Nuggies: Braving War Zones & Life-Saving Tweets
Thursday, December 31st, 2020: HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
Welcome to the thirtieth 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 Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist and economist, “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
This Week’s Articles:
Meet the unicorn founder that braved war zones and missed meetings to make his mark on the startup world, Fortune
This article follows the story of Tope Awotona, the founder of popular scheduling app Calendly. Awotona followed an unconventional path to build his now $1B+ startup. Mainly bootstrapped, he only took $550,000 in funding, using most of it to build the platform with a team based in Kiev, Ukraine. While others fled the city during the 2014 riots, Awotona couldn’t stay away. This is a great read for anyone interested in startups, especially ones that don’t follow the traditional path.
Read it here
What’s the Hidden Business Behind the Business? with Jen Hyman, Masters of Scale
Masters of Scale is one of our favorite podcasts, hosted by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Ventures. This episode features Jen Hyman, founder of Rent the Runway, the unicorn fashion startup that rents high end dresses and apparel online. It talks about how, in order to gain unicorn status, they had to learn to master all of the businesses that enable their main business to succeed. In their case, the main one creating and managing a global dry cleaning network to empower the quick and easy rental business.
Check it out here
How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners, The Wall Street Journal
At one point, Amazon was just a fledging startup in a Seattle garage and its strategy towards competitors mimics that of garage startup rather than $1.7 trillion market cap company.
This articles shows how Amazon targets specific competitors and creates an internal team dedicated to besting competitors big and small. To CEO Jeff Bezos, it’s always day one and Amazon must continue to fight for market share.
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:








This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
Check out these emails between Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram, from when Facebook was in talks to buy Instagram. It gives you a chance to be a fly on the wall in one of the most profitable and influential deals of the 21st Century.
This Week’s Question:
Do you like when people send you Calendly links?
What are we listening to this week?:
This week, we’re ringing in the new year by listening to Duckwrth’s SuperGood. It’s a feel good and easy-going pop album that still manages to feel experimental.
Thank you for reading! Nuggies is created by Thomas Pero and Spencer Koehl, two undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame.
If this was forwarded to you, please subscribe here:
If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us at tpero@nd.edu and skoehl@nd.edu, or on twitter, @tpero_ and @spencerkoehl
While this is a labor of love, if you would like to support our efforts please share this with friends and on social media.