Growth of YouTube Shorts & Sam Altman's SPAC

1/ Growth of YouTube shorts

As I previously predicted YouTube shorts is crushing in terms of usage. Google said 2 Billion people are watching shorts daily. Yes 2 Billion!

Why did I think this will happen? Two reasons:

1. Distribution: YouTube is where people consume content across the globe, its bigger than Netflix based on a consumption basis. Starting from millennials all the generations that follow don’t have traditional cable tv subscriptions, their main home page on TV is YouTube. An average adult in U.S spends 4hrs watching TV and 90% (my guess) of them will open YouTube more than once before moving to Netflix.

2. Incentives: YouTube’s biggest strength lies in its incentive structure, no other platform created more full time creators than YouTube. There is no creator economy with out YouTube. Creators can break out on any platform but they will eventually make their career on YouTube because that’s where the money is. This is the big problem that short form content (TikToks or Reels) doesn’t solve for. Yes, there are brand deals and other one off opportunities on TikTok & Instagram, but these apps are acting as top of the funnel for building YouTube. All roads lead creators to YouTube.

2/ Sam Altman’s SPAC:

If you thought SPAC’s are dead, you are wrong.

Sam Altman sponsored SPAC recently took a nuclear energy startup OKLO public. Oklo is trying to build a new generation of smaller nuclear power projects and must prove they can deliver on time and on budget, unlike the fleet of large nuclear plants that preceded them.

One thing I admire about Sam Altman is he doesn’t do any small stuff, he is always taking big bets in his career and it worked out well for him as a strategy. I love breaking down careers of interesting people and will write about Sam’s career in the next edition. Keep an eye out for it. Its one of the reasons why I do the podcast.

3/ New Conversations

Keep an eye out for my conversations with two interesting guests on the podcast. I spoke to Joe Heitzeberg who is a serial entrepreneur and recently the founder of Crowd Cow, we spoke about a lot interesting things including the problems in the U.S food ecosystem. Another conversation I am excited to release is with the General Partner of Engineering Capital, Ashmeet Sidana. To stay up to date on the conversations subscribe to the podcast on  Spotify, Apple, Google, YouTube & other platforms.

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Nataraj