Balancing being nimble with moving forward in your career

(Photo credit @veklabs)

Whether you are kicking off a job search or working at your dream tech job, a skill that you should continue to develop is how to balance being nimble with moving forward. Especially in tech, it’s really hard to maintain a strategic, forward-looking focus, while also reacting and pivoting from the challenges of the day. As a job seeker, you need to be flexible to network when a contact is available, yet also get in your daily job applications & interview prep. Same thing holds for when you are ‘balancing many spinning plates’ at your job.

Want to learn more?

• The Best Strategic Leaders Balance Agility and Consistency: John (the author) is a former student of mine and wrote a great article on this (complete with 2x2 matrices!)

• Leadership and the art of plate spinning - I love the analogy of ‘envelope leadership’ for setting wide boundaries but allowing wide creativity inside the boundaries.

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Have you tried the Experience economy?

(Photo credit @acreativegangster )

#TECHTOPIC

Since my brief stint as Dir of Marketing/Membership for early networking startup TheSquare.com, I have always been interested in the symbiotic relationship between online platforms and offline experiences. It could be for connecting friends, networking for jobs, educating others, or finding new curling buddies. The two articles I highlighted below both discuss the evolution of experiences. While ‘content was king,’ the future is about engagement. (We’ve seen Facebook shift from just providing a place for you to share content with others to supporting vast growth in groups & online communities).

And the experience economy can range from wellness experiences to education to pure fun. Part of WeWork’s attraction was the physical place it customized to bring together fun & work for entrepreneurs who were spending so much time alone with their laptops. And while that company went off the rails for many reasons, places like Luminary and Chief seem to be succeeding by focusing on specific populations (namely women). It will be interesting to see if/how the rise in the COVID-19 virus & resulting quarantines will affect this rapidly growing niche that is navigating online/offline human interactions.

Want to learn more?

• Investing in the Experience Economy - my former student Mercedes Bent (now VC Partner at Lightspeed) just wrote a great article on the experience economy

• Content Used to Be King. Here’s What’s Next - writer & founder of online events platform discusses the idea ‘content was king, now it’s engagement.’

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#WATCHING

“The Man” by Taylor Swift was a surprisingly awesome video. See if you can name all the cultural references seen in the video.
(Cheat sheet can be found here: What Taylor Swift wants you to see in ‘The Man,’ her gender-bending takedown of the patriarchy.)

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Want a Career in Tech but aren’t sure where to start? Take a look at MY COURSE, ‘TECH SEARCH COMPASS’ FOR STEP-BY-STEP SUPPORT

Do direct-to-consumer brands live up to the hype?

(Photo credit to Curology)

Happy Thursday! How is it already the end of Feb 2020??

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#TECHTOPIC

Since Warby Parker launched a decade ago, there has been ever-increasing buzz around ‘direct to consumer’ or DTC brands. In late 2015, venture capitalists (VCs) like Charles River Ventures were pushing an increase in consumer product investment, echoed by a CBInsights report in early 2016. Looking back from today’s vantage point, all of the top DTC brands CB highlighted in that report have been acquired (Bonobos by Walmart, Dollar Shave Club by Unilever, etc) while all of the pure software plays are still standalone businesses.Hmm... Even in 2018 & 2019, DTCs were still being billed as pure success stories.

And now, in the shadow of the WeWork freefall, we see chaos in the DTC ranks. Brandless went out of business a couple weeks ago because apparently, brands do matter. Casper had to downgrade its IPO price and the stock fell sharply in the following week of trading -- because the public markets realized that selling mattresses is not a tech business. And now the FTC has blocked Edgewell’s proposed acquisition of Harry’s (acquisitions being the main success vehicle for DTCs) because it would eliminate their biggest independent competitor.

And why do you think the economics were off with DTC brands? Check out the ‘actual DTC value chain’ image in this article and you’ll see that all the expected profits from “going direct” were gobbled up by Facebook & Google...so tech (software) wins again. Maybe brick-and-mortar is coming back?

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#LISTENING

Hands-down favorite podcast right now is Pivot with Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway. They are absolutely crazy, but I love their discussions of tech, valuations, politics, more tech, business models, etc. My other automatic download is Levar Burton Reads, aka “The Best Short Fiction, Handpicked by the World’s Greatest Storyteller.” And I recently discovered PocketCasts and it’s changed my life. The highly customizable filters are ah-mazing for super-curation of my podcast queues. (I can’t believe I just kept hoping Apple would fix their terrible Podcast app.)

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Want a Career in Tech but aren’t sure where to start? Take a look at MY COURSE, ‘TECH SEARCH COMPASS’ FOR STEP-BY-STEP SUPPORT