Jimmy Guterman — We lost the author of this newsletter (and NewCo’s Executive Editor) last week, a terrible blow to family, friends, colleagues, and NewCo. Read more about him here.
Uber Rides Shotgun With Didi in China — Maybe partnership is the new black. After spending billions trying to win at all costs, Uber has decided to work with its Chinese rival (Bloomberg). The company will combine its Chinese business with Didi Chuxing (China’s version of Uber), and by default the Chinese government, which just so happened to legalize ride sharing the week before. Didi will also invest $1 billion into Uber globally. Oh, to be a fly on that particular Chinese wall….
John Battelle, NewCo CEO, interviews Aaron Levie, Box CEO, for the NewCo Shift Dialogs video series.
I’m on vacation this week, so please enjoy an updated version of a piece I wrote early this year. It still resonates, and was published before we formally launched NewCo Shift. In fact, this piece is the essential framing behind both the Shift Dialogs (a new video series coming with partner Nasdaq later this summer) and Shift Forum (a new executive conference coming early next year).
Thanks to NewCo, I’ve gotten out of the Bay Area bubble and visited more than a dozen major cities across several continents in the past year. I’ve met with founders inside hundreds of mission-driven companies, in cities as diverse as Istanbul, Boulder, LA, and Mexico City. (Austin and Cincinnati are coming up later this month!) I’ve learned about the change these companies are making in the world, and I’ve compared notes with the leaders of large, established companies, many of which are the targets of that change.
Usually in this space we focus on Big Picture issues. This week, we’re looking at something much more practical: email subject lines. We all know intuitively that there are things we can do with those subject lines to make it more likely that people will open our emails. But we do that more from the gut than from evidence. What if someone looked at 115 million emails and figured out what worked?
That’s what email automation firm Yesware did. Email Subject Lines That Actually Work, its recent ebook, shares what works (shorter subject lines) and what doesn’t (subject lines framed as questions). Some of the more surprising findings: emails that look like forwards (with “FWD:” or “RE:” in the title) get opened more, although less so on mobile devices, and putting numbers in your subject line gives you a slight advantage.
Some of the lessons are what you’d expect. Lay off the exclamation points! Don’t pretend to know someone when you don’t. Never use the term “appropriate person.” And no, people don’t want to join your webinar. Yes, Yesware published this because it wants to sell you software, and you have to give up your email address for the PDF. But the tips here will be useful to you even if you don’t ever want to try the company’s product.
For their second act, the founders of “Total NewCos” are reaching for far more than a payday.
You had a good idea, and you started a company around it. You hired a strong team, nearly killed yourself for years, and despite numerous failures along the way, you made it work. And now you find yourself at the receiving end of our nation’s most fabled business narrative: Your company has been acquired for a princely sum, and you’re wealthy enough to retire.
The team behind Viv hopes to change how we interact with just about everything — and build a new economic model for the Internet along the way.
About halfway through a 90-minute exploration of Viv, the recently debuted and much heralded next-generation smart assistant platform, I started to experience a bit of deja vu. Here were two highly intelligent and credentialed founders, animated by a sense of purpose and a shared conviction that there Had To Be A Better Way, extolling the virtues of a new platform that, if only it were to be adopted at critical mass, would Change The World For the Better. It reminded me of my early days covering Apple in the 1980s, or Google in the early aughts. And I found myself believing that, in fact, the world would be a better place if Viv’s vision prevailed.
But that’s a very big “if.” What Viv is trying to create is a platform shift on the scale of Google search or Apple’s app store — a new way to interact with the Internet itself. Yes, the interface is an intelligent agent that you talk to — much like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa. But for Viv to truly flourish, the Internet would need to reorganize around a new economic model, one that looks dramatically different than the current hegemony based on the big five of Search (Google), Commerce (Amazon), Social (Facebook), Enterprise (Microsoft), and Mobile (Apple/Google).
Hello, NewCo Shift readers. Thanks so much for reading. I’d like to share with you some of my favorites on our site right now:
Scott Rosenberg has a terrific piece on The Idea That’s Killing Mission-Driven Companies. If profit isn’t your only goal, congratulations. You’re now at odds with neoliberalism, the economic consensus of the last three decades (Lady Thatcher, above, was a severe proponent). Rosenberg dives deep into this much-cited but little-understood economic philosophy and shows what NewCos can do about it.
Many of the World’s Top Companies Can’t Explain Their Purpose. Why Knowing Yours Will Be a Competitive Advantage
In the Valley, there’s not much love for BigCos — those slow-moving dinosaurs stuck in the Innovator’s Dilemma tarpit. Valley culture celebrates purpose-driven entrepreneurship and world-changing ideas. As I wrote a few weeks ago:
More than half of millennials believe they will start their own business, and the majority of them believe that businesses must be driven by more than profit — seventy-seven percent of Millennials chose their place of work based on their employers’ purpose. Given a choice, this generation does not want to work at the corporations created by their forebears. This, of course, is an existential threat to the world’s great corporations.
