Category: reading list

India’s GDP has grown at a rough average of 7 percent per year over the past two decades, social aspirations have risen with it. There have been significant improvements in education in many states. Not long ago, most adult workers had no formal schooling, and hence no hope of formal employment, whether in the public or the private sector. Now, their children increasingly have high school certificates and often also college degrees, and with these the expectation of permanent jobs.

But the number of decent, stable and well-paying jobs, whether private or public, have not increased in keeping with the numbers of new entrants to the labour-force, let alone to accommodate those leaving agriculture and other traditional occupations in search of better employment. This phenomenon has popularly been termed “jobless growth.”

Surveys by the ministry of labour show that only 15 percent of Indian workers have regular, salaried jobs. The same surveys also show that 67 percent of Indian households report a monthly income of Rs 10,000 or less, and only 2 to 3 percent of households earn more than Rs 50,000 a month. These trends have given us a generation that feels cheated by the system.

But the problem is two-fold. While educated young Indians cannot find good jobs, employers cannot find good, educated workers.

Hiring the right people is extremely hard. Not only is the market tightly constrained — especially for tech companies, but the unwritten rules for how to hire are often plain wrong. With more candidates who “look good on paper” going on to flounder at startups, it’s time to rethink what qualities actually make someone a great employee.

Our hiring is almost completely built around just going through someone’s life story, and we look for moments when they had to make important decisions, and we go deep on those.

I find the strongest predictor of people who do well at Shopify is whether they see opportunity as something to compete for, or do they see opportunity as essentially everywhere and unlimited? It’s a rough proxy for pessimism and optimism.

It’s really hard to get entry level PM jobs, and I think it’s representative of a broader issue in how software companies hire.

You should read this book if you don’t have a ready and clear answer to the question: “what are the differences among the concepts of business intelligence, data mining, analytics and six sigma?”

Instabug is based in Cairo, Egypt and was founded during Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman’s last semester at Cairo University. From graduating college in 2012 to graduating from Y Combinator in 2016, the duo built a team, launched an MVP aimed at customers abroad, developed the core product, expanded into an adjacent vertical, grew Instabug’s user base, and secured larger and larger investments.

This article is part of a series of blog posts about Instabug’s startup journey — the struggles behind the scenes of the company’s “wins” and lessons learned from overcoming them.

Robinhood offers free trading, but free doesn’t mean costless.

They’re fairly simple and when you think about it, they are common sense.

1) Your application must save your users significantly more money than any of your competitors
2) Your application must save your users significantly more time in their day-to-day lives than any of your competitors
3) Your application must be significantly more entertaining than any of your competitors

In fact, not being a risk-taker:

Has enabled me to build a business with over 110 employees
Allows my startup, JotForm, to serve nearly 4 million users
Explains why I still own 100% of my business
Underlies our great company culture

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”  
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008) 

Patrick and John Collison have democratised online payments – and reshaped the digital economy in the process

The innovator’s dilemma is this: a company that does everything by the book — listening to customers, managing by facts, being disciplined about costs and quality, and so forth — can get blindsided by an innovation that rapidly takes away its markets, because it was doing everything right.

The innovations that cause this “why bad things happen to good companies” dilemma are disruptive innovations. The signature story of disruption reads as follows: an upstart low-end competitor displaces a much larger incumbent in a market, with the incumbent either retreating upmarket to higher margin/lower volume products or dying out altogether.

The key point to remember is that disruption is a market/business phenomenon and has little to do with technology per se. 

In particular, a disruptive innovation may or may not represent a major technical breakthrough. Major breakthroughs, which are called ‘radical’ in Christenson’s model, may or may not be disruptive, while minor, or ‘incremental’ innovations can be massively disruptive. The opposite of disruptive is sustaining.

The search for solving Bloom’s 2 sigma problem using technology continues.

Why ed-tech may be heading in the wrong direction. 

Take a moment to read that again.  This is the mantra of much of modern day ed tech…can we get the same outcomes of 1:1 tutoring without incurring the cost of 1:1 tutoring?  Analytics, personalized learning, adaptive learning, AI, machine learning…amirite?

So here’s where the bastardization comes in to play.  I think that there has been so much focus on the tutoring part, that we’ve lost sight of the learning part.  “Will it scale?” is arguably the most important question that an ed tech investor will ask.  That’s great, and that’s an absolutely justifiable question.  But if you read through Bloom’s paper, there are two parts to the question.  Will it scale, AND, will it improve learning levels over the conventional baseline.  Like with many “shiny object” technologies, we tend to focus on the scale part and gloss over the improvement part (or worse yet, just “assume” the learning will happen).

What comes first – apps or platforms? 

USV details the history of technology and examines that this chicken and egg problems gets solved like the original one – gradually. 

A common narrative in the Web 3.0 community is that we are in an infrastructure phase and the right thing to be working on right now is building out that infrastructure: better base chains, better interchain interoperability, better clients, wallets and browsers. The rationale is: first we need tools that make it easy to build and use apps that run on blockchains, and once we have those tools, then we can get started building those apps.

But when we talk to founders who are building infrastructure, we keep hearing that the biggest challenge for them is to get developers to build apps on top. Now if we are really in an infrastructure phase, why would that be?

Our hypothesis is that this is not actually how things play out. We are not in an infrastructure phase, but rather in another turn of the apps-infrastructure cycle. And in fact, the history of new technologies shows that apps beget infrastructure, not the other way around. It’s not that first we build all the infrastructure, and once we have the infrastructure we need, we begin to build apps. It’s exactly the opposite.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

Markets tend to favor unequal distributions of market share and profits, with a few leaders emerging in any industry. Winner-take-all markets are hard to disrupt and suppress the entry of new players by locking in market share for leading players.

I’m going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way.

And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma’s rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert.

A happy life is all about managing expectations. If you matriculate at Harvard, great things are expected of you. And if you don’t do great things, are you a disappointment?

InVision’s 700 employees. The company doesn’t have a physical headquarters – every employee works remotely.

We are told we can achieve the same results as someone else by copying their actions. Yet none of the tips, tricks, and hacks we acquire are ever enough.

Self-help pundits fail to emphasize an important fact: The practice, habit or method being promoted was originally developed by someone else to achieve their goals. In other words, someone transforms a practice — that was only ever meant for the originator — into “a technique.”

The person we admire figured out what worked best for them and achieved extraordinary success because they were not focused on what others were doing.

If you’re in tech, you need to move to San Francisco. The advice holds especially if you’re a student, not having dug your roots too deeply anywhere yet.

One of the thoughts that’s been ricocheting around my skull of late is that the problem isn’t initiating action on climate change, but radically changing its direction.

It was prompted by something Heather Davis said in her talk for the Dark Ecology conference, Plastic Geologies: The Problem of Universality. The point she made, almost in passing, was that climate change was the direct objective of western settler colonialism.

The world we live in today, careening toward complete ecological collapse and the total destruction of all planetary boundaries, has been the centuries long project of western industrial civilisation.

As I’ve grown JotForm from a solo venture into a company with 110 employees, I’ve learned a lot about culture.

I’ve made some mistakes, too. That’s why I admire culture-driven companieslike Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and Warby Parker.

I’ll spare you our big mistakes, but here’s what I know for sure about hiring great people and nurturing a healthy startup culture.

Before graduating, Harvard Business School (HBS) students complete 500 of these “decision-forcing” exercises, which are thought to be superior tools for training future corporate leaders, compared with discussing skills and theory in the abstract. Arguably, because the method has been so widely adopted by other schools, which tend to combine it with traditional lecture formats (at Harvard, it’s used almost exclusively), it’s come to be synonymous with business education itself.

But the authors of a recent paper argue that Wallace Donham, the man credited with establishing the case method as a force at HBS in the 1920s, had evolving views of business education that have never been surfaced, and that contradict the sense that management lessons should be viewed through the narrow lens of the case study.

Around this time last year, I began noticing the annual deluge of radio and billboard seasonal hiring ads for our area Amazon fulfillment center. Curiosity got the best of me. I’ve been driving by this facility for a number of years and always wondered what actually happened inside. What was the journey like for the constant stream of packages arriving at my door? My wife begrudgingly, but graciously, entertained my curiosity and let me wander down the Amazon rabbit hole.

A plan is not “what are you going to do”. That’s still a vision. Most everyone thinks a plan is a detailed list of what you will get done reported in a kanban. One way to think about this is to first make sure you have a strategy, but what’s that?

At the company level there is Mission, Vision, Plan, Tactics. See how plan is one part of this. Combine these and you have a strategy. Conflate them or fail to differentiate and you have a mess.

Looking back on the incredible guests I’ve had, I realize now the common mindset that unites them, and I’d like to highlight that mindset here. Even though my guests have come from just about every conceivable background, investing and otherwise, they are all in persistent and consistent pursuit of original experience.

The first common trait is deep curiosity. My take on curiosity after meeting all these people is that it works best in two ways: through building units of exploration, and through embracing strange intersections.

The second common trait is persistence through randomness. Sometimes when I talk with people about the importance of curiosity, they say it sounds too easy and fun. The good news for the skeptics is that more often than not, it’s not fun, it is a total slog. 

The third common trait is risk management. It is tempting to view uncertainty as a sort of risk, but I think that is a large mistake. All the good stuff is found in places that haven’t been mapped already.

More specific to investing, many of my guests have a clear focus on downside risk protection. Several people have told me that there are common ways that things go wrong, but many more unknowable reasons things go right. So instead of trying to predict what will work, focus on avoiding the common pitfalls. 

There are podcasts in China that are ad driven and free for listeners, just like in the United States. Chen said though that he believes the quality of the free content is more entertainment driven and not as useful for his self-improvement.

Podcasts with subscription fees, interactive Q&A’s online with experts or celebrities and live-streaming lecture-sessions where the audience can participate and pay as they wish are what people in China refer to as the “pay-for-knowledge” economy.

“China’s middle class feel that free content will not be good quality and that paid products are packed with useful information and save people time,” Zheng said.

“I think of startup growth in two distinct stages that require very different strategies: Zero-to-one. This is where you’re trying to figure out, does the product even work at all? And one-to-n, where you ask, ‘How can we add in more channels and get very metrics-oriented to scale as quickly and efficiently as possible?’”

The study of complex systems focuses on understanding the relationship between simplicity and complexity. This requires both an understanding of the emergence of complex behavior from simple elements and laws, as well as the emergence of simplicity from simple or complex elements that allow a simple larger scale description to exist.

The first bucket is simple and straightforward: cut out your worst speech habits.

The second bucket falls into the choose-your-own-adventure category. There are many paths you can take. I’ve focused on (1) writing regularly, (2) studying rhetoric and (3) emulating my favorite speakers.

Two things happen to predictions after you get hit with something big and unexpected:

You extrapolate what just happened, but happening with even greater force and consequence.
You forecast with great conviction, despite the original event being improbable and something few, if anyone, predicted.
Which is exactly what happened in 2008.

I won’t do the disservice of summarizing this one. Read this one for sure in its entirety. Josh Wolfe is amazing.

When making critical decisions I’ve learned to take our time, ignore the noise, be emotionless and always be data driven. This framework has led to the right outcome many times even if it looked “foolish” at the beginning (starting Social Capital, buying the Warriors, buying Bitcoin, investing in Amazon, etc. etc…).

This is the next decision along this framework and brings us to today and how we intend to iterate Social Capital. We are no longer accepting new outside capital. By the end of 2018, we will have finalized a set of changes we began in 2017 and will become a technology holding company that will invest a multi-billion dollar balance sheet of internal capital only. 

Luck matters more in an absolute sense and hard work matters more in a relative sense.

The absolute view considers your level of success compared to everyone else. What makes someone the best in the world in a particular domain? When viewed at this level, success is nearly always attributable to luck. 

Then there is the relative view, which considers your level of success compared to those similar to you. What about the millions of people who received similar levels of education, grew up in similar neighborhoods, or were born with similar levels of genetic talent? These people aren’t achieving the same results. The more local the comparison becomes, the more success is determined by hard work. When you compare yourself to those who have experienced similar levels of luck, the difference is in your habits and choices.

One thing about moonshot investing is that you know the market is there.

So the market risk is close to zero. That leaves a big technical risk, I’m not underestimating that. But then you ask — What changes in science and technology would actually make this breakthrough possible?

Before investing, we ask ourselves three questions. The first is “why now,” which is critical for deep tech investing.

The other thing we spend a lot of time thinking about is whether this is feasible in the time frame that is conducive to venture capital.

And the third question you ask is, “Given your timeline of development, how does a business stack on top of that?” It’s really fun to invest in these types of companies because you have people who know the science deeply and they’re missionaries. They’re more purpose-driven than opportunistic.