The 'Inbox' Keeps Winning...

Good afternoon…

The ‘inbox wins’ is a theme of mine (and Ethan Berk) who is our analyst.

In the public markets, Google is my inbox investment. In our Socialleverage.com funds we have made a bunch of successful inbox investments over the years and two fast growing ones in our last fund (fund 4) are Beehiiv.com and Punchup.live.

Today, I got this email from the current king of comedians, Shane Gillis, who has joined the Punchup.live platform to share content and sell tickets directly to his fans. He owns his customer/fan list. He can share his list with other comedians to help them grow their fan base and sell tickets in specific locations without spamming his entire list. He can slice and dice his lists by location and he owns that list and his ability to reach his fans. Of course, Shane is big enough that he does not have to worry about the ‘little things’ like lists, email and ticket sales, that up and coming entertainers have to stress about, but Punchup has made it so that even the biggest and best comedians, entertainers, podcasters, magicians etc are excited leverage the platform and make it their hub/home on the internet.

Of course Shane can continue to share content and market to his social followers but now everything can be about bringing his fans into his direct reach via his Punchup.live content, email and ticketing hub.

The ‘inbox’ wont die and all the attempts at killing it have only made it stronger.

My long time chief of staff now analyst at Social Leverage Ethan Berk has the awful job of reading through hundreds of links I send him each week about things I think I might have to understand 🙂 . I am his inbox nightmare. Ethan is super curious, tech savvy, self motivated, has a fantastic attitude, and the ability to understand how I am thinking about things at a high level. He is an important filter for whether I should care about a product or company enough relative to the themes I am focused on.

The biggest work theme for me continues to be my reliance on ‘email’ and my ‘inbox’. I hate it, I love it, I am never in full control of it, but it is by far the best way for me to organize my work life. I am not sure how anyone values Gmail, but it is undervalued.

Because I am a slow adapter I will miss the eventual email ‘killer’. If that killer is some form of AI inbox chatbot I imagine Google will be one or two in that category anyways.

Slack and Teams And Zoom only make email more important and because of Gmail, I tend to use Google Meets now for most of my video meetings. Of course email is a massive trojan horse for Microsoft as well.

Have a great rest of the day.