I'm back! Technological window; playbook for risk based contracting; YouTube Shorts for creators
+ top movies/TV/books of 2022
Hello, welcome back to this (special) edition of Double Take on product, health tech, and digital media. Scroll to the end for my top books, movies, and TV of 2022.
So, the reason for my hiatus: I had a baby! The luxury of our Canadian social system is not lost on me. Three days of hospital private stay for the delivery with 24/7 nursing care: whopping $230. Follow-up paediatrician, lactation consultant, 24/7 telehealth services: all covered by the public system. I took a year of maternity leave and felt bewildered by the average 10 weeks leave in the US. I’m excited to be back on our biweekly programming here (making that commitment a New Year’s goal).
This year’s vibe shift turned out to be “you can’t make this stuff up”: Twitter drama, crypto collapse, reproductive rights reversal, war, inflation, stock market fall, tech layoffs, and AI going mainstream with ChatGPT. As we wrap up the year, watch Google’s year in search 2022, read Stratechery’s year-in review, and listen to After Hours’ predictions for 2023 and Lenny’s podcast’s compilation of this year’s best insights.
Now onto the regular programming 👇
💻 Product
Technological Windows. Commoncog, one of my fav newsletters on career and business decision making, launched Case Library (beta) - a collection of business cases organized by concept. This one is about “Technological Window” - a core concept that drove Steve Jobs’s endeavours in consumer technology. He believed that a window opens when enough technology come together from diverse places and suddenly line up to enable a product that’s a quantum leap forward. It takes around 5 years to see that window opening and another 5 years to exploit it in the market. You can find these technological windows by seeding experiments internally, and poking around places where new technology is usually developed. The Apple II, the iPod, iPhone, are all cases that follow this idea of chasing the technological window.
Airtable’s path to product market fit. The founders were contrarian about the “Lean startup” mentality, where they dug really deep in the problem and took a slow path from prototype to launch. As they focused on the goal of “making database accessible to non-programmers”, it really meant emphasizing on an easy-to-use interaction that feels like users could “reach out and touch” their data. Alpha phase was very lean with both users and engineers. After 2 years and 100 users, they moved to beta via public launch on Hacker News. They approached go-to-market by starting with a horizontal product for the broad market, seeing the use cases that arose organically, then narrowed focus on landing customers. The “Aha” moment was visceral for co-founder Ofstad when they landed WeWork and he witnessed Airtable open on everyone’s computer during a customer tour.
a16z’s Growth metric benchmarks for B2B. An interactive guide on growth metric benchmarks for B2B companies. Based on parameters of your sales motion, type of software, and ARR, see where you stand on metrics including growth, retention, margin, sales efficiency, and business efficiency.
📠 Health Tech
HTN’s health tech trends of 2022. A comprehensive year-end summary of headlines in healthcare with a question of “does activity equal progress?”. Giants further vertical integration of their healthcare ecosystem; VBC’s effectiveness remains unclear; hope in the employer market, and more stories categorized in 9 themes.
Playbook for risk based contracting for value based care. This playbook (with video) is a primer on risk-based contracting and is filled with practical insights from digital health founders on how they approach risk-based models. Be realistic, not idealistic - take a glide path to risk, find an anchor partner who shares commitment to VBC, focus on getting solid proof points for the clinical model that works with the business model, and build operational capabilities early on for scale.
Omnibus spending bill partially averts Medicare cuts. A summary on healthcare wins & losses in the 4000+ page Omnibus bill, including 2% cut in physician payment rates (from proposed 4.5%) and extending telehealth waivers to 2024. Aledade’s Farzad Mostashari has a thread diving in the cause and effects of the cuts.
2023 physician fee schedule final rule - MSSP expansion. CMS issued its Medicare Physician Fee Schedule final rule with changes to the Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) to encourage new accountable care organization (ACO) entrants into MSSP. Changes include advanced payments for new ACOs, using a quality performance sliding scale for shared savings, and adjusting benchmarks for renewing ACOs to more reasonably meet their saving benchmarks. This final rule expands MSSP’s reach to Medicare beneficiaries, especially rural and underserved populations.
📣 Media
YouTube Shorts vs. TikTok for creators. Last year, young people spent 56 minutes on day on YouTube compared to 91 minutes on TikTok. Shorts is YouTube’s high stakes battle with TikTok. The prospect of Shorts joining YouTube’s Partner Program in early 2023 makes it attractive to creators, as monetization on YouTube is much more robust than on TikTok. However, some creators complain about the usability of the tool itself. YouTube’s hypothesis is that it’s superior for the multiformat creator, who can use Shorts as the gateway to long form content that generates greater revenue.
Streaming wins and losses in 2022. Apple TV+ became the first streamer to win a Best Picture movie. Netflix’s Stranger Things Season 4 was the biggest TV release of the year. Prime Video released its extremely expensive The Rings of Power. And HBO Max continues to impress with hit shows Euphoria, House of the Dragon, and The White Lotus. Netflix, HBO, and Disney Plus now all have launched a cheaper ad-supported tier. Netflix’s ad-supported subscriptions accounted for only 9% of new signups in Nov 2022. Disney Plus increased the price for its standard tier, will the others follow suit and create a greater gap between its cheaper ad tier and premium tier?
Top books, movies, and TV of 2022
📚Books
[Business] Build by Tony Fadell - candid stories from being a junior engineer at General Magic, to building the iPhone, to founding Nest. There are many practical lessons on managing your career, approaching the evolution of your product, aligning with internal & external heartbeats, finding great ideas, product management, sales, and much more.
[Fiction] Sorrow and bliss by Meg Mason - dark, funny, and moving all at once, this story is the journey of Martha living through her mysterious mental illness and the transformation of her relationship with her loving husband Patrick and her eccentric family. “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It's only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.”
[Lifestyle] Kurashi at home by Marie Kondo - a meditative read on philosophies to live your ideal lifestyle. This makes a perfect New Year read, with insights and inspirations on crafting habits and setting up a joyful environment for your everyday life.
🎥Movies
Triangle of Sadness. A Palme d’Or winning black comedy on what happens when a cruise for the super rich sinks and leaves its survivors on an island. Centered around the theme of class-divide and social conformity, it hilariously showcases the hypocrisy of the ultra-wealthy and the shift of power when roles are reversed. If you love movies like Parasite, you’ll love this one.
Decision to Leave. A romantic noir thriller about a detective becoming mesmerized by the mysterious, charming widow of a man whose death he’s investigating. Alluring and dream-like, this film keeps you tangled more in the characters’ tensions than the suspense itself.
Everything Everywhere All at Once. An incredibly creative film about a miserable middle-age woman getting roped into a multi-verse adventure with different versions of herself to save the world and herself and her family.
📺TV
Better Call Saul. This year’s season 6 marks the end of BCS, the spectacular successor of Breaking Bad and arguably one of the greatest TV series of all time. With breathtaking cinematography, brilliant writing, and poignant characters, the story reveals the transformation of Jimmy McGill-the earnest but unimportant lawyer to Saul Goodman-the mastermind attorney of meth drug dealer Walter White.
Severance. This sci-fi thriller by Apple TV+ was surprisingly gripping as it questions whether isolated parts of your consciousness can stand alone as its own person and how meaningful is life when we compartmentalize pain.
House of the Dragon. The prequel to Game of Thrones did not disappoint. Set 200 years before GOT, it tells the story of the Targaryens’ battle for the iron throne. Yes, there are a lot of birth, death, and dragon scenes but all service the story and are not just for shock value.
I hope you had a fulfilling year. I propose 2023 be a year of seeing every moment with fresh eyes. See you in the New Year!
