Welcome back to the 9th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Here’s what we have for you this week:
Critical Race Theory (1x 🎧, 4x 📙)
📙 🎧 Critical Race Theory
As we like to do with hot-button issues, below we’re sharing a few things we’ve read and listened to on Critical Race Theory that tries to span the spectrum of the discussion. This is another sticky subject the vocal left and right have sunk their teeth into; as with many of these issues, the right solution probably lies somewhere in the middle. To say the least, it’s shameful that most people (including us) learned about the Tulsa Massacre and Juneteenth only last year, let alone through Instagram. These omissions from our classrooms should be fixed given the importance of these events in our country’s bruised history. On the other hand, CRT isn’t as simple as that and the implementation of a “theory” has the potential for unintended consequences when taken too far. We hope you’ll find the below helpful if you’re looking to learn more and welcome any recommendations from different perspectives as we’re learning more ourselves.
🎧 The Daily — The Debate Over Critical Race Theory (Spotify and Apple Podcast)
📙 NYT Opinion — We Disagree on a Lot of Things. Except the Danger of Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws
📙 Paul Rossi — I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
📙 Adam Harris — The GOP’s ‘Critical Race Theory’ Obsession
📙 🎧 Bari Weiss — Should Public Schools Ban Critical Race Theory?
🎧 Andrew Wilkinson’s Lessons from Building Tiny
Village Global’s Venture Stories —April 26 | 53 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
If you listen to a bunch of podcasts in the VC space, this is a cool look at private investing from a very different direction. It’s an interview with Andrew Wilkinson, founder of Tiny, a Canadian holding company that incubates, buys and operates small, profitable internet businesses. Wilkinson started his career running a design agency called MetaLab, investing the profits in building and buying other companies and ultimately rolling them up under the Tiny umbrella.
Wilkinson spends most of the interview detailing Tiny’s unique strategy to company acquisition. It’s counter to traditional VC tech investing in that they look specifically for established, “sleepy”, profitable internet businesses with 7- or low 8-figure annual recurring revenues, and also pretty different from other “rollups” in that they tend to leave the underlying companies largely independent to preserve culture & continuity.
An interesting recent development from Wilkinson and his Tiny co-founder, Chris Sparling - they’ve actually raised outside capital from a set of investors including Bill Ackman to launch a public holding company, WeCommerce, that buys businesses within the Shopify ecosystem. Specifically, companies that enable Shopify’s ecommerce shops by providing themes, designs, apps, social media shoppability, and other services. Given the rise of Shopify itself over the last couple of years and its continued moves to enable businesses to sell across both their own domains and social platforms, I’m bullish on this strategy moving forward.
Extra: This is a great Twitter thread from Wilkinson back in March detailing a painful lesson he learned trying to compete against Asana in the productivity space. As with Tiny, it’s unconventional (in the Twitter biographical thread world) - no self promotion, honest, and some genuinely meaningful insights.
—Mike
📺 This Week in Startups - David Sacks, CEO of Yammer
This Week in Startups—June 2010 | 63 min
In honor of Jason and Sacks making up in episode 38 of the All-In podcast, thought it’d be fun to re-surface this episode of Jason’s podcast, This Week in Startups, from 2010 where he sits down with Sacks before they were “besties”.
Beyond the nostalgia, Sacks shares a bunch of interesting stories including his early days at Paypal with Peter Thiel, his experience producing Thank You For Smoking post Paypal acquisition, and his current venture at the time, Yammer (think Facebook/Twitter for the enterprise, which Microsoft bought for $1.2B in 2012). One thing I didn’t know was Yammer was born out of a messaging feature of another company Sacks was working on at the time called Geni, a site mapping the world’s genealogy into one giant family tree. It reminded me of the founding story of Slack, which was born out of the messaging feature in the video game they were making, Tiny Speck.
Jump to minute 24 to get right to the discussion. And for the record, Jason interrupting David is not a new revelation.
—Thomas
🐦 Tweet from Chris Hladczuk (“The Frameworks Guy”
Chris’s tweet introduced me to this amazing Reddit community called Explain it like I’m 5 where the community aims to answer people’s questions in the simplest form possible. There’s something satisfying about complex topics being explained in a way that it just clicks. Here are a few I found helpful:
Extra: Here’s another Twitter thread with some different examples in case you want to go down a rabbit hole.
—Thomas
As always, drop us a note if you have any feedback. And if you enjoyed this, feel free to forward it to any friends.
See you next Sunday.