Thursday, January 08, 2015

Interesting business writing - on Salesforce, Amazon, Jet, Twitter & Datanyze

Some of the most interesting business writing I've seen lately included three really well-written feature stories, two insightful opinion pieces and a cool short piece about asking.

The first of the features to note here was for Businessweek with "Marc Benioff's Philanthropic Mission: San Francisco" by Brad Stone on efforts by the Salesforce CEO and it was a solid look at efforts by Benioff to give back.

The other two features definitely are related with Austin Carr for Fast Company writing "The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezo's Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means for Amazon's Future," a story perhaps somewhat disquieting for Amazon shareholders, and then Brad Stone in the latest Businessweek writing "Amazon Bought This Man's Company. Now He's Coming for Them." Stone's piece is on the forthcoming eCommerce site Jet.com which will follow a Costco-like model of steep discounts (that can escalate depending on shopper choices made) and membership dues. It's definitely an intriguing idea that's being launched by Marc Lore, formerly of Quidsi, a company that Amazon acquired to get its Diapers.com site.

The opinion pieces I found particularly interesting recently were about Twitter, which I love using and marvel at what it can do. "There’s Something About Twitter" was by venture capitalist Fred Wilson for his AVC blog and Ev Williams (one of the founders of Twitter and I guy I find to be brilliant) wrote to Medium "A mile wide, an inch deep" about user metrics for the site and the point of the whole thing.

The final piece to note here was by Eugene Kim for Business Insider with "How Cold Emails Led This 29-Year-Old To Get Funded By Mark Cuban And Google." About Ilya Semin, CEO of the startup Datanyze, and his asking for product and business concept feedback from experts, it was a really interesting piece in which Kim attributed sage advice to the company founder with "Semin says people are generally always willing to help, especially when you're not asking for money. He always asked for feedback first, and that's what propelled his business to early success."