Welcome to Working Assumptions, new friends. I’m swapping the order of my posts. I’ll send links to what I’ve read on Friday, and my longer form essays on Sundays — it seems like folks have more time to read on Sunday!
Enjoy your weekend and see you on Sunday!
“Everyone’s a Sellout Now”: This article on the mass layoffs in journalism talked about the “personality-ification” of journalism. You need a personal brand, followers, and your own distribution channel for your work in the modern world – the Washington Post won’t do it for you. I think there’s a lot of applicability of this framework to other kinds of careers, certainly any career that relies on “eyeballs and ads” as a way to monetize.
I thought the launch of the Arc browser that “browses for you” was very well done. It is a victory of product marketing. It is what tech marketing should be like, it’s very good!
There’s been a spate of “meta” ads (not Meta ads) lately, if you’ve seen the Intercom ad on the 101. I like the idea of pulling back the curtain and showing how work is done. Intercom, Posthog, and The Browser Company are Quentin Tarantino style “making movies about Hollywood to appeal to Hollywood” — everyone who buys Intercom has a product marketer and knows how hard these things are to get right. They are making the bet that their audience knows the “conventions” they’re discarding, and finds it brave.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff: The story of a 24-year-long marriage between an equally ambitious and complicated man and woman, and the way their relationships and careers eat at them over the duration of their relationship. I stayed up at night with a flashlight, I loved it so.
An amazing article in the Financial Times about Nicole Shanahan’s investment in funding fertility research. In my friends’ “Women in Business” chat amongst their Stanford GSB class, the only topic of discussion for these elite women in business is egg freezing. Every time I sit at a table with my friends, someone asks me if I’ve frozen my eggs. As Shanahan says, extending women’s reproductive longevity is a question of human rights and economic productivity.
Did you know that women’s health attracts only a minuscule percentage of all science funding? In 2019, just about 11% of all NIH funding went to conditions that solely, differentially, or disproportionately affected women. In 2019 alone there were 5.8x as many publications on erectile dysfunction as on female infertility.
I’m still doing the
Slow Read of War and Peace! A quote that I loved from the book that I feel describes the core nature of people in bureaucracy:“I have already told you, Papa,” said his son, “that if you don’t wish to let me go [to the army], I’ll stay. But I know I am no use anywhere except in the army; I am not a diplomat or a government clerk.—I don’t know how to hide what I feel.”
One of my friends is trying to convince me that understanding Taylor Swift is important to understanding business – I thought this article about why TSwift dresses in such mediocre fashion was interesting.
“Swift doesn’t need to be the face of a fashion brand: she makes far more money than most actresses, and her image is so carefully controlled that any deal would need to feel exactly right, and at the right price, for her to say yes,” Sherman wrote. “You could argue that her persona, which remains very young despite the fact that she is firmly in her 30s—Christ’s age, to be exact—doesn’t naturally align with any luxury brands, who either choose famous people who match their aesthetic perfectly (Chanel is good at this) or have such a flimsy idea of fashion that they are easy to mold. I suspect another part of this is that Swift’s demo isn’t likely to significantly move the needle on or create a moment around a luxury good she’d wear.”
This banana bread is soulful.
I commented on this a bit in the context of my Mexico City trip, but it’s eerie how “Brooklyn millennial” the fancy bars in CDMX looked. I met a girl at a party last night, and she was a carbon copy of a trendy friend of mine down to the middle part, lip gloss, and leather jacket. Are the algorithms making us all the same?