Reading

“the very same forces that connect individuals the world over and allow them to produce and share information also lead to a superabundance of content, and its global dissemination, which threatens the health of a functional public sphere and perhaps...”

“a tiny number of companies is responsible for algorithmically constituting our informational ecosystem.”

Interesting highly factual bio of Godel, but not the most accessible or generlizable bio

“constant in all the world—the place from where she had come”

“Strategy serves best not as an analytical redoubt, but rather in developing the “prepared mind” of those on the ground.”

“If your business does not have at least one of these seven Power types, then you lack a viable strategy, and you are vulnerable.”

“He was studying Hindu scriptures, in order to be able to denounce them intelligently.”

“tourists were treated to truncated kathakali performances (“Small attention spans,” the Hotel People explained to the dancers). So ancient stories were collapsed and amputated. Six-hour classics were slashed to twenty-minute cameos.”

“God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”

- To learn

- smell food before eating

- deconstruct tastes to understand the part. associate herbs/spices with an anchor dish if needed

- Try odd combinations and think about why they work (combos of flavor profiles) - e.g., cinnamon on bacon, cayenne on mango

- foodpairing.be to find pairings and replacements

- Things that always work

- just steam veggies for 15 min and add lemon

- Fish: fennel or dill

- Beef, pork or lamb - rosemary

- lamb: mint

- Eggs: tarragon

- tomatoes: basil

- Suggestions

- maldon sea salt

- Get quickly to breakeven point

- Horizontal relationships

- Demand more

- Global transitions come from shifts in scarcity

- Shifting now from scarce capital to scarce attention

“I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an...”

"Our culture is four things: customer obsession instead of competitor obsession; willingness to think long term, with a longer investment horizon than most of our peers; eagerness to invent, which of course goes hand in hand with failure; and then,...

“Leadership Principles are deeply ingrained in every significant process and function at the company.”

- Docs are discrete information streams (event + context)

Over-specialization makes people blind to connections

Too much over-specialization in this world, limiting creativity

Late specializers have better "match quality" with what they settle into

Also more likely to make connections across disciplines and have more outlier outcomes.

“conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws.”

“We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the...”

“groups of people united by a common interest.”

“We need our work to have meaning, and the communities that succeed the most are clearly able to draw a connection between the work of their members and the broader mission of the overall community. This is why activist groups such as Amnesty...”

“The more team members you have, the geometrically harder it is to share what is currently going on with everyone, as well as have everyone be emotionally bought into the decisions being made. Do not underestimate this cost. It is much larger than...”

“with six or fewer people, the environment feels like a team in battle. Chaos is expected. So when chaos is actually encountered, the team meets it with glee. People who join small teams crave the challenge of new things. They want things to be hard.”

“There is no effectiveness without discipline, and there is no discipline without character.”

“How do you build leaders? You first build character.”

- Negotiation is about emotion, not logic

- Active listening and empathy. Can't be listening well if you are thinking about your own argument

- Accusation audit - take all the negative you expect them to feel and voice it early yourself to anchor them in it

- What we say and do is less important than how you act and feel - your voice can be telepathic if calm, trusting, etc in delivery

- mirroring: repeat key word(s), low voice, downward inflection, imply question

- Label emotions - takes them from amigdala to cortex

- Trigger 'That's right' in them..(better than yes)

- Label + paraphrase to restate their summary and trigger the that's right

- Don't let deadlines and time trick you into bad decisions. Make them work for you

- Missed deadlines almost never have real consequences - they rarely trigger the consequences they supposedly will

- People with damage to emotional part of the brain can't make decisions.

- Fairness is a powerful concept

- "we just want what's fair" implies unfairness and puts other in conciliatory mind

- "it's a fair offer" implies other side is not being fair

- If getting this at you, mirror "fair" and ask for evidence

- "I want you to feel I'm treating you fairly at all points, tell me if not" - sets you up as honest

- Let the other side anchor monetary negotiations

- Name a range. Offer a range where the low end is what you want.

- Give an unrelated gift to trigger reciprocity

- Use odd numbers as they seem specific and reasoned to (instead of round numbers)

- "what does it take to be successful here"

- Negotiation is coaxing , not overcoming. It is co-opting not defeating.

- Open-ended questions: removed the hostility

- "how am I supposed to..." Is a gentle way of saying no that guides the other side to suggest an alternative that is more in your favor

- Forces them to have empathy for you..they have to consider the implementation

- Liars use more words, more complexity, more third person to create distance

“The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no...”

- Demo driven product development. Steve jobs getting demos of what's been worked on

- 7 principles: decisiveness, collaboraiton...

- nintendo vs. sega (vs. sony)

- cultural differences in running a company (US vs. Japan)

- Closed and controlled platform (nintendo) vs. open newcomer (sega)

- All about the software (games) to drive the hardware (consoles)

“The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite.”

“examinations at the Hôpital de la Sulpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no scientific intervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was...”

“Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well. That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things...”

“self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write.”

“it’s the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, after all. Thus it is spreadsheets, not VisiCalc, Lotus, or Excel, that is the adoption category, just as it is browsers, not Navigator or Explorer. In the early days products and categories were synonymous...”

“The chasm represents the gulf between two distinct marketplaces for technology products—the first, an early market dominated by early adopters and insiders who are quick to appreciate the nature and benefits of the new development, and the second a...”

- Need a product first, platform second. That's how you build a side of the market

- Underappreciated benefit of platform model (besides scale and unit economics and variety) is you get to run massive amount of small experiments with real world data on what customers want

- Redraws the lines of the business - influence outside matters more than control inside

- Moved from supply economy of scale to demand economies of scale

- Two sided network effects -

- Ways to attract

- Price - can disappear

- Brand - fickle

- Network - virtuous cycle

- Viral is attracting new, network is making it more valuable for existing

- Need to curate to avoid negative network effects from undesirables crowding out others

- 4 types of network effects

- Cross side and same side effects, on both consumers and producers

- Can be positive or negative on both

- 4 types of companies, broadly: asset builders, service providers, technology creators, network orchestrators

- Network orchestrators are by far the most efficient value creators (2x or 4x better ratio)

- Far easier to scale network effects outside a firm, so focus of organizational attention inverts

- Management of externally is

- Functional integration and network orchestration

- Platforms are complex and getting started is hard - focus first on the fundamentals. What are you trying to facilitate

- 3 things that are exchanged

- Information

- Goods/services (value unit)

- Currency (incl attention and reputation)

- Design one interaction at a time

- As easy as possible to exchange - the core

- Well designed filters are critical - give users the value units that are valuable to them. Eg a good search fn

- Pull, facilitate and match

- Pull - attracting consumers is very different than pipeline biz. Chicken and egg.

- Once they are there, make sure they can find value

- Feedback loop is critical

- Single user feedback loop - targeted value unit to that consumer

- News feed is great feedback loop with likes/etc for producers

- Lower barriers to entry

- Platform must be simple and clean to let users and producers rely on it, no bloatware

- Low variety and stable base

- Integral architecture can be easier, but is much harder for external parties to build on. Network effects are much harder

- Software is eating the world

- V1 was improved digital pipelines

- V2 is platform model

- 3 ways to unlock value and create platform

- Delink asset from value (let it be used by anyone who can find a use)

- Reintermediation - more efficient pairing of value units to consumers..also can leverage social feedback and reputation

- Market aggregation - centralized markets to serve dispersed markets

- Designing for viral growrh

- Pull not push strategies

- Push doesn't work bc it doesn't activate and create feedback loops

- Strategies that bake marketing and appeal into the platform, feedback loops that reinforce the right usage and add value

- Incumbents vs upstarts - not about huge initial user base, but about designing the right interaction model

- What works for one platform does not typically work for others

- YouTube's early focus was entirely on content creators

- Created network of producers which is more sticky than viewers are

- Know your value proposition and those of your competitors

- Solving chicken and egg problem

- Start with an existing pipeline business then open to external

- Staging value creation - attract initial users who then create new value units

- Focus on one side then use that to attract the others

- Simultaneous onboarding in a burst

- Example variations

- Piggyback off another customer base or provider base (scraping Craigslist, ebay PayPal)

- Seed the initial value by being the first provider

- Incentives to key users

- Exclusive access

- Induce producers to bring their customers

- Big bang strategy for simultaneous onboarding

- Can do this in small networks too, not just globally

- Micro market - bring people who are already likely matches (fb at Harvard)

- Viral growrh requires 4 components

- Sender

- Value unit

- External network - medium where something spreads

- Recipient

- Viral growth incentivizes every user to become a marketer and spread value externally

- How to monetize the business

- Cannot charge either side - would discourage entry, data etc

- Unless you need to add friction to curate

- Charge at deal completion - once value is proven

- Or charge for something tangential

- What value is created on the platform? 4 types

- To consumers - access to value created on the platform (apps, vids)

- To producers - access to a market

- For both - access to tools and services that facilitate interactions

- For both - access to curation mechanisms

- Plenty of times that monetization may not be possible - need to produce enough excess value through the platform that can be captured by the platform

- More users is not always better

- Meetup succeeded by charging organizers, making for better interactions

- Find a way to monetize in a way that does not destroy network effexts

- Charge for enhanced curation

- Enhanced access to users (broader reach, sponsored content)

- Subscription

- Charge for completed transactions

- Charge for advertising that is beneficial to both sides (eg LinkedIn recruiting)

- Charge for enhanced tools that aid the interaction beyond the match

- Who to charge

- All members - when you want to curate the full network

- Charge the side that values the interaction more

- Subsidize 'stars'

- Charge the less price elastic group

- Never take first money - only once both other sides have gotten value

- Platform is basically an infrastructure to facilitate exchanges that are valuable

- Start with the basic then later on over time

- How to decide how open to be?

- Three kinds - manager and sponsor particiaption, developer participation, user participation

- Manager - different than sponsor. Apple, Android, linux all different

- Devs - core, extension, data aggregators

- Core - app store

- Extension - apps; opened through apis, which can be closed . Salesforce gets 50 percent of revenue through APIs

- Data -

- If an extension app can become a platform itself, seek to own it

- If a function is often reinvented by extensions, own it and make it a free api( (camera, record)

- Users - compete openness usually doesn't work, need to filter for quality

- The unique value of a platform lies in it's ability to make connections between users outside the platform itself

- Governance

- Don't take more than your fair share

- Don't change rules in your favor

- Always create value for your customers

- 4 ways to build healthy markets

- Increase safety - transparency, wualitu, insurance

- Thickness - discoery

- Minimze congestion

- Minimize repugnant activity

- 4 tools to control behavior

- Laws - forbid smoking

- Norms - mkae it uncool

- Architecting - filters that reduce the impact

- Market - taxes

- Use all 4

- Vibrant community is one of the most important things a platform can have

- Promote the best members

- Have a natural role progression to more authority

- Trigger - action - reward - investment

- Unexpected rewards are most habit forming

- Let users have a hand in designing the system

- Use social credit system to get community involved

- Tell community what you are building and help them financially to avoid unnecessary competition

- Insurance exacmple - transaction benefit and freedom outweighs fraud

- Metrics

- Successful interactions and value for all users

- Early -creation, sharing of value.

- Later - retention and conversion

- What portion is happening on vs off the platform

- Which groups to incrnticiz, to bring onto the platform, to charge..

- At maturity, innovate to enhance the value proposition against competitors -- track producers and consumers participation closely

- In phases

- Startup -

1. Liquidity - percentage of successful interactions is high. There is stuff to do! Percent of listings that lead to interactions within a time period.

2. Matching quality - successful curation ; daily interaction percentage

3. Trust - comfort with engaging in interactions on the platform

- Growth

- Producer to active consumer ratio

- Producer - frequency, offerings, rate of failed interactions, fraud; can calculate LTV of producer

- Consumer -

- Interaction conversion rate

- Consumer conversion to producer (issue attestation)

- Odd one - distance to consumers. How integrated into lives?

- Maturity

- Measuring incremental changes to the product

- Drive innovation - identify what developers are doing that's valuable to absorb,

- Signal from noise - don't over measure/underprioritized

- The more you measire, the less prioritized you'll be. No vanity metrics

- Actionable, simple, auditable

- Resource allocation -

- Strategy

- In Porter's 5 forces - build a moat to avoid competition, and push all others to compete; horizontal and vertical integration

- Resource based view - control of a key resource

- Sustainable advantage disappearing today with such rapid iteration and competition

- Purpose of business is to create a customer

- Can remake markets through network effects

- Platforms turn businesses inside out, moving resources outside the walls

- How platforms compete

- Limit access to control more value

- Foster innovation and capture it's value. Eg sap dev community. Don't seek to own all value, but do own the most important resources

- Leverage data -

- M&a - get to observe activity on the platform first

- Platform envelopment - scan the horizons for adjacent platforms

- Enhanced platform design

- When advantage is sustainable

- Supply economy of scale

- Strong network effects

- High switching costs

- Catering to niche tastes/specialization

“company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you.”

“while I’ve removed the words “policy” and “procedure” from my vocabulary, I love discipline.”

Great NYC book

Beinoffs story with some interesting tactics on his journey. Very accessible but not that useful

- Auctions as free markets- used everyhwhere from ads to spectrum

- Moral economies were the norm before. Superior to market economy in many ways but do not scale past trust/gossip/community

- Markets must be free, competitive, and open

- Two problems - market power, and lack of markets

- Monopoly power is everywhere - individual land owners, etc

- Monopoly game was developed to share this idea

- Corporations skirt this by owning many assets

- Voting

- You should have to pay for what your vote denies someone else (the way buying a good denies them that good)

- Y

“the Crisis, all aspects of work within the aerospace system accelerated, and even the long-delayed first-generation space”

“who tarried in the city, and there were casualties.”

- Frictionless entry but then easy paths up the participation scale

- Be ready to capture a moment to galvanize a movement

- Most crowdfunding happens in last 3 days