Welcome back to the 10th edition of the Roundtable Weekly 👋
Here’s what we have for you this week:
📙 The contrarevolución will be livestreamed
The Pull Request, Antonio Garcia Martinez - July 14 | 10 min
This is one of two great articles on the situation in Cuba this week (here’s the other) by Antonio Garcia Martinez. Martinez is a Cuban-American tech executive most recently in the news for being hired and quickly fired by Apple after employee pressure related to some of the language in his 2016 Silicon Valley memoir, Chaos Monkeys.
Here he focuses on the unique internet environment in Cuba, specifically the already-limited public access now being further curtailed by total government control in response to anti-government protests. Given the way in which effective social media virality is critical to how modern protest movements both sustain internal momentum and attract external support, the improvised methods Cubans are now using to get information to the outside are critically important.
This is what they’re up against, from the Cuban Constitution:
Citizens have freedom of speech and of the press in keeping with the objectives of socialist society. Material conditions for the exercise of that right are provided by the fact that the press, radio, television, movies and other organs of the mass media are State or social property and can never be private property. This assures their use at the exclusive service of the working people and in the interest of society.
The law regulates the exercise of these freedoms.
-Cuban Constitution, Article 53
—Mike
🎧 MFM Mini - Shaan's 15 Minutes with the CEO of Alibaba
My First Million—July 4 | 8 min
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
This is a quick listen packed with a bunch of insight. As the title reveals, Shaan had 15 minutes with David Wang, the CEO of Alibaba at the time, and he asked (what he admits wasn’t his best question) “What’s the key to success in business?” Despite the question, he winds up getting a very insightful answer. Wang responds by saying “modeling success is misleading… Instead, what you should ask me is what are the keys to failure? Those are always the same”.
From Wang’s perspective, there are 3 things that will kill any company if there’s excess:
Money
Plans
Technology
Alibaba had an internal motto of “no money, no plans, no technology”. This seems counterintuitive but his rationale makes a lot of sense:
No Money: Too much money results in throwing money at problems, instead of trying to find creative solutions. Sometimes it is the right answer, but it becomes a crutch. Constraints lead to creativity.
No Plans: The plan always changes, but the mission never wavers. Adapt and don’t get married to the initial plan—follow your mission, vision, and the reason you got started in the first place.
No Technology: Wang didn’t think of Alibaba as a technology company—he thought of them as a service company solving customer problems, not to build new technology. Focus on solving the customer’s problem, not building something cool.
—Thomas
📺 Vertical farms could take over the world | Hard Reset by Freethink
Freethink—May 22 | 11 min
Similar to the electrification of cars, it seems inevitable that in the future most of our vegetables will come from indoor vertical farms. Global population growth is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, meaning our food supply needs to grow by 70% - however, the amount of farmable land is constrained. It seems obvious but indoor farming enables more produce to grow in one location, allows greater visibility into and optimization of the growing cycle, and is more sustainable. Plenty, a private indoor farming company, is able to condense 700 acres of farmland into the size of a big box retail store, they harvest 365 days of the year, and have been able to increase typical crop yields by 700%. They do all this while saving ~1 million gallons of water per week, recycling and reusing 99% of the water they use, and using 1% of the land compared to traditional farming. Today, indoor grown crops are definitely sold at a premium relative to traditionally grown varieties but the prices should drop over time as their operations become more efficient. One of the crazier aspects to this: they’re able to change the flavor profile of different vegetables by changing the composition of the LED lights used to mimic sunlight.
Extra: Explained is a Netflix series produced in partnership with Vox and has a great episode on the global water crisis. Agriculture is the biggest culprit of water consumption as it makes up 70% of the world’s fresh water usage, which makes me even more bullish on indoor farming as the future of our food supply.
—Thomas
🐦 Tweet from Dan Rose
Dan is a former Director of Business of Development at Amazon and current Chairman of Coatue Management. I love stories that let you peek behind the curtains of the most successful entrepreneurs, especially Bezos. This tweet thread is the story behind a reason one of Amazon’s core values is “bias for action”. Quick but worth the read.
—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.