Greylock Perspectives

AirBnb took the opposite approach of Expedia, Booking, VRBO, etc. Instead of focusing on SEO and paid search like the incumbents, AirBnb focused on brand. Great breakdown by Casey Winters on the strategies - https://news.greylock.com/four-strategies-to-win-big-with-low-frequenc… - showing that there are different strategies, and not one absolute best.

Convoy | Software Engineer | Seattle | Full-time, onsite, https://convoy.com We're optimizing the trucking and logistics industry; automating what is, today, a $800B industry that still runs on fax machines and phone calls. Currently backed by top tier investors. Read about us: https://news.greylock.com/our-investment-in-convoy-changing-the-logist… I'm employee #2, and I've been here since we were borrowing desks at a local startup incubator. We've grown a lot since then, but we still have a tight-knit, incredibly high-leverage group of engineers. Even after two years, I still love going to the office each morning. I get to work with the smartest folks I've ever met, on software that is going to modernize an industry that's fundamental to the modern world. No team I've ever been on, including at Amazon, has felt like I could have this kind of impact. We would love more engineers, up and down the stack, and anywhere on the generalist <-> specialist spectrum. We use pretty cutting-edge tech (React, React-Native for mobile, TypeScript + Node for backend), but we're a lot more interested in engineering chops than any particular tech skills. If you're in Seattle, in tech, and interested in the business, reach out and grab coffee with me or one of our other developers. Help us grow an amazing tech team from a very early point in our company's history! Some, but not necessarily all, of our open jobs:…

Yeah I’m kinda on the fence about this. On one hand, I see the case that this diminishes the open market. On the other hand, Amazon is doing this all within their own ecosystem. So it’s a bit disingenuous for the FTC to say that this has nothing to do with their size. The problem the FTC keeps skirting around on anticompetitive is the fact that the internet favors power differentials, so we’d have to ding any company that has massive market distribution and tweaks their platform to favor participants exclusively on their network Network effects have not been accounted for in antitrust. That’s the core of the problem. Not the fact that Amazon is tweaking algos. Every major player is doing that. I like Jerry Chen’s piece on “The New Moats” (ahead of its time published in 2017) that calls out the progression of tech going from systems of engagement -> systems of record -> systems of intelligence. It feels like this is one (of many) consequences of that progression: https://news.greylock.com/the-new-moats-53f61aeac2d9