Insights 02020
Desire to be Authentic > Desire to be Famous
It’s tempting to think of scientific research as being akin to editing or adding to a vast list of facts, but it’s much more than this because new facts aren’t confined within the existing system of knowledge. Rather, they occasionally (as in the case of Newton’s discoveries) overturn our understanding of what the system is.
Prices for Healthcare, Education, Housing, Food all seem to be out of hand.
Hot Take, Quarantine Day #ILostCount: Responsible adulting is mostly about unlearning the stupid shit, incorrect mental models, and biases you learnt growing up. Learning to think for yourself is today’s winner. Keep your core values, but otherwise just get your shit together.
Covid19 pandemic has shown us that the world works with a lot of chaos, and insane system interdependencies.
3 simple yet powerful indicators of rotting company culture:
1.Mgmt. never ever asks for feedback
2.Behaviors are based on optics creation, & opportunistic leverage rather than brutal honesty & clarity towards a vision
3.Human bottlenecks for a fake sense of importance or role establishment
Product Roadmap Prioritization via Jyoti Bansal
A systematic & practical framework to think about product roadmap prioritization as a founder.
The joy of actually debugging something starting from a complete unknown state & then fixing a problem is boundless. Not to mention the obvious, but applying this strategy to your life at a meta-level has infinite upside. Caveat: problem has to be uniquely interesting to you.
It’s fascinating Index Funds, introduced in 1970s, took so long to be a popular investment choice. Fast forward to now, 2020, it’s the dominant investment medium. Guess, counter-positioning with a valid logical/economically sound thesis — is a real strategic advantage. Recent analysis by Bloomberg on the Big Three in ETFs here
4 Kinds of Chance/Luck by Dr. James Austin via Marc Andressen:
1.Complete pure impersonal luck. Accidental, you can’t influence.
2.Favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment & explore.
3.Favors those who have sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations.
4. Favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.
Product-Market-Fit Measurement Formual via Andy Rachleff:
Enterprise:
1.Sales Yield > 1 HBR Article
2.Pull the product after 30 days of trial or PoC. Customer needs to yell that they need it.
Consumer:
1.Organic word of mouth (WoM) growth (not purchased or gamed growth but exponential organic growth)
2.NPS (Net Promoter Score) - A Decent (not the best) Proxy for WoM
When travellng to a non-English speaking country make sure to spend enough time learning their language. It will make your experience 10x better. I made the mistake of going to Chile w/o putting any effort in learning Spanish, I totally regretted that decision. Obviously it isn’t hard to get around using Google Translate but you don’t get to make a real connection or conversation with the locals. In retrospect, it seems very abrasive & disrespectful to not make a genuine effort in trying to understand their language. Nonetheless, definitely download offline language models on your Google Translate app.