumers expect. Their tech industry also promotes a culture of 996 (working from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), which means they’re moving faster than anyone else. There are a lot of interesting case studies to learn from and this episode dives deep into one of China’s emerging tech giants, Pinduoduo.
Founded in 2015, Pinduoduo is now one of China’s largest e-commerce sites by active users. Their ambitions lie in covering all product categories (like Amazon) but their core competency, and how they got started, is actually in agricultural products—connecting consumers with farmers directly.
There were a few things I found particularly interesting about their business:
The first is this concept of “social shopping”. Say I’m shopping for some mangos… I’ll see one price if I’m buying it for myself, but I’ll also see a “team price”. If I’m able to get enough friends to join in on the order, we’ll get a group discount. This is a really interesting way to leverage users for customer acquisition and enable greater visibility for manufacturers from a supply chain perspective.
The second is how they include games as part of the shopping experience. They have a game called Duoduo Orchard, where users are rewarded virtual “water droplets” for browsing product listings and making purchases with certain stores. The end goal of “watering the tree” enough times is for it to bear fruit; once it bears fruit, the user actually gets a box of real fruit that’s in-season and sourced directly from farmers living under the poverty line. It’s a really clever tie in with their product and mission of supporting farmers.
It’ll be interesting to see how Pinduoduo fares with the government taking a more proactive stance in reigning in the power of their tech giants.
Extra: Lillian Li is an expert on Chinese tech companies and writes her own substack newsletter called Chinese Characteristics. She recently put out a short walkthrough of the Pinduoduo app and what she thinks they’re planning.
—Thomas
📺 Jon Stewart on Vaccine Science and The Wuhan Lab Theory
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—June 15th | 8 min
This segment between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is as funny as it is awkward. Stewart surprises Colbert with a bull-in-the-china-shop monologue on his belief in the “lab leak” COVID origin theory, and even the audience seems to feel conflicted at first about how to react. Colbert is pretty clearly nervous about the implications of this sort of rant on his show, and tries to steer the ship away (unsuccessfully).
Regardless of your opinion on the plausibility of the theory, the fact that a clip like this very well might’ve been censored off the major social media sites as recently as a few months ago is another reminder of the complexity of permitted speech issues. Until new guidance from the Biden administration to intelligence services to investigate the lab leak possibility, it was largely treated as a surefire conspiracy theory to be blocked by the platforms as misinformation. I don’t envy the position Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the other large platforms find themselves in, but the flip-flopping over the last year on issues related to public health information (e.g., regarding mask efficacy) does suggest a need for new solutions.
—Mike
🧵 Emmett Shear’s Tweet
Emmett Shear is the co-founder and current CEO of Twitch and recently dropped a tweet storm on the lessons he’s learned while building the streaming giant. I know these threads are a dime a dozen but there’s some real gems in here. Below are a few:
—Thomas
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See you next Sunday.