The iPhone’s Inventor, the Navy SEALs of Payments, & the Encyclopedia of Memes

Happy Sunday!

It’s been another eventful week in tech. Sheryl Sandberg’s out at Meta, Tesla wants its employees back in the office, and New York just passed the US’s first-ever right to repair law. 

This week on Every, we’ve got a review of a new book of business advice from the inventor of the iPhone, an interview with the editor-in-chief of the internet’s main meme repository, and a deep dive into payments space.

Let’s get to it! 

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The Inventor of the iPhone Has Some Thoughts

Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

“I should write a management advice book” is right up there with “I should start a podcast” on the list of statements in tech most likely to make you say, “Should you, though?” But if we were to list people whose opinions on business building we’d actually be interested in hearing, iPhone inventor and Nest co-founder Tony Fadell would be right up there at the top of the list. 

Lucky for us, Fadell has published just such a book, and this week on Napkin Math, Evan (a self-admitted Fadell stan) is digging in. As Evan describes it, Build is an “internal wiki of [Fadell’s] brain,” covering his views on everything from management consulting to the point of PMs to dealing with burnout. Of course, as with any book of business advice, the question lurking just under the surface is: is Fadell’s advice right? 

Read.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Memes

Fadeke Adegbuyi / Publication

Memes are the native language of the internet, the fundamental unit of idea transmission in the digital age. And for the past 15 years, the website Know Your Meme has been there, documenting the meaning, origins, and significance of memes from the Rick Roll to crying Michael Jordan— and of meme culture more broadly. 

This week on Cybernaut, Fadeke sits down with Know Your Meme’s Editor-in-Chief, Don Caldwell to explore how memes have shaped our world—and how technology has shaped memes. Along the way, they discuss a wide range of topics including when exactly an idea becomes a meme, the rise of the Chief Meme Officer, and why Facebook is more than just a meme generator for Boomers. 

Read.

Adyen: The Navy SEAL Team of Payments

Abdullah Al-Rezwan / Every

With all the attention it gets from the startup media, you’d be forgiven for thinking Stripe is the only disruptor taking on the payments space. But over in the Netherlands, a different payments disruptor has been taking on the industry with a focus and discipline that led one early backer to dub them “The Navy SEAL team of payments.” 

In this piece, Abdullah Al-Rezwan—whom you might know as Mostly Borrowed Ideas on Twitter—takes us on a deep dive into Adyen’s business, covering everything from what makes the payments business so challenging in the first place, to Adyen’s philosophy on acquisitions (it doesn’t do them) to what is potentially the company’s Achilles heel: its compensation philosophy.   

Read.

A Brief History of Digital Nomads

Lauren Razavi / Every

Take a look at the Google Trends data for the term “digital nomads” and you’ll see that the idea of leaving it all behind for a glamorous life of international travel and working from the beach has never been more popular. But as long-time digital nomad Lauren Razavi points out, the ideas underlying the digital nomad movement stretch back to far before the advent of the iPhone and Instagram paved the way to its popularity. 

In this excerpt from her book Digital Nomads, Lauren takes us on a journey through the history of digital nomadism from the late ‘90s to the 2010s to the present. She also explores the role technology played in facilitating digital nomadism’s evolution, and some challenges and criticisms the lifestyle faces as it moves into the future. 

Read.

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Cap Tables 101 | GoingVC 

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That's all for this week!