Check your Pulse #12

🚀incentives, nuggs, and a fringe idea goes mainstream 🐔

Welcome to the 12th edition of Check your Pulse, a weekly-ish newsletter where I share a collection of thought provoking things designed to help you stay inspired, think better, and create meaningful impact.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of incentives lately. Incentives are everything at the level of society.

So much of what we see in the world that is creating perverse outcomes is a matter of incentives being badly aligned.

Schools and universities are not designed to make money when students succeed. What would happen if schools didn’t charge tuition until you secured a job?

In healthcare, doctors have a financial incentive to specialize in treating the really bad problems instead of preventing them — heart surgery pays more than preventing heart disease. What if we paid prevention doctors more?

Consultants earn money regardless of the outcome of their recommendations - what if they only got paid if their recommendations worked?

Facebook’s business model incentivizes it to harvest data and encourage unhealthy habits. What would happen if Facebook’s business model wasn’t predicated on amassing loads of data and compromising our privacy?

In the long run, the self-interest of a business needs to align with the self-interest of the customer, or the business will get disrupted.

I’m more excited than ever about the potential for entrepreneurs to design systems that realign incentives between stakeholders. If you’re building something like this, I’d love to learn more.

🚀🚀🚀

Sari

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." 

-E.B. White

caught my attention

This week, the Business Roundtable made up of Fortune 500 CEOs dropped a bombshell of a statement redefining corporate purpose to include all stakeholders and not just shareholders. The agreement was signed by 181 CEOs including Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon. If you were to trace the history of the shift in attitude toward corporate purpose among Fortune 500 CEOs, you might start with the speech Bill Gates delivered at the World Economic Forum in 2008, where he said, “the genius of capitalism lies in its ability to harness self-interest in helpful and sustainable ways.”  Of course, there’s a huge difference between making a nice statement and actually shifting the way business is done, but this is a very important sign of a fringe idea going mainstream and companies openly declaring that value creation should be measured by their social and environmental as well as financial impact. 🌏

This takedown of WeWork by Scott Galloway is one for the books. In frothy markets, it's easy to enter into a consensual hallucination, with investors and markets, that you’re creating value. And it’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market's halcyon: cheap capital. 💼

Swell entering the food container market is very exciting. 🍯

According to this NYT article authored by Adam Grant, productivity isn’t about time management. It’s about attention management. The key to getting things done, we’re often told, is time management. But time management is not a solution - it’s actually part of the problem. ⌛

CrowdJustice is a way to take legal action without going broke: “Built by lawyers, CrowdJustice is the leading online fundraising platform specifically designed for legal action.” ⚖

I am obsessed with this Moon Puzzle 🌜

A handy Google doc with questions VCs may ask you when fundraising. 💰

On a related note, this Techcrunch article on the reality of startup fundraising is an important read for founders — representative of a lot of public perception issues in Tech/VC which lead to mental health problems for founders and unhealthy comparisons. 💎

Great post on how much burn is reasonable by Fred Wilson. There is a difference between a company that loses money because it’s investing in the infrastructure needed to become a profitable company, and a company that loses money because it can’t charge customers a price that reflects what it costs to run the business. 💵

Apparently, some people who visit US slave plantations don't want to hear about slavery. 🌱

I love this by Jamie Varon ✍🏽

We have ruined childhood is a great piece to read, share, and discuss with fellow parents or friends/family who are entering parenthood. No longer able to rely on communal structures for child care or allow children time alone, parents who need to work are forced to warehouse their youngsters for long stretches of time. 🚸

This mental model/illustration/essay thing about the meaning of life is brilliant.  💫

Retailers such as West Elm, Shinola, Ikea, and Taco Bell are opening hotels, and smaller brands like Marine Layer (image below) are following suit, leveraging the power of Airbnb for marketing. Here’s why your brand should consider opening an Airbnb 🛏

have you heard of?

NUGGS are a chicken nugget simulation made with a new texturized pea protein technology. They are free of major allergens like eggs, wheat, dairy and soy. They’re also cholesterol free, contain 22g of protein (about 2x more than animal-based nuggets) and are 180 calories (about 20% less than animal-based nuggets). It’s worth noting that the founder is 19 years old 😮

overheard on twitter

Amanda Richards @amandakater

i do this really cool thing professionally where i beat myself up when i feel like i'm not killing it, and then when i'm killing it i act like it's no big deal bc it's just my job

If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:

My name is Sari Azout. I am a design-thinker, storyteller, and early stage startup investor at Level Ventures. My mission is to bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business.

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Know a founder i should meet?

Drop me a note at sari@level.vc

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Thanks for being here!

Sari