Interviewing Benedict Evans at Appear Here's Global Gathering

The Venue and Agenda

On January 24th, 2020 Appear Here held its Annual Global Gathering where we brought together world class investors, retailers, landlords and technologists for a day of insights, lessons and knowledge sharing:

My chat with Benedict Evans

I had the pleasure of hosting a fireside chat with the infamous Benedict Evans (formerly a Partner at a16z and now based in London). Benedict is widely considered to be a thought leader for the tech industry and his weekly newsletter frequently shapes the conversation around new tech developments, artificial intelligence, regulation, big tech companies, mobile and venture capital for a global audience. He has an avid following which includes 130k newsletter subscribers and 280k Twitter followers.

We covered a range of topics including high street retail, machine learning/data science and acquisition channels for brands. Below I've included the list of questions we worked our way through during the 30min conversation:

1. You've said. "Everything the Internet has done to media, it's now doing to retail", tell us more.

2. Do you think the high street is dying? Why or why not?

3. What does the future for the high street look like?

4. If it was up to you, in what ways would you like to see retail change or be disrupted by tech?

5. What role do you think machine learning/data science could play in retail?

6. We hear a lot about machine learning and data science, what are some useful ways to think about machine learning? (You've said, "Machine learning is the new database" tell us more)

7. As the cost of online advertising increases, how do marketers continue to grow their businesses?

8. Why do you think Amazon hasn't been as successful with offline retail as they are with online?

9. What do you make of the rise and fall of WeWork; what can we learn from it?

10. After working in SF and London, what differences do you see and what can we learn from them?

Benedict's "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" Presentation from Davos

Just earlier that week, Benedict had been in Davos to present an annual presentation on tech trends. In a recent blog post he said "Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems. Tech is becoming a regulated industry, but we don’t really know what that will mean." I've pulled out some notable slides from that presentation below that relate to the discussion we had at Appear Here's Global Gathering:

Benedict has clearly thought carefully about how technology is evolving and it was a pleasure to speak with him about those trends as they apply to retail, data science and startups.

Solarwinds Press Release for Pingdom, Librato and Papertrail

Solarwinds, the Texas based enterprise IT management company that purchased Pingdom for an undisclosed amount, Librato for $40M and Papertrail for $41M over the last couple years, recently got in touch with me because my company, Insignum, uses all three of their products to manage our machine learning infrastructure in the cloud.

Solarwinds were attending Velocity 2015 in Santa Clara and asked for my take on their products to include in a press release.  Here is the excerpt that includes my comments:

“All of these SolarWinds Cloud products work well together as they're solving slightly different problems at each level of our technology stack,” said Andrew Thompson, co-founder and CEO of Insignum, an automated analytics intelligence company. “Pingdom is our go-to solution for understanding the overall health and stability of the web pages our customers engage with day-to-day, while Librato gives us an understanding of how all our infrastructure is performing to deliver value to users, and then when something breaks, Papertrail becomes the service that we use to drill into the exact details of the problem so we can devise a solution – its true value is simplicity.”

Insights from LeWeb'11

I attended LeWeb in Paris, France on Dec 7-9th 2011. LeWeb is the premier technology conference in Europe which attracts influential businesses, up and coming entrepreneurs, passionate speakers and bold ideas while providing an opportunity to network with everyone involved. LeWeb'11 was themed around what they called SOLOMO (Social-Local-Mobile) and they had a wealth of influential speakers on the subject.

Below I have captured some of the insights and notable content from LeWeb'11:

:: Berlin


Bright and young entrepreneurs are flocking to Berlin. London has always been seen as a cultivator of entrepreneurs and their startups within Europe but Berlin is taking off. Its tech scene is trying to emerge as a thriving economy: entrepreneurs are setting up shop along with talented young professionals seeking employment. From SoundCloud to Gibsy to Wooga.

:: Tackling Heavily Regulated and Entrenched Markets

• Uber's disruptive private driver (taxi) service is challenging a heavily regulated taxi cab industry in Paris, New York City, San Francisco, Washington and other cities. They're up against a strong opposition but with lots of funding from various sources they're hoping to become a more valuable and improved transportation service over existing methods.
• Path is finding a niche in the social networking space by avoiding direct competition with Facebook. Its focused on a more intimate experience for its users and puts design at the forefront.
• AirBnB started with an inventory of properties that directly competed with budget and mid-priced hotel chains. They have subsequently grown to include some very interesting properties: Mushroom Dome Cabin, Designer Hong Kong loft, Ancient British Castle or a Discovery boat in India. They market themselves as "unlocking unique spaces worldwide" and are becoming a serious threat to some companies within the travel industry.
• Karl Largerfeld (Creative Director at Chanel) has a new line of affordably priced clothing called Karl which will be sold exclusively online via NET-A-PORTER. Karl remarked during the announcement at LeWeb'11 that when his new clothing line is released in February 2012 it will be in the same month that he releases some new haute couture garments priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. This highlights the fact that products from opposite ends of traditional market segments (the fashion industry in this case) are being repackaged in very innovative ways.

:: Mobile


In the history of computing, mobile has had the fastest adoption rate. There are currently 700 million smart phones being used and the projections are that this will treble in 3 years. Product companies building web-based applications should therefore think seriously about where their user base currently is and where it will be in 3 years. Given that the general trend is heading towards mobile, if companies are not heavily focused on it then they should at least know why not and have a good reason for it.

From a technology standpoint mobile requires different skill sets within an engineering team. Depending on whether the chosen development architecture is cross-platform (PhoneGap, Appcelerator, or simply HTML5) or native (Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android, C# .NET for Windows Phone 7), a clear understanding of how these mobile devices, with their many versions and layouts, will interact with your web-based application is critical. If you are fortunate enough to have already built or inherited a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based application, you are one step in the right direction to building out your mobile product offerings. Scaling with hundreds, thousands or even millions of mobile applications being used in the wild (each set with their own application versions) presents some very unique challenges that will need to be overcome if the mobile growth projections become reality.

:: Prioritize Design


Many companies still neglect design to their detriment. Engineering teams usually hire in a contract graphic designer or user-interface designer for usability concerns instead of focusing on it in-house. Flipboard CEO, Mike McCue, stressed that the trade-off in software engineering is between a few very well designed features or many mediocre ones.

:: Focus


Continually question what your company's focus is and make sure you are always correcting your course back to that initial purpose. Many companies start out with a clear focus but over time there is a strong tendency for it to either become diluted or for the company to forget/ignore what the original focus was. The key take away was that a company's focus is key to their growth and holding onto that singular focus is very important in a sea of constant noise.

:: Put People at the Center


Many people attribute Facebook's huge success to a pivotal turning point when the tagging of photos became mainstream on their social platform. There were many companies building web-based photo sharing applications (such as Flickr) but Facebook quickly became the largest by far by simply putting people at the center of those photos. Facebook added a key feature which allowed people to tag their friends, family and just about anyone they knew which caused a massive change in people behaviour to begin uploading and tagging pictures on Facebook in record numbers never before seen in an online application. The power of social is the people are at the centre.

:: Dream Bigger


The now well know advice that Steve Jobs gave to an executive trying to reinvent the Disney Store was to "Dream Bigger". Time and time again VCs on stage would urge the crowd to ignore the easy road of building yet another photo sharing app and find a problem or need in the world that is so huge that it scares you to even think about it. Those are the kinds of ideas entrepreneurs should be thinking about and trying to solve. Whatever you are thinking you can allows dream one step bigger.

:: Best Interviews (Videos)

• Sean Parker (Founders Fund), Shervin Pishevar (Menlo Ventures) and Alexia Tsotsis (Techcrunch)
• Eric Schmidt (Google) and Loic Le Meur
• Mike McCue (Flip Board) and Loic Le Muer

Attending LeWeb'11 in Paris

I'll be fortunate enough to attend LeWeb'11 in Paris this week.

LeWeb's theme this year is Social, Local & Mobile (SOLOMO). There are some great guest speakers and workshops over the 3 days and I'm especially interested to see how Karl Largerfeld's opening address to LeWeb attendees ties in with the SOLOMO theme given that he is the fashion designer at CHANEL.

I'll also be posting a review of LeWeb'11 a few weeks after the event so stay tuned.

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:: Update


The insights gained from LeWeb'11 can be found on this post.