Ben's List

Ben Costantini
Ben Costantini
Ben's List

Voilà my humble contribution to free thinking and exploration. I hope you'll bear with my usual randomness.

This list was started two weeks ago. You're looking into my brain as of February 10th. And here we are, publishing on February 18th.

As mentioned in previous articles, I always enjoy looking into patterns in these lists, especially afterwards.

There's an overarching structure that encourages you to read through the list from books and reports, to general articles around strategy, entrepreneurship or venture capital. And then we go deeper into marketing, podcasting, newsletters - topics related to Selected - before ending with some science, gaming, arts and music.

In some occasions, there are also deeper connections between items which looks fascinating in retrospect since I never plan them. We explored them in our annual list of lists.

I feel like this is a consequence of using this list as a form of digital gardening, a way for me to collect ideas and stories worth checking afterwards. You can do it on Notion, Roam Research or Evernote. You name it.

This week, the red thread is data. It's present on (almost) every single item. And it's the core of what we're building at Sesamers as mentioned in my recent Clubhouse article.

Welcome to the most Selectivest.

Books

Paving - Conversations with Incredible Women Who are Shaping Our World

A book about 25 global women leaders would be remarkable by itself. The fact that it is written by a teenage girl makes it incredible.

The Cold Start Problem

Otherwise known as the "Chicken or Egg Problem," the "Cold Start Problem" is a puzzle that this book promises to address by revealing "what makes winning networks successful, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today."

RyanBerg

Big Ideas 2021 Report

Faster Than The Future: Facing The Digital Age

Shoutout to one of this report's co-authors who also happens to be one of my good friends, Robin Wauters 👋🏼

Page47

Culture

A letter to my people: I

Ignorance is a choice, thus it is not an excuse
MemeGenerator

Venture Capital

Turning up the heat on VC cold inbound pitch forms


Marketing

Battery

The Loop: Our Community & Public Platform strategy & roadmap for Q1 2021

Inspired by the interplay between their Community & Public Platform teams.


Podcast

A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery

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Data

The Data Source #2 | The Metadata Revolution ✊🏽

It all starts with having a strong framework around extracting metadata into one source of truth, an end-to-end lineage powering use cases including data operability, access control, quality, auditability, and more.
Pinterest

Helping the Enterprise build reliable data products

From a VC point of view, if you’re a believer in the evolution of the stack, playing the monitoring part is often a “good” bet to take.
Source: bi-survey.com/top-business-intelligence-trends (n=2,653)

Gaming

A sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator: high-fidelity digital humans made easy

Creating one high-quality digital human is difficult and time-consuming. Scaling that effort to create many diverse digital humans of the quality required by next-gen platforms and high-end virtual production is a formidable task indeed.
YouTube

Science

Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features

What's the best group to win at an Escape Room game? Larger, older, and gender diverse groups are more likely to escape. And machines are better than humans at predicting the outcome.


Music

How Music Promotion is Going to Change in 2021 (Spotify Growth, FB Ads and Beyond)

Smarter Playlists: automate your music discovery, playlist strategy, and library organisation



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