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The following startup adage feels true of Tesla today as it ever has:

Tesla has been running fast to capture the value and growth of electric vehicles. There are innumerable complex challenges of building an electric vehicle - not only do you have nail production of a normal vehicle, something OEMs have been doing for decades, but you also need to layer in hardware, software, battery technology, electric drive trains and sensor fusion.

The crux of the bull v bear argument here is; bulls argue that Tesla is uniquely positioned to build a defensible tech stack, which current OEMs are not native to, bears argue that Tesla is unable to compete with existing manufacturers on the table stakes of car production and delivery. Let’s explore both sides of the argument;

Full stack:

Whilst there are no doubt other significant elements to add to both sides of the argument - these tend to be the crux of the focus for the majority of speculators.

There are currently 452 “unicorn” tech companies, this has been driven by companies staying private longer and more late-stage venture capital, hopefully this dislocation between price and value will see a reversion to sensible valuations (thinking about writing a longer piece on this) // this pricing drift is also not being “bought” by Wall Street/public markets (WSJ paywall), typically where VCs liquidate their positions, as recently witnessed by meh listings of Uber, Lyft, Pinterest etc. // The fundamentals of product-market fit, a great primer by Holloway Guides // The New Yorker looks at the IndieWeb movement of owning your own servers/data, a partial remedy to misappropriation of data by platforms // A fantastic deep dive by a16z on investing in the podcast ecosystem // betaworks’s John Borthwick breaks down his thoughts on Zuckerberg’s podcast - he highlights how Zuck’s mental models might have lead to blind spots in data privacy

Awesome write up by Alex Danco on “cooking as a service” (this is must read in my view); in my view there is a wider trend of atomisation of work as technology has removed friction from internal and external coordination of firms, giving rise to new services and work modes // Lightspeed’s Alex Taussig writes about the “business in a box” - how horizontal platforms are providing individuals, solo-preneurs with turnkey economic opportunities // “The AI gig economy” how perceived “AI” is actually a mechanical turks powered by gig workers, to clarify this is not the world we want to live in

You can now use NYC’s Citibike through the Lyft app. Last year the company acquired Motivate, the operators of a number of urban docked bike sharing schemes. It’s important not to understand how important this is for Lyft as ride sharing platforms look to go multi modal and building a superior full stack offering in a city as large as NYC // Speaking of which, VOI just announced a bike sharing partnership with the city of Stockhom // Nissan is now using computer vision for its autonomous program instead of Lidar, partial validation for Mr Musk who has claimed Lidar is a defunct technology // Uber released their Q1 ‘19 earnings, the first as a public company, spoiler alert: it wasn’t good, still though the stock is up (!)