10 things I consumed this week...
Enjoy with your Black Friday purchased speakers (if you're anything like me)
I consumed a lot this week, not the least of which was a lot of food and a planned list of essentials I’d purchase during Black Friday. I may have only slightly deviated from that list, but it was really just to do my part so that Stripe and Shopify made their processing numbers, you know. I needed speakers for my cool new record player!
On to the recs:
The Founders by Jimmy Soni is an inside view on the founding of PayPal that is incredible for anyone working in tech, but it also has this extra allure for anyone who knows payments. It has this combined effect of reminding you that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin really were geniuses (just try and solve the AMC math problems they embed in the book — they’re PayPal interview questions) and simultaneously clueless (the PalmPilot era of PayPal is hilarious.) They solve all the problems any payments team tackles: fraud modeling, fast onboarding, encouraging bank payment methods over cards, etc. It’s also filled with incredibly tough interpersonal problems — Elon is fired by the board, for one. My friend S recommended the book to me with the quote, “I wish I had known much of what the book teaches before I entered SF.” Same!
Someone sent me this PDF of “11 rules of showrunning,” which, I think, is exactly like being a founder of a creative company. Product CEOs are like showrunners in that they create vision for the product and need to bring in a slew of highly diverse characters to autonomously and creatively get the job done. Some CEOs aren’t “vision people” — there’s a lot of debate as to whether you have to be, whether you can be simply “good at delegating and hiring.” That’s not a debate with showrunners:
There are seven words no competent showrunner should ever say: "I'll know it when I see it." When you're a showrunner, it is on you to define the tone, the story, and the characters. You are NOT a curator of other people's ideas. You are their motivator, their inspiration, and the person accountable for their implementation. Bottom line: the creativity of your staff isn't for coming up with your core ideas for you, it's for making your core ideas bigger and better once you've come up with them. To say "I'll know it when I see it" is to abdicate the hard work of creation while hoarding the authority to declare what is or isn't good.
As a showrunner, you must communicate your vision so that everyone understands it, and then preach it, day in and out, to the point of exhaustion until everyone feels it in their soul like a gospel. And here's the great part of successfully communicating a shared vision: your employees will love you for it. Loyalty to an employer begins with the knowledge of what the job is. Loyalty comes from knowing that your bosses have your back both in the form of giving out the information necessary to do what you do and do it right, and the empowerment to use your own abilities to improve on the baseline.
On why Friendster lost steam… I’m really interested in “failed company stories” these days, since I think all of the success stories are just reciting practiced PR talking points instead of digging into what they genuinely did right. This post doesn’t really come to a crisp set of issues (and compares Friendster to the success story of Myspace!!), but provides some view into how adoption worked: “Mainstream American users came on because of mass media, not because of organic cluster effects. When they joined, they couldn't see anything or anyone. It was also not where all of their friends were and often they got bored before their friends arrived; there was never enough of a tipping point for many mainstream clusters.” Same issue with modern Twitter?
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft. I don’t really get this take, especially if I’m considering AI to be more akin to the compiler than to, say, Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But it wasn’t just the New Yorker who posted such laments — Slava (former founder of RethinkDB) said the same.
If you’re a climate and sci fi person, you’ll know Kim Stanley Robinson — he’s the most beloved climate fiction writer out there right now, and his books are incredibly well regarded by climate leaders and fiction readers alike. This blog reviews every book he’s ever written. If I were to recommend one KSR book, it’d be his most famous one, the “Ministry of the Future.” It will green-pill you.
This is an amazing recipe for Miso Tahini Sweet Potatoes that got me multiple rave reviews at Thanksgiving. It’s so easy that even I can do it.
Everyone I know has either frozen their eggs or at least thought about it, and I’m sure that’s true for you too. Have you listened to this BANANAS podcast about a fentanyl addict who was stealing the pain killers, letting women go through the retrieval without any?! A good “long holiday season traffic jams/waiting rooms” listen.
The Flux Collective’s year in review. I love the very thoughtful and eclectic curation of new ideas because they help me think better. An example:
In the lush complexity of rainforests, certain relationships evolve between organisms, such as a specific plant that co-evolved with a specific hummingbird species. The long, narrow flowers of one plant are a perfect fit for a hummingbird with a long, straight beak. Likewise, the curved flowers of another have corresponding hummingbirds with curved beaks. Each pair is adapted to a specialized niche.
This relationship serves as a metaphor for professionals long embedded in a peculiar organizational culture with its particular business pressures. Consider senior employees experienced in writing technical roadmaps, crafting product designs, and influencing decisions. They may profess their particular organizational dogma as universally correct, and the organization develops blind spots as a result.
A two year old learned how to read at a ~4th grade level thanks to spaced repetition. Amazing, I am a sucker for this type of Polgar/Curie-like parenting tactics.