Category: reading list

To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside. So a good area to focus on is an area that looks like work to others, but feels like play to you – That’s your superpower. 

Pushed out by the cost of living as well as by a less welcoming American government, they are being pulled in by countries such as Canada, where tech vacancies are forecast to reach 200,000 by 2020. Canada is gambling that by the time America wakes up to the cost of discouraging immigrants its tech sector will have secured some of the best talent.

The world seems to be moving from a unipolar America-led situation towards a bi-or-multipolar one where China assumes a lot more importance, so speaking Chinese is a good hedge in that sense.

Important reasons –
1. China is emerging from its copycat phase and is beginning to produce interesting technology and cultural products again.
2. Almost as many people speak Mandarin as English; about 1.5 billion for each language.
3. Very few Mandarin speakers also speak English. The oft-cited figure of 300 million english-speakers in China is laughable propaganda, and the true number is probably closer to 10 million, or less than 1% of the population.

Human history is a history of hardship and suffering not because it has to be so, but because it is also a history of near-complete stasis. And this is why ‘sustainability’ is such a dangerous idea.

The term has two complementary meanings: ‘unchanging’ and ‘providing’. It’s the idea that we can find a stable, non-dangerous way of life, where no more existential problems arise that require creativity and progress to solve. This is Garden of Eden-type thinking — environments never sustain anything!

What would I prefer instead? Send me a great cold email. One which tells me why you’re reaching out, directs my attention to something, and suggests what you’d like as a next step. Provide proof, rather than claims (show me code, a blog post, a deck). And don’t start off by apologizing for sending me a cold email.

With Jio pushing data onto your mobile, it can also bundle content through its “pipes.” The Jio service doesn’t only provide data, but could also provide video, audio and other content.

Expectedly, Jio acquired Saavn for music streaming, signed deals with Balaji, Eros and Star for video and has even partnered with cable.

Jio’s bundle could be more powerful than a standalone Netflix, in a reversal of the unbundling. For one subscription price, you could get a lot more than video.

Sarah Kasbeer reflects on a history of hookups — and why they left her cold.

Riva-Melissa Tez is the CEO and co-founder of Permutation in San Francisco. A London native, she runs an artificial intelligence platform and incubator. In her spare time, she works on The Longevity Cookbook, alongside Maria Konovalenkoand Steve Aoki, which is a book that distills academic research into practical measures for slowing the aging process. This is an edited transcript of a recorded interview.

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize just a few big ideas changed how you think and drive most of what you believe.

Morgan on convexity in re-reading. 

Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley.  First they talked about valuations being too high.  Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything.  Then they talked about companies staying private too long.  Then they talked about burn rates.

But something does feel off, though it’s been hard to precisely identify.

I think the answer is unit economics.

For at least a couple of decades NGOs and others in developing countries have been designing, evaluating, tinkering, and trying to improve projects and programs that deliver specific in-kind “interventions” (e.g., micro-credit, asset transfers, business training, savings) to targeted individuals/households (e.g., women, the “ultra-poor”, small enterprises) in ways that raised their incomes in a sustained way. 

This is a great, nuanced discussion on whether such interventions are of any significance as compared to the growth that can be achieved by focusing on big picture questions such as “How to achieve sustained economic growth?” or “How to prevent cyclical effects of recessions?” 

Girard’s ideas applied to ASOIAF.

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.”

This call to intellectual originality is the core thesis of his new book, which isn’t really a management manual or guide to startups so much as an extended polemic against stagnation, convention, and uninspired thinking. What Thiel is after is the revitalization of imagination and invention writ large.

Peter Thiel is asked the formula for starting great businesses at every talk he gives. His answer is every time the same: “There is no formula. You have to figure it out for yourself.”

In his interview, Tyler offers a summary of Thiel’s thought. (Search for the paragraph that mentions Tocqueville.) I haven’t read enough Girard to follow the part about original sin, but Tyler describes Thiel as someone who is trying to get us to break free of socially-derived opinions and to see the world without distortions.

Scott Alexander on tolerance, forgiveness and group dynamics. 

Where should we expect Girard’s predictions for mimetic crises to run most rampant? At places where values are confused and people are much the same. To me, that description best fits one place in particular: the American college.

An excellent application of Girard’s ideas to elite universities where people are stuck playing zero-sum games driven by mimetic contagion. 

I’ll share more about the specifics of this experience, and lessons learned, but mainly I want to enter my first serious attempt at blockchain punditry into the public record: the blockchain is irreversible social computing. 

The message of the medium is this: blockchains never forget. By providing an extra-institutional base layer of irreversibly settling collective memories that cannot be erased, blockchains create a foundation for fundamentally different institutional and technological landscapes. Ones based, as I will argue, on a notion of artificial forgiveness.

Full-Stack Freelancers respond to technology as an opportunity, not a threat. They leverage software-as-a-service and online platforms to vertically integrate a “full stack” of capabilities, instead of focusing on one narrow function. This allows them to capture a much greater percentage of the value they create, instead of giving it away to gatekeepers and distribution bottlenecks.

Full-Stack Freelancers are responding to a series of technology-driven trends — contingent employment, intensifying globalization, and automation — by taking advantage of the other side of the coin: technology finally becoming powerful enough, cheap enough, and user-friendly enough to be deployed productively by a single individual.  

Or A Speculative Sociology of Our Blockchain Future

The Blockchain Man’s world will be defined by the three tenets of the Protocol Ethic.

a belief in the individual as the source of creativity
a belief in serving the needs of the protocol as the ultimate purpose of the individual
and a belief in the application of blockchains to achieve an individual’s highest potential.

It’s tempting to think of Snapchat as a part of the app revolution, as one of the shining examples of mobile-first design that has defined our smartphone age.

This is of course true to an extent, but seeing Snapchat take its place at a consistent #1 or 2 in the US App Store alongside Facebook and Google’s main properties (and the other flavors of the week) somewhat obscures what is actually going on here.

Snapchat is not mobile-first, and it’s not really an app anymore. Nor is it a meta-app platform at this point like Facebook Messenger is angling to become (at least not yet). Snapchat is a true creature of mobile, a living, breathing embodiment of everything that our camera-enabled, networked pocket computer can possibly offer. And in its cooption of smartphones into a true social operating system, we see the inklings of what is beyond mobile.

Content marketing strategy for SaaS businesses. Also, applicable to personal blogs who are starting out.

The best content strategy is the one that prioritizes quality and depth, not volume and breadth:

i. Depth is almost always more useful to readers than breadth.

ii. Content efforts that require a lot of effort (think benchmark reports, data analysis, etc.) often deliver 10x the results of a post that requires less effort.

iii. The huge majority of readers are not regular visitors to your site. Instead, they seek out specific articles to solve specific problems. 

Some harsh facts about love and marriages in India. For all the talk about liberalization and forward thinking, our revealed preferences show a stark contrast. 

Just 3% of urban respondents had a love marriage and the custom of arranged marriages hasn’t changed much over time, data from a survey shows.

A host of factors contribute to China’s growing influence on AI applications:

i. Speed – The Chinese environment is a combination of a huge market, ample capital, and daring entrepreneurs who are the embodiment of “lean startup”: fail fast, fail early, and fail often. Chinese entrepreneurs are fast to find market opportunities, build products, and pivot when needed.

ii. Effective execution – In execution, Chinese entrepreneurs are unafraid of the tedious, messy, and risky tasks, if they help achieve the ultimate result. Chinese CEOs usually have absolute power within the company, which makes execution much more effective.

iii. Acceptance of new tech – The Chinese market rapidly embraces new products and new paradigms. Just within the last 3 years, mobile payments have emerged as the dominant transaction tool, replacing cash and credit cards. Total transaction in 2017 was $18.8 trillion, even larger than China’s GDP.

iv. Support from the government – Sophisticated government support comes in three forms, which are neither blind nor anti-competitive: (1) Central government sets the tone, which can legitimize a burgeoning industry like AI and influence companies and consumers to adopt AI; (2) techno-utilitarian policy, which allows unproven technology to be launched early and quickly and adds regulation only if necessary later; (3) infrastructure-building, such as rebuilding cities and highways.

Marc Andreessen on VC, power laws and software eating the world. 

An excellent post on Brand Redesign that answers the following questions:

i. When do we need a redesign?

ii. How much should the design, interface, and experience change?

iii. How will it affect the business and experience of our existing customers? How much time will they spend retraining their staff?

Tectonic shifts in acquisition strategies are on the horizon owing to rising acquisition costs. 

Why does Netflix fail so frequently?

Two reasons:

i. There are many biases that cloud human judgment

ii. It’s hard to invent the future. It is critical to remove losers swiftly and double down on winners, which means good judgment is paramount.

Working with Amazon is about going in with your eyes open, said Charlie Cole, global chief e-commerce officer at luggage juggernaut Samsonite and chief digital officer at Samsonite-owned Tumi.

Getting in bed with Amazon is a risky business.  

An nuanced take on the twitter war between Taleb and Silver and digging into the cause of the feud.

Let’s be honest, Silver is here to rake in the moolah. No election forecaster got into the business because he has noble intentions. This is entertainment based off of the drama that the US elections are. 

Globally, the people who fight in wars or commit violent crimes are nearly all young men. Henrik Urdal of the Harvard Kennedy School looked at civil wars and insurgencies around the world between 1950 and 2000, controlling for such things as how rich, democratic or recently violent countries were, and found that a “youth bulge” made them more strife-prone. When 15-24-year-olds made up more than 35% of the adult population—as is common in developing countries—the risk of conflict was 150% higher than with a rich-country age profile. 

Interesting article on how video games are compensating for lack of meaning in daily life for a large number of men. 

How it works in general, Barabási suggests, is now becoming clear owing to the emergence from research of a number of simple “laws of success”.

– The first is that “performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success”.
– That phenomenon is the subject of the second law: “Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded.”
– The third law that Barabási describes is: “Previous success × fitness = future success.”
– And then there’s the fourth law: “While team success requires diversity and balance, a single individual will receive credit for the group’s achievements.”

This is quite the article. An excerpt: 

Has anyone ever successfully answered the question of what we should do with our lives?

I feel like ever since the Industrial Revolution, mankind has struggled to construct a meaning by which they can satiate their souls.

What I mean by that: In our ingenuity, we’ve stripped life of some challenges that had previously given us meaning. Our biological systems have not evolved quickly enough to give us the same sense of momentum that our ancestors had when cultivating a garden or constructing a shelter.

The most successful companies and products of the internet era have all been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. 

While we know that not all network effects are created equal, they don’t evolve equally either. Every product has different types of network effects that mature and develop differently over time. If anything, most network effects businesses are changing faster than ever before.

So how can entrepreneurs and founders navigate this era of seemingly diminishing network effects? The trick is to know what your network effects look like today, but also project how they’ll evolve over time. To that end, you’ll need to understand three aspects of your company and how they could change going forward: 
1) your value proposition, 2) your users/inventory, and 3) your competitive ecosystem. Otherwise you could get caught flat-footed, claiming that network effects are dead.

Chinese education technology companies have proven they can solve the #1 problem in online learning. Most people, however, draw the wrong conclusion from these successes.

Online learning programs in China post remarkable student retention rates. These results don’t stem entirely from a unique cultural phenomenon that we cannot replicate. Instead, homegrown innovation in product and business model have driven stickiness in this category. We can and should learn from China’s success in online learning.

The perverse incentives that govern influencer marketing are bad for both consumers and businesses. 

A pair of apps preach relaxation to millions of customers—but still badly want to beat each other.

One of America’s top social scientists on what has changed since he sat down with Reason 38 years ago.

In 2005, as I joined Netflix as VP of Product, I asked Reed Hastings, the CEO, what he hoped his legacy would be. His answer: “Consumer science.” He explained, “Leaders like Steve Jobs have a sense of style and what customers seek, but I don’t. We need consumer science to get there.”

Reed’s aspiration was that the Netflix team would discover what delights customers through the scientific process — forming hypotheses through existing data, qualitative, and surveys, and then A/B testing these ideas to see what works. His vision was that product leaders at Netflix would develop remarkable consumer insight, fueled by results and learning from thousands of experiments.

A long read on some of the more important questions I’m thinking about these days.