Insights 02019
Legendary Startup == Slightly Contrarian Startup via Andy Rachleff
The quality of the top management in an organization is highly correlated to whether they fuel/promote: 1. Optics builders or 2. Value builders. Optics builders surface smoke & mirrors, and very nuanced politics. Value builders surface clear truths, tough problems, and direct solutions. The worst of them all don’t know which is which.
Asian restuarants in the Bay Area always seem very well-staffed and high-paced. Wonder if it has todo with some foundational cultural unpinning? Is it about community?
I always wonder why - when people interview celebrity scientists, or businessmen; they always ask - “Describe what a working day in your life looks like”. I feel what people generally do on weekends is far more interesting or insightful about them. Note: Not implying that someone should be working on weekends
Stripe’s API metaphor (as explained by someone how worked there for 5 years) is a great example of explicitly setting up culture that actually aligns with the core business of what Stripe actually does. We did something similar at FogHorn as covered in my culture essay.
With everyone getting into streaming and original content by 2020; the leverage is definitely on the talent side. An org like CAA under @MichaelOvitz would thrive right now with an immense one-stop shop value proposition; completely talent/quality driven.
Polls related to naming publicly visible things seems to excessively popular in the general population.
In the 4 years at my startup, until 2019, while running a core team of 12; I only got like 2 referrals. Even though we had a good referral bonus and reminded people all the time to refer freinds. Why is this? Do people have really poor networks? Do really smart people inherently small professional networks?
Human bonds created in some sort of adversity are probably the strongest bonds that exist. Example: Having a near death experience and surviving it together.
Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro (tallest peak in Africa; 19,341 feet) has certainly been one of the best memory of my entire life. Extremely challenging and extremely satisfying. Even though backpacking trips are tagged with cliched self-discovery storylines, I have to admit: it opens a certain window to peek within. Things that are hard to endure are things that are sweet to remember.
Your core invention/compelling value (business model, product, or process) + market dynamics/trends + market size + execution quality => these four factors ultimately decide the fate of your business and its lifetime - via the book 7 Powers
With the spotlight on the success of neural nets and deep learning techniques in specific problems; a general lack of funding and research interest on other radical approaches towards intelligence is observed in the last couple of years.
In 2019, I particularly noticed a couple of specific instances where U.S. government policy and mindset had big social, environmental, and economical impact. From 2015 - 2019, a significant dip in the # of people wanting to come to the U.S for higher education. H1-B visa rejections went from 4-5% to 40-50%. Looser regulations & policy on Oil & Gas lead to lesser accountability for working on better solutions for the environment. Outright deprioritization of global warning lead to harmful economic consequences. Trade war with China significantly effect market dynamics. Government created extreme polarization created between left & the right and weaponized it domestically.
If your product manager schedules a brainstorm meeting with 10 people - either don’t attend that meeting or fire your product manager if you can. Brainstorm meetings with 10 people just doesn’t work. If it’s really needed have 10 people generate ideas separately and showcase them.
I wonder what % of software development effort is duplicated at companies across the world. Common infrastructure components, boiler plate, tooling, utilities etc that people build over and over again at different. For e.g. I have written a web socket server at-least 3 times until now in 3 different language. C++ being the absolute favorite and best implementation w.r.t performance. It’s fascination to ruminate if this is one of the reasons we don’t make progress fast enough. Of-course there are frameworks that abstract away some of the repetition but there is so much stuff that needs to be built alongside just the core of your functionality. There is always a something different or unique about the application; always a something different or unique about the application, it seems. Other key forces at play: a. once you have too much abstraction only God knows what the hell is going on underneath the layers when you crash (but where do you find a good balance; would great debugging tools fix this?), and b. developers love starting idea from a blank slate.
Most creative work is not done with writing proper headlines, titles, or sub-categories. that pseudo creative stuff. Creative work is usually messy in the beginning.
While doing any project: it’s hard to focus on just the parts the offer the most ROI. Learn this skill; saying no to features as an engineer is hard. It doesn’t have to be perfect in round one. Always be self debugging mode.
Dishwasher usage is a great example of how the human brain learns by daily association. How strategically you set it up improve exponentially over time.
It’s super important to make easy-to-use tools for thought. It’s an amazing general pattern for abstraction. All great tools abstract so much that the users don’t even realize how much work is done underneath. This is true for all great products e.g. Google Search (Web), Stripe(Payments), Google Maps(Travel) etc. or even just an excellent book. Great interfaces hide inessential complexity and expose very high leverage actions and representations by Micheal Nielsen.
Michael Nielsen - Best Tweets 2018
Always remember the difference and similarity between motivation v/s incentives in the organization. You have to optimize for both in your organization.
Guide to block chain programming
First principles thinking playbook:
1.Always question the defaults; Always!!!
2.Goto & commit to fundamentals; reach absolute/basic truths and then reason up from there,
3.Have original thoughts,
4.Optimize the function; ignore the form,
5.Innovation lies at multi-displinary things,
6.Practice makes it better; so this type of thinking often - “explicitly”.
via @naval - alternate reading books from the following fields is actually a great idea: biology, physics, mathematics, cs, philosophy, economics, psychology, microeconomics.
Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is a great example of rebel with a cause - she so same and simultaneously so different.
Breed thoughtful dissent. Encourage it for creative, new learning as it will provided better insights. Get outside your comfort zone.
A good on-boarding page and program is one of the most underrated asset in an organization for establishing culture.
Good question to ask founders: What has surprised you the most since starting the company. What early assumptions turned out to be wrong.
Good services marketplace startups are those where there is large or highly customized demand (different perception of value) and less supply. Regulated or Customer have to do too much work themselves to figure it out.
Why & how WeChat became the central hub for pretty much everyone in China. What forces allowed for this to happen in China as opposed to the west - as it almost feels like a digital extension to a person with APIs access to that.
Stubborn Attachments by Tyler Cowen makes you realize how bloody dumb you are in general. How people live narrow lives in their little bubbles of work, leisure, home, media etc. and think it’s such a cool existence. Packs quite the punch. Very glad I picked this to read.
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they’ll use it even when it’s a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they’ve never heard of?
The biggest sin for killing creativity is taking the current state of the world for granted. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. You couldn’t get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.
When something annoys you, it could be because you’re living in the future - PG
The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies - PG
So don’t look for a replacement for x; look for something that people will later say turned out to be a replacement for x. And be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most) - PG
Where do most interesting ideas germinate from - especially weird or surprising ones? long extended conversations with people, rants about problems people have, travel to unknown, new places, sci-fi movies, conferences outside your field like UX, literature, biology, physics etc., randomly stumble upon stuff, read papers from 1960 - 70s (mobile and pervasive computing), reading about history, questioning the defaults about everything in your day to day life, books about the future from the past, operational tours about things in new industries, following great people on twitter - Levie
Find upstream sources of material or people whom you admire. Basically go to the main source. - Patrick Collison
Why having a baby is described as a transformative experience by many people? Is it biological and DNA (where years have trained to be happy) or is it truly an abstract notion created in our minds and is all about emotions? Or is it both?
The line - “Fake it, till you make it” can be more positively interpreted if we look as it as aspiration rather than lying to yourself. Most major decisions (which are big) are probably more aspirational.
Writing good emails:
1.Good subject with ACTION, INFO, REQUEST etc. properly communicated.
2.Bottom Line Upfront (BLUP).
3.Use Active Voice.
4.Be economical and bullets with background.
Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility - Yuval Noah Harari
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - expand your mental models so you can question yours worldview about everything.
Managing and keeping a team motivated is a continous daily effort. Explicitly invest in the internal narrative of your startup. Keep a strong 1-on-1 cadence and follow up with people. Mostly importantly, listen patiently.
Evaluating decisions on outcomes prevents us from learning. We need to dive into a decision, cut it open and examine its parts - Farnam Street
If people don’t go to universities in the future and the current slow shift in them not retaining the same kind of signaling power they used to; then do university endowments no longer continue to remain a viable LP resource for venture capital in the long run?
Never underestimate the value of incentive alignment.
It’s fascinating that Amazon is spending some many R&D dollars in logisitic improvements and innovation. Although not so much on the buying experience. For instance, why I can’t shop seamlessly & beautifully on my mobile phone. Yes, there is way to do it but it just feels like web on the phone. Instead of a native mobile shopping experience. Would that affect buying behavior? Would customers care? Or is it something that doesn’t matter at all.