Nuggies: Trump Fridges and $10M for Links
Thursday, October 29th, 2020
Welcome to the 24th edition of Nuggies, an email newsletter that aggregates articles and commentary on business, economics, startups, and more, in bite-sized nuggets sent right to your email weekly. Created by and for college students.
Our quote of the week comes from Pixar founder Ed Catmull, “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
This Week’s Articles:
Linktree raises $10.7M for its lightweight, link-centric user profiles, TechCrunch
You read that right. Linktree, the social media website that allows users to create a profile page with links to other sites related to them, has just raised a $10.7M round led by Insight Partners.
This is their first round of funding, which comes after wild organic growth that led them to 28,000 unique sign-ups per day. They fill a niche in that Instagram does not allow more than one link in a profile. Some of their wild growth can be attributed to the Black Lives Matter movement, whose activists used the platform to aggregate resources in one, easily shareable place. They have ambitious goals too, hoping to replace the standalone website in exchange for their more streamlined, link based platform.
Read it here
Quiz: Can You Tell a ‘Trump’ Fridge From a ‘Biden’ Fridge?, New York Times
This “article” is anything but a waste of time. The New York Times has compiled fridge images from hundreds of American households and it is up to you to guess which one is a Trump household and which one is a Biden household. Fun game or groundbreaking political psychology experiment? We’ll let you decide. See if you can beat our score of 54% right on 70 attempts.
Try it here
The people trying to get in Biden's head on holding tech accountable, Axios
The last time Biden really made big tech regulation a centerpiece of his campaigning was last January, but the issue has gotten even more serious since then.
Surrounding the debate around big tech (Facebook, Google, Twitter) regulation is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which made it illegal to sue companies over user-posted data. If Biden wins, he will face calls from advocates for and against getting rid of Section 230, neither side strictly following party lines. Those who are hesitant to get rid of Section 230 argue that it could seriously destabilize these social media platforms, and propose less strict regulations. That being said, this is interesting to note because the divide does not tend fall along party lines. It seems like everyone wants to sue Zuckerberg, but what’s new there?
Read about it here
This Week’s Tweets:
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
Check out this website, McBroken.com, which is a live map of all McDonalds’ locations which informs you whether or not their McFlurry is broken. When is their Series A?
This Week’s Question:
How do incentives determine the small decisions you make on a daily basis?
What are we listening to this week?:
This week we’re listening to Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, Travis Scott’s sophomore album and one of his better, if not overshadowed projects. We both agree that every single song on this album is an 8 or higher. True masterpiece. With temperatures dipping below the 40’s in South Bend mornings and evenings, this dark masterpiece is on repeat.
Thank you for reading! Nuggies is created by Thomas Pero and Spencer Koehl, two undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame.
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