Yvonne Chiang

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Airbnb : Finding a Home Anywhere
Yvonne Chiang
Posted on December 9, 2015 at 8:52 pm
Launched in 2008 to capitalize on the hotel room shortage around the Democratic National Convention, Airbnb has emerged as a market leader with its successful alignment of operations and sharing economy model.

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On December 14, 2015, Yvonne Chiang commented on Didi Kuaidi & China’s Car-Hailing Market :

Interesting read, thanks Tara! I’ve been curious to see what Uber is doing in countries like China; I had not known about Didi Kuaidi until your post. I find it fascinating that over half of its trips are in the private-car service, quite similar to how Uber started out in the US. I wonder if both Uber and Didi Kuaidi would follow similar U.S. service expansion trends such as UberX and Uber Pool.

In addition, since Kuaidi is backed by Alibaba, it would be interesting to see if there’s any synergy that could be achieved with ridesharing from Didi Kuaidi and goods-delivering from Alibaba. As Uber in the US is exploring food/package delivery services, I can see similar opportunities that would be tremendous given the existing infrastructure that we learned about in the Alibaba case.

On December 14, 2015, Yvonne Chiang commented on How Zara uses supply chain to execute business model :

Awesome post Alina, I almost wrote about Zara myself!

If I remember correctly, another key factor in Zara’s success is its use of cross-functional teams in its initial design phase. Similar to what we saw in the IDEO case, Zara really encourages quick feedback and prototyping early on to achieve its amazing turnaround turn – Zara’s designers, product/market specialist, planning staff, and prototype shop are often located in one room.

Similar to what others have mentioned, I wonder how its operating model changes for different product categories. In addition to potentially tailoring to local tastes, I imagine that another major divide would be stable/basic items vs. trendy items. As the supply and demand for stable/basic items are likely more consistent, I imagine the processes you described are more applicable to its trendy items. Thanks for a great read Alina!

On December 14, 2015, Yvonne Chiang commented on Tableau: Managing the data explosion :

Great read, Sagar!

I also used Tableau quite extensively in my last job, and one of the challenges we ran into is its limited implementation when not all users have licenses (mainly due to cost constraints). Tableau is powerful in its dynamic data visualizations, so it’s often not as useful when one person in the group (or on the client side receiving the reports) does not have the Desktop Licenses to modify the dashboards.

In our usage, we found Tableau’s competitive advantage in its ease of use for the more basic data users and business needs. This likely will be the space that Tableau will continue to differentiate itself in, as evidenced by its ranking in the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant year after year.
http://www.tableau.com/gartner-magic-quadrant-2015

Since you brought up the IPO, I’d be interested to explore further if Tableau’s operating model and/or business model has changed now that it’s a public company. Thanks Sagar!