INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again.
Last week, I talked about SoftBank big embarrassment and how it could impact venture
capital.
If you&re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.
The big
story
#DeleteLinkedIn
Before you dial up a quick search, no, LinkedIn isn&t currently caught in a scandal, but does a product need to have a
deeply toxic culture, corrupt democracy or have an ICE contract for you to boycott it? Can&t the product itself just be bad?
I&ve thought
about writing this for a long time because LinkedIn does serve some purposes, but it not a professional network, for the lay user it not
much of anything.
It built for recruiters and salespeople, and, yeah, I&m sure they will have plenty of great things to say about the doors
that have been opened to them, but what about the employed consumers who value professional development and have been convinced that a
LinkedIn account is a necessity? Facebook has taught consumers that our data is the price to use their services, but at least we get a
little something out of that deal
LinkedIn is just a CRM where the customers all populate their own cells of the spreadsheet
It gives users spam and pop-ups that seem designed to help them find where the notifications settings on their phones are.
LinkedIn is a
sith lord of dark pattern design https://t.co/5AGUgkcNpU
— Lucas Matney (@lucasmtny) August 26, 2019
LinkedIn has been remarkably
unambitious for a long time
The company is trying to make money and that chill; they&re trying to live up to Microsoft expectations by making obvious choices and I&d
imagine it awfully hard to do that.
Enterprise software lives in an eternal cycle of bundling and unbundling and LinkedIn is long overdue
for some startups to come unbundle it
It can keep recruiting, sales and the millions of hallowed-out users profiles, but there so much potential dying on the LinkedIn
vine.
Investors have raved about the &consumerization of enterprise,& or bringing consumer-like products deeper into the workplace
There has also been a ton of chatter about startups building bespoke communities focused on tighter verticals
These two trends should lead to some great professional development products, and I&m sure there already are plenty entrepreneurs building
solutions that will pop up in my inbox or the comments
There nearly endless potential for niche professional networks to flourish, actually innovate and create connections.
LinkedIn is what
happens when network effects congeal
It has this data that could be used to create so many good worker-facing products, instead the company has monetized itself by going out of
its way to obfuscate this data for the majority of its users
I have truly limited faith in LinkedIn turning itself around so maybe it time we all walk away from this idea that it has so much untapped
potential and we just give up on it to search out some more focused products that have a few users and meet a few needs.
Please reach out to
me if you&re building something cool.
Send me feedbackon Twitter@lucasmtnyor emaillucas@techcrunch.com
On to the rest of the week
news.
Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to
all the sweet, sweet added context:
Jack and Zuck
Jack Dorsey says an awful lot of nothing for being the guy in charge of Twitter, but he
had a lot to say this week, and more importantly a little to do
He said the company would be uniformly banning political ads on its site, something that will likely help it sidestep some controversy, and
will turn up the heat for Facebook to do the same.
Escape podsI wrote some harsh words about Juul in my previous newsletter ahead of what
seemed like an inevitable reckoning
Well, that reckoning has gotten a bit more codified this week
Altria wrote down $4.5 billion of Juul value
The company is prepping for major layoffs including a handful of execs
Layoffs suck but not quite as much as taking a job at Juul.
Fitting in
Google made an interesting hardware play this week buying Fitbit for
Hardware has always been a bit of an afterthought for Google, but maybe this purchase will allow them a more concerted push to take on the
Apple Watch, or maybe like Nest, they won&t have any idea what to do with them
Regardless, it a relatively soft and dignified landing for Fitbit which has had a rocky past three years going head-to-head with
Apple.
GAFA Gaffes
How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:
Facebook
pays fine without saying sorry:[Facebook agrees to pay UK data watchdogs Cambridge Analytica fine but settles without admitting
liability]
App Store bugs erases ratings:[A week-long iOS App Store bug wiped out over 20M ratings]
Disrupt Berlin
It hard to believe it
already that time of the year again, but we just announced the agenda for Disrupt Berlin and we&ve got some all-stars making their way to
I&ll be there this year, get some tickets and come say hey!
Announcing the Disrupt Berlin 2019 agenda
Learn how to win customers and
influence consumers
Three of the best tackle the thorny issue of Brexit for startups
Learn how to raise your first Euros
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