Intro

Good morning! Happy Friday 🥳!

Topics: #spacs, #braintrust

Still, everyone talks about SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies), and we covered this topic a few newsletters back. Did you know that SPACs, compared to classic IPOs, are allowed to give you long-term revenue forecasts for raising capital?

As a result, some SPACs throw crazy predictions at investors, stating they can reach 10B in sales within 3 years. In comparison, it took Google 9 years, Facebook 11 years and Amazon 12 years to achieve such a milestone. It seems regulation on this topic is ‘a bit light’.

Snippets

📊 Markets: Due to an increase in the M2 money supply by more than 26% over the past year, investors are looking into ways to move cash into ‘wealth-storing’ assets such as bitcoin, commodities and stocks. This could additionally fire the stock-market and crypto rally. Deep Dive here →

🐒 Reddit: The Reddit community WallStreetBets, famous for boosting the share price of GameStop in order to push short sellers out of the market, is in the news again. This time for a completely different reason: Adopting 3,500 gorillas. Deep dive here →

🕯️ Idea: Do you want to start a business real quick? Buy one and make it big! Become a tiny PE so to speak. Starting at around $800, you can buy a fully fledged website. Deep dive here →

Micro Knowledge

Braintrust Meetings At Pixar

Source: Giphy

Pixar is one of the most successful creative companies ever - they have won 16(!) Oscars in total and each of their movies grossed $600M on average. How has Pixar become so successful? And, is there something you could adapt for your business?

Braintrust Meetings: According to Ed Catmull, one of the core reasons for Pixar’s success is a meeting concept called Braintrust, which happens, on average, 6-8 times during the production of a movie.

This is how it works: Directors and producers watch the latest version of the movie and then give super-candid feedback to the movie’s director.

“All our movies suck at first,” Catmull said. “The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it’s also where they start to not suck.”

Key reasons why these meetings work so well:

• Super candid: These meetings are usually no fun. Directors might learn that their story is confusing and their characters not engaging.

• Never personal: Discussions are super intense and passionate, but they never get personal.

• No authority: In the end, the members of the Braintrust meeting can’t tell the responsible director what to do. This is very important, because the director can come into the meeting without a defensive posture.

We at shoto.io use this method daily in our editorial meetings. It doesn’t always work but it has definitely helped us in fleshing out good content. Could you use this meeting type in your company or startup?