Business Ideas From A $200M CEO

GM! It's Tuesday, February 7th - Today, we're covering Google's new ChatGPT competitor, the Carlyle CEO's $180m pay package, Dell laying off 6,500 employees, and a business idea from a $200m CEO.

- Callum

FEATURE

Business Ideas From A $200M CEO

Last year, Patrick Campbell sold his bootstrapped business ProfitWell for $200m. After the sale, he's been exploring new business ideas. Here's one he thinks has a lot of potential.

What's the problem to solve?

Every startup needs great managers, but most lack this historical bench of managers to draw from. Typically, the only way to grow into a great team leader is to be mentored by someone in a legacy organization willing to take the time to walk you through various scenarios. This mentorship and training is very common at large established firms (like Intel, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon), but exceedingly challenging for startups.

The core thesis: 80% of best practices for management training are the same across most companies, so why doesn’t someone document them all and give them away in a database?

The Big Idea

Help small-to-mid-sized companies improve their managerial talent with a comprehensive database of best practices for management training and career development.

Here's How To Build It

1) Identify the core interactions that managers have with their teams throughout the complete life cycle of an employee, from onboarding to separation.

2) Figure out which managerial practices are foundational to all verticals. For example:

• How to fire someone

• How to promote someone

• How to host weekly meetings

• How to Interview

3) Create a suite of courses on best managerial practices.

4) Interview a cohort of managers to find out their top three pain points within the practices you have identified.

5) Deploy one of two “freemium” models discussed above with a basic strategy of giving access to the top three pain points and marketing the rest of the suite to the user base.

You could also ignore the pain point approach and provide the first set of scenarios, i.e., onboarding and day-to-day workflows. This creates a habit/need for the progression of interactions chronologically.

HEADLINES

Google Announces ChatGPT Competitor

> Google announces Bard A.I. in response to ChatGPT as the company's core product – online search – is widely thought to be facing its most significant risk in years.

> New Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz gets a shot at a $180m pay incentive.

> FTX is chasing politicians like Nancy Pelosi to return donations given before the crypto giant's collapse. They now have a deadline of February 28 to pay.

> Live platform Fever scores a $110m round of funding led by Goldman Sachs at a $1.8B valuation.

> ShiftMed raises $200m to expand its digital healthcare marketplace.

> Penske Media acquires a $100m stake in Vox Media and becomes Its Largest Shareholder.

> Dell to lay off 6,650 workers, or 5% of its workforce

> Supernatural: After a victorious battle with the FTC, Mark Zuckerberg finally gets to buy Within Unlimited, the maker of the popular fitness app Supernatural.

ON TREND

Chat Wars - Google vs. Microsoft

You should know:

Google recently announced Bard A.I., its answer to the viral chat app ChatGPT - a generative AI company that quickly grew to over 100m users in months.

• OpenAi's ChatGPT and generative models are considered the most significant risk to Google's search business. Microsoft recently invested $10b into the company.

• Google core search business generated $163 billion in revenue last year.

• Bard A.I. is built using Google's large language models and draws information from the web, unlike ChatGPT, which does not store information after 2021.