How Do You Know When It’s Time To Go?

There’s a lot of ground to cover here and after 10+ drafts I’ve figured out that I can’t write about everything and still make this readable, so here’s some context:

• The target audience I’m writing for is people who haven’t changed jobs a lot. Customer Success at Microsoft was my 17th job and I still struggle with the “when is it time to go” but I remember it being way harder when I quit my first job or when I shut down my first start-up so this my way of sharing some of what I’ve learned since then.
• This isn’t about crappy jobs. Jobs where your manager sucks or you get treated unfairly or harassed or discriminated against. If you’re in one of those jobs, a LinkedIn post really shouldn’t be the driver for you to change.
  This is about those jobs that are actually pretty awesome, when you’ve got a good company, with a vision you can get behind and a good manager and good pay for the work that you do and probably even prospects if you keep your nose down and do good work for a couple more years. That’s a good job by pretty much any definition, and that’s the one you really agonize about because in ten or twenty years time you will start asking yourself “what if…”
  Let me help you get to that question quicker!

With that out of the way, three takeaways – the second one is pretty Customer Success specific but the other two should work for everyone:

1. Go where? There’s a lot of nuance to this. ‘Go’ doesn’t have to mean leaving your current company (although it might!), it means finding your next challenge. But this requires you to understand the lay of the land. No one is going to come to you and say “Tim you’re amazing as a CS, come work for me in Sales” or Product or anywhere else in your organization. I mean, maybe they will to you! But I’ve not had that experience. Every one of the 17 jobs has been because I’ve applied for the role. Now it’s possible that this is because I’m not that great at Customer Success but I suspect that it’s because, in a most organizations, that’s not how things, work most of the time.
   • So the key point here is that you, and only you, are responsible for your career. Not your company, not your manager, not your HR person, you. Other people can help, absolutely, I’d encourage you all to be putting regular time in your managers calendar to check in on your career. Get another perspective on where you are on the mastery curve, tell them what you are enjoying and ask them what kind of roles they think you’d be good at. Leverage those resources, but own your own journey.
     • And remember it’s not a tunnel leading to Satya’s role, the best advice I ever got was that your career is a pond and all across the pond there are rocks. At the other side is your goal. Maybe it’s being a CEO, maybe it’s being a technical expert, maybe it’s retiring at 40. And there are many paths to get there, sometimes you’ll jump from one rock to another, and find that this is not the rock for you and you need to go back. Sometimes life happens, you have twins (!) and then you need to look at the rock you are on and decide if, hey, this rock is pretty good for a little while, it’s not my goal, but I can stay here a bit because there are other things in my life that need to take priority right now. But we’ll come back to that later…
2. When you lose your empathy: the secret to great Customer Success is having empathy. Placing yourself in the shoes of your customer and understanding what they want to achieve and how they are trying to achieve it. And that’s really taxing; it’s the reason that a lot of CS people burn out. My working theory is because if you do this right, you see a lot of the problems with your own product or organization and so you have this dichotomy within you, where you have a problem but you are unable to resolve it (because in most orgs, stuff doesn’t move fast and CS doesn’t change how the product works). Over time this builds up until bad things happen. Be aware. Manage this and when you can’t do that anymore… change.
3. When your priorities change: “Thanks for that deep insight Tim, yeah…” but how many of you actually know what your priorities are? Microsoft has a week every year that they call “Trust week”. It’s a chance to reflect on things like ethical decision making and understand a little more about how to support and grow that internal voice that guides you. Two years ago, we had a guy come and talk to us about what the warning signs were that people were going to make unethical decisions. Super interesting talk, I don’t remember his name (if any of the MS people can, please let me know so I can link it !) that I’ve left but one of the things that really struck me was that these people, the ones who faked the Volkswagen emissions tests, the ones who omitted the 737 MCAS info when working with the FAA. These weren’t bad people, these were engineers and pilots who were put in untenable positions, their organizations saying to they “you need to product these results or you’re out of a job”. And with the benefit of hindsight we can act all shocked and “how could they have done that” but in the end, it came down to what was a priority for them, and the priority of keeping their job vs. maybe getting found out, maybe not, at some point in the future… So, the bad news, you will have to make a similar choice at some point in your career, I guarantee it. By virtue of reading this far, it’s clear that you are a high achiever, driven and engaged, and so you’re going to be put in this position at some point, as a result. One of the ways you can build a defence against making the wrong decision is by understanding what you’re going to prioritize. What’s important to you.When I was doing my MBA, a mentor of mine, Ryan Gunesekera, gave me an exercise with a set of cards… 3 categories: Important, Not so Important and Very Important. I had to sort 70 cards with values on them, into those categories. Eventually what I ended up with was a stack ranking of what was important to me. I found this super valuable, because I don’t typically have a problem choosing between a good thing and a bad thing but it’s when I’ve got to choose between two good things (do I work a little longer on this project that’s going to help my customer vs. spending that time with my daughter?) understanding which consistently comes first really helped me. I’ve made it into an online exercise here: http://principlestack.com/ It should take about 20 minutes and I do it every couple of years and it evolves (because you change!) as a reflection of what’s important to you. If you have any questions or want to chat about it after you’ve done it, more than happy to talk… I’ve got plenty of time right now!

Wrapping up, I want to reiterate the theme that I suspect most of you picked up on in maximizing value while at MS section, the thing that’s worked really well for me has been to create value for other people. If you want a quick thumb suck test on whether what you are doing is valuable, reverse the roles; would I be happy with this service/product/treatment? I’ve found that a consistent benchmark both professionally and personally, if you can deliver the level of service that you would expect to be given, you’re gold. You’ll win the trust of the customers you’re working with the the results and accolades will follow.
It’s been a fantastic experience, creating value for our customers, learning and building at Microsoft and working with you. I’ve made life-long friends, done things I’m incredibly proud of, been challenged and grown as a result. Thank you all for contributing to that, don’t be a stranger, and if I can help you, or if you even just want to bounce some ideas off someone, please reach out.

Thank you!

Thank-you and goodnight

Now a quick caveat, I spent 3 years at MS… that’s a little while, but it’s not 20 years and my insights reflect that relatively limited experience, this is what worked for me, maybe you’re the same, maybe this is just an interesting set of datapoints about how other people think about things… either way I hope there’s value here for you:

How can you maximize value while you’re at Microsoft?

1. Build networks: especially when you’re early in career, you’ve got at least another 40 years if you want it, the tech world is small, Switzerland even more so, chances are that you’ll interact professionally with others again. Create value for others by doing good work because this will follow you across your career.
   • A side note: Beware not updating your previous impressions. I did an MBA 10 years ago, if I was to get back in a room with those people now, what preconceptions would I start with? What heirarchy would I expect to ‘naturally’ emerge? The cool kids, the ones who went to McKinsey, the ones who started companies and built empires. Despite knowing these people incredibly well 10 years ago, they’d be almost strangers to me today, in terms of their experience and their abilities. You learn and grow every day, so does everyone else. Update your priors… and leverage this to your advantage. Create value for others and they’ll engage readily in the future.
2. Learn: MS has some amazing opportunities to learn, we all know the MOOC’s, they are exceptional. Do them all. There’s also a lot of mandated learning, don’t let that deter you from investing some of your time into building the skills you want to invest in. Chat with your manager, allocate time every week, build a habit. Microsoft gives you the space to learn, don’t waste that.
   • Try something new. One of my highlights was speaking at the MS technical conference about “what’s not going to change in the next 10 years” with Emma Stephen. Was it a strictly technical talk? Not really? Was it something Dev’s need to think about if they want to deliver a great product, absolutely. Create value for others.
   • Teach others: the one thing that will accelerate your learning the fastest is teaching others. Here again, you are creating value for other people. Learning on it’s own is actually pretty useless, it’s only when that learning is applied, when you do, that you add value to the world but that cool this is that you can 10x that really quickly, by teaching others what you have learned. You’ll understand it better and you’ll establish expertise (remember the bit about impressions above!)
3. Understand the mastery curve: so my ballpark calculation is that it takes between 3 & 5 years to master customer success. There are a couple of dependencies: have you worked in CS before; do you understand how the company works and how your customers work? Some of this is experience based, but you pretty quickly run through the permutations of the problems you’ll need to solve. As you go along this curve, what you spend time on changes. In year 3 you’ll be able to manage your customers in 60% of the time it took you at the start, at year 5… it might be 20%. That’s how good you’ll get. So it’s important that you evolve with the role, it’s important that you shift to teaching, it’s important that you find passion projects that inspire you and do more than just add usage or seats, it’s important that you keep learning and trying new stuff because that will extend how long you can do this role successfully.

Stay tuned for the second part, later this week: How do you know when it’s time to go…

One Thing I Learned Each Week – 2020

 

So I know I’m running a little late this year but Cyberpunk 2077 is as good as the hype! Anyway, here’s a selection of 52 articles that made me think this year. 

I’ve tried to stay away from COVID-19 pieces (think we’ve all read enough) which is a good segue to remind you that there’s no expectation that you read everything, pick and choose. What’s interesting? What’s outside your filter bubble (is there such a thing)? Grab an espresso, settle in to your favourite comfy chair and enjoy… 

 

Start-up’s, Scaling and Flywheels

20 mins – The Adjacent User Theory: Andrew Chen is on my “read everything he writes” list but the best post on his blog this year was a guest post from Bangaly Kaba on user growth. Moving users from aware (and maybe even tried, but haven’t become engaged) to regular users is a super interesting area that drives you maximize the product-market fit you’ve worked so hard to create

16 mins – Underutilized Fixed Assets: it’s the second half of this Kevin Kwok article that got me thinking; if you’re reading this article than you probably already know the first half – fixed assets like houses (AirBnB), cars (Uber), commercial kitchens (cloud kitchens) can be utilized more efficiently via a marketplace. The cool bit is where he starts to look at what happens after the platform arrives (how people’s behaviours change because the breakeven calculation for that holiday house looks very different if you can offset via AirBnB) as well as the professionalization and services ecosystem that springs up around the platform.

22 mins – Productive Uncertainty: Jerry Neumann is a VC who dives into the framework for investing into deeptech/capital intensive start-ups. His theory is that in these areas (high uncertainty), VC’s should invest in start-ups in emerging markets who have new technologies rather than competing with incumbents (even with a new technology). 

16 mins – The Five Stages of Denial: I’ve been trying to read more European VC’s and entrepreneurs to understand the ecosystem over here and I’ve found Nicolas Colin (from ‘The Family’ in France) has produced some absolute gems. This one is from 2016 but I still think it’s one of his most impactful articles on how Europeans incumbents are reacting to software eating the world. Might be at the “New Balance of Power” stage right now.

17 mins – How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1000 users: Lenny Rachitsky has built a customer acquisition cheatsheet that every start-up should be using. Even Microsoft could leverage this as a framework for product launches. Interesting that he differentiates between the first 1000 and from 1k -> 10k. Already looking forward to the follow-up article.

19 mins – TikTok and the Sorting Hat – How could I write about tech and startups in 2020 without at least one reference to TikTok! Of all the articles I read, this is the one I learned the most from. I love Eugene Wei’s strategic lenses and this was the one that helped me understand that the true value here is the Bytedance algorithm. Up until TikTok you needed friends to successfully scale a social network and this shows that there is another way to do it.

8 mins – The Product Philosophy of Kuaishou: a great follow-up to the TikTok article with an insight into the other Chinese short video product Kuaishou. Lillian Li does an awesome job of translating both the product and cultural drivers that have led to Kwai’s success. Interesting to look at this with the lens of Michael Sandel’s piece on Education bias (down the list a little further)

 

Strategy & Economics

15 mins – Strategy in the Post-Fixed Costs Economy: this article got sent to me because it includes one of my favourite definitions from Bill Gates  “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” My job has involved a lot of thinking about platforms this year and this is a great article to get 80% of what I’ve learned, in 15 minutes! Also… when you see that graphic for Banks -> Customer Needs… you can replace Trade Ledger with Stripe and that’s why everyone is so bullish there.

28 mins – Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System: a fascinating deep dive into complex systems to find counterintuitive leverage points. There’s a useful taxonomy here in terms of where it’s most effective to intervene for greatest impact (and also where the system will resist change the most). This is an early Sunday morning, when it’s quiet and everyone else is asleep, kind of read. As someone who is not a systems analyst, I needed time (and re-reading) to get the most out of this one.

7 mins – How Costco Convinces Brands to Cannibalize Themselves: private label retailing interests me because it seems so counter to the prevailing brand-centric way of doing business today but it’s a sector that’s growing rapidly. Worth reading because of what Amazon is doing in the same space (although with a very different approach).

19 mins – Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping The World: technically a 2019 article but I only came across it this year and despite all that happened in 2020, these are even more relevant now (aging demographics, wealth inequality and information ubiquity). A great article to share with people to spark a discussion. It’s one thing to read and learn about this, it’s another to leverage that information.

14 mins (+ 22 mins) – Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage: this caused quite a stir (at least in the Twitter/HackerNews/Substack bubble where I hang out!) when it came out in May, probably lucky it didn’t happen in December when they IPO’d. Their “Demand Test” growth strategy is pretty interesting (we’re delivering your food with your consent or without it) and it’s worth a read of Alexandre Dewez’s S1 Analysis if you’re considering investing in Doordash (or Uber – given they’ve given up on a lot of other moonshots).

9 mins – Scale and Loyalty are more important online than offline which drives much of the “winner takes most” reality of the internet: built around the precept that the barriers to entry are low, but the barriers to scale are high. This is going to be really interesting given the looming regulatory banhammer coming in the US and EU and the online-only retailers experimenting with offline seems to support the theory.

20 mins – When Tailwinds Vanish: John Luttig makes the case that we are moving to a new model for growth rates and internet enabled consumption and that the blitzscaling model has had its day vs. sustainable growth. This aligns with the article that had the biggest impact on me this year, Debt is Coming, by Alex Danco (in his own section at the bottom!)

8 mins – Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost: a new tool for my strategic toolbox. I’m often find myself asking “how could they have forgotten to build X feature” but with this approach I’ve found myself asking if it’s a resourcing/prioritization issue or a fundamental conflict between their vision and my expectation (the previous default assumption) before I go off on a rant.

45 mins – Money is the Megaphone of Identity: this year I was privileged to have a conversation with a teenager about money and after about 10 minutes I realized that I hadn’t thought this through at all. So I did some reading and this was the best, most approachable piece for having a chat about the topic with someone who is trying to understand what the fuss is about and how they should build their approach. It’s a long read but an important conversation to have (hattip Rich Dad/Poor Dad which also did some heavy lifting).

 

Data, Data and More Data

12 mins – Defining 90’s Music Canon: this is just a great bit of analysis on how to define a generational song. Specifically, what do the kids today recognize from Mum and Dad’s era? A bit limited by the dataset (Billboard top 100). Naturally, my one-year-old daughter Charlie has been getting Smashmouth Allstar on the change table to imprint it early. 

4 mins – Electric Cars emit less CO2 over their lifetime than diesels even when powered with dirtiest electricity: pretty much what it says on the label, but the reason it shows up in here is that it was one of the tipping points for EV this year. I’d bet that within our lifetime ICE vehicles will achieve the status of horses today; an expensive hobby.

9 mins – The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths: Dr. Richard Fletcher from Oxford University dove into what the data actually tells us and highlights that there is not a lot of evidence of a filter bubble effect. However something is clearly going on here (and we might be misattributing what we observe to filter bubbles) because while we have access to more diverse sources, polarization still appears to be occurring so finding the mechanism that is actually driving that is the next challenge. 

7 mins – Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs and skydiving: a great mental model for risk (a micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death) – running a marathon is 26 micromorts! Just “being alive” is 24 micromorts per day. I had a lot of fun with the calculator and when it got updated for microCOVIDs I was all over it. Note that the resolution is nation-level, so there’s probably additional fidelity that could be brought in here. On a side note… no public transport for me until I’m vaccinated!

 

Governments and Cultures

6 mins – The young hackers transforming rural China: a great article that prompted me to buy the book, about the shift from mega-city back to the country and bringing the latest technology along with them. The idea of Taobao towns is amazing and a little frightening but labour follows opportunity and the push to modernize rural China will be a generational endeavour.  

11 mins – The age of cooptation: The high cost of doing business in Xi’s China: so, in the light of what’s happened with Ant and Jack Ma and Zoom and TikTok and TSMC, it’s worth understanding the history behind how China has protected and nurtured it’s tech industry and it’s own version of the web and the companies that provide those services because there is a cost to doing business in China and being aware of what those are, is not something I’m convinced that a lot of companies (incumbents and start-ups) have grokked yet.

23 mins – The Coronavirus and the Right’s Scientific Counterrevolution: I really tried to away from COVID related topics, but this looks beyond how those in power acted and asks how scientists and experts exposed themselves and created mistrust by undergoing the scientific process of hypothesis/challenge/test/update position in a public forum and how this is the latest drama has affected judgement and sense across the political spectrum.   

5 mins – Disdain for the Less Educated is the Last Acceptable Prejudice: Building on the themes from the last article, Michael Sandel examines what happens to a disenfranchised group who feels undervalued and unheard by their society. Elitism isn’t just an issue in the US, but it gets more media coverage there and he gets to the heart of the issue with the classic American dream namely whether to attribute success to personal effort or environment?

35 mins – Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know: fair warning, this is not for everyone! But as an immigrant in Switzerland, I find their model for direct democracy to be effective at empowering citizens and educating and creating a safe space for public political discourse. It’s not perfect but what I appreciate more and more is that the Swiss see the role of government as a tool to enact the will of the people, and I struggle to find other governments that do that. 

22 mins – A New Land Contract: focused on land/housing costs in the UK (although this is a problem that much of the world is facing –  Canada and Australia I’m looking at you) starting from the history of the concept all the way through to land rights and the massive transfer of accumulated wealth at the expense of the tax-payer. The suggestions at the end of the paper might appear a little socialist for my American readers, but given the push back on income equality that’s happening internationally, land ownership seems like the biggest bucket to tackle.

 

Crypto, AI & Open Source

30 sec – Ethereum 2 Launchpad. This goes in here because of what it represents; a shift from proof-of-work (e.g.: mining – computationally and therefore resource expensive) to proof-of-stake (capital expensive but way more distributed and robust). eth2 will be what enables crypto to scale as a functional product vs. just be a store of value.

11 mins (+16 mins) – Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height: this is a pretty contrarian take but I found it valuable (given the focus on this inside MS and the large enterprise customers I work with). Obviously cloud infra costs are something that MS doesn’t see as a negative (!) but the rest of the points are valid particularly around reusability and this looking like software masquerading as a service. As a counter-narrative, check out Alex Danco’s take on the Silicon Valley contract around the suspension of disbelief required to innovate and draw your own conclusions.

13 mins – Why American Farmers are Hacking Their Tractors with Ukrainian Firmware: a very readable expose on black market tractor hacking! Manufacturers have always built in mechanisms for maintaining the service revenue stream but with software, things get tricky, particularly for a large investment like a tractor. Right-to-repair is important because it seeds innovation and breaks lock-in/planned obsolescence. The engineer (and the country boy) in me is firmly on one side on this! 

 

Storytelling & Biographies

21 mins (+19 mins) – The Metaverse: What it is, Where to Find it, Who will build it, and Fortnite: Matthew Ball wrote a lot of great pieces on gaming and storytelling this year but the Metaverse one is the one where the underlying idea resonated the strongest. When we look at why movie franchises and Harry Potter or Pokemon or Disney IP lasts, it’s because they have created the world (albeit pre-Internet) that people want to both use and go to for storytelling and escape. 

15 mins – To Get Good, Go After The Metagame: a worthy follow-on to the Metaverse article if the whole concept was a bit meta for you. Explaining what the metagame is; in some senses, another term for mastery but also combined with the idea of a doctoral study. i.e.: increasing the worlds knowledge by changing the rules as they are understood today.

28 mins – A Kingdom From Dust: maybe because I’d just read “Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi, the storytelling craft that Mark Arax demonstrated here, really hit home. It’s a long read best saved for when you want to escape from wherever you are and bury yourself in the dry Californian dirt.  

12 mins – Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong: climate modelling is worth paying attention to because there’s a high likelihood that sometime in the next hundred years, water is not going to be where we expect/need it (fresh water sources as well as sea level). I was under the assumption that sea levels are “averaged” around the world, but Jerry Mitrovica makes a strong case for there being meaningful localized effects.

13 mins – For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Cover Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps: OK… so this is in here because it’s just plain cool. This is the mapping equivalent of easter eggs in code and I love it.

24 mins (+26 mins) – Daniel Ek via the Observer Effect: I hadn’t really read much about the CEO of Spotify previously. I’ve really liked what they’re doing in the podcasting space as well as their mix of human/automated curation (check this out from Brett Bivens if you want more of a ‘Spotify product’ focus) so I was interested in how he thinks. Sriram Krishnan is an amazing interviewer and he helps uncover how a lot of Swedish/European values guide the organization, even at scale, which helps it zig vs. the US cultural zeitgeist of zagging.

12 mins – What Matters More Than Your Talents: I always seem to end up with something from Jeff Bezos in these lists! This is from Princeton graduation speech in 2010, but it’s a timeless reflection on gifts (and by extension – privilege) and choices as to how we leverage those. His personal story of being clever at the expense of being kind is a lesson I value being reminded of. 

 

Remote Working & the Future of Work

10 mins – The Five Levels of Remote Working: the first half of my 2020 was spent helping traditional, large organizations make the shift to remote work, most of them are at level 2 but I’ve observed with interest the broadening perspective that leads to stages 3 & 4.

6 mins – Sustainability over speed: adopting asynchronous communication: not being able to lean over your shoulder to ask your co-worker a question or get a second opinion is something most of us have had to come to terms with this year. Thinking about a new mode for interaction in the workplace (see level 3 & 4 above!) will go a long way to reducing some of the stresses created by the change.

8 mins – Surviving disillusionment: while this is written for a programmer audience, the idea of burnout and ways to counter that is a common theme for all professions. What’s interesting here is how he applies it to jobs that don’t have an obvious “higher calling”, a programmer and a doctor have a very different perspective on how their work impacts society and people directly and Slava taps into with strategies to keep your practice fresh.

9 mins – Collectives in the Creative and Business Worlds: I’m fascinated by the idea of collectives and the resurgence that was going on pre-COVID in this type of structure for gaming, influencers, musicians and digital artists. Alexandre Dewez dives into the history, via French hip-hop and then links it to a future state of work for freelancers and members of the gig economy. Some interesting tools to try and challenges to be aware of.

5 mins – Time for a new social contract for the gig economy – pair with the last article and you start to get a picture of how Europe could legislate/regulate it’s way back into relevance after losing the entrepreneurship battle to the US. Some great frameworks in here for what this could look like.

 

Three Thinkers 2021

Here are three new people to add to my list (already included: Ben Thompson; Tim Urban and; Benedict Evans). I found everything these guys wrote, valuable, even (especially?) if I didn’t agree. Definitely worth subscribing to their newsletters if you’ve enjoyed the themes above. 

Alex Danco: a reformed VC (headhunted in 2020 to head up Shopify Money’s strategy unit) who I stumbled across via this article on how the start-up ecosystem is ready to evolve using debt in addition to equity to fund expansion at SaaS companies. A credible hypothesis and my most read, referred back to and shared article of 2020. Watch this space. Also worth checking out this piece on subsidizing rent via amazon prime (!) and Cooking as a Service (Mr.Beast + TK are there… definitely a bet for the post-COVID world).

Byrne Hobart: has an awesome newsletter called the Diff, does consistently great analysis and critical thinking. Explored topics like why are Frequent Flyer programs are worth more than the airlines that run them as well as income inequality (riffing on Piketty’s r > g) and plenty of Uber coverage! 

Yannick Oswald: A VC based in Paris with an amazing process for thinking about start-ups and innovation and what comes next. He got me hooked with this article on Annual Run Rate and it snowballed from there. Then there’s this piece on different subscription billing models and what that means for your business in terms of cashflow. Complex concepts, simply explained.

That’s it! If you’re looking for more during the year, you can always check out my flipboard feed and drop me a line and let me know what you liked or didn’t, what you’d already seen, and anything you’ve read that adds to the conversation! Have a great 2021.

 

 

So I know I’m running a little late this year but Cyberpunk 2077 is as good as the hype! Anyway, here’s a selection of 52 articles that made me think this year. 

I’ve tried to stay away from COVID-19 pieces (think we’ve all read enough) which is a good segue to remind you that there’s no expectation that you read everything, pick and choose. What’s interesting? What’s outside your filter bubble (is there such a thing)? Grab an espresso, settle in to your favourite comfy chair and enjoy… 

 

Start-up’s, Scaling and Flywheels

20 mins – The Adjacent User Theory: Andrew Chen is on my “read everything he writes” list but the best post on his blog this year was a guest post from Bangaly Kaba on user growth. Moving users from aware (and maybe even tried, but haven’t become engaged) to regular users is a super interesting area that drives you maximize the product-market fit you’ve worked so hard to create

16 mins – Underutilized Fixed Assets: it’s the second half of this Kevin Kwok article that got me thinking; if you’re reading this article than you probably already know the first half – fixed assets like houses (AirBnB), cars (Uber), commercial kitchens (cloud kitchens) can be utilized more efficiently via a marketplace. The cool bit is where he starts to look at what happens after the platform arrives (how people’s behaviours change because the breakeven calculation for that holiday house looks very different if you can offset via AirBnB) as well as the professionalization and services ecosystem that springs up around the platform.

22 mins – Productive Uncertainty: Jerry Neumann is a VC who dives into the framework for investing into deeptech/capital intensive start-ups. His theory is that in these areas (high uncertainty), VC’s should invest in start-ups in emerging markets who have new technologies rather than competing with incumbents (even with a new technology). 

16 mins – The Five Stages of Denial: I’ve been trying to read more European VC’s and entrepreneurs to understand the ecosystem over here and I’ve found Nicolas Colin (from ‘The Family’ in France) has produced some absolute gems. This one is from 2016 but I still think it’s one of his most impactful articles on how Europeans incumbents are reacting to software eating the world. Might be at the “New Balance of Power” stage right now.

17 mins – How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1000 users: Lenny Rachitsky has built a customer acquisition cheatsheet that every start-up should be using. Even Microsoft could leverage this as a framework for product launches. Interesting that he differentiates between the first 1000 and from 1k -> 10k. Already looking forward to the follow-up article.

19 mins – TikTok and the Sorting Hat – How could I write about tech and startups in 2020 without at least one reference to TikTok! Of all the articles I read, this is the one I learned the most from. I love Eugene Wei’s strategic lenses and this was the one that helped me understand that the true value here is the Bytedance algorithm. Up until TikTok you needed friends to successfully scale a social network and this shows that there is another way to do it.

8 mins – The Product Philosophy of Kuaishou: a great follow-up to the TikTok article with an insight into the other Chinese short video product Kuaishou. Lillian Li does an awesome job of translating both the product and cultural drivers that have led to Kwai’s success. Interesting to look at this with the lens of Michael Sandel’s piece on Education bias (down the list a little further)

 

Strategy & Economics

15 mins – Strategy in the Post-Fixed Costs Economy: this article got sent to me because it includes one of my favourite definitions from Bill Gates  “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” My job has involved a lot of thinking about platforms this year and this is a great article to get 80% of what I’ve learned, in 15 minutes! Also… when you see that graphic for Banks -> Customer Needs… you can replace Trade Ledger with Stripe and that’s why everyone is so bullish there.

28 mins – Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System: a fascinating deep dive into complex systems to find counterintuitive leverage points. There’s a useful taxonomy here in terms of where it’s most effective to intervene for greatest impact (and also where the system will resist change the most). This is an early Sunday morning, when it’s quiet and everyone else is asleep, kind of read. As someone who is not a systems analyst, I needed time (and re-reading) to get the most out of this one.

7 mins – How Costco Convinces Brands to Cannibalize Themselves: private label retailing interests me because it seems so counter to the prevailing brand-centric way of doing business today but it’s a sector that’s growing rapidly. Worth reading because of what Amazon is doing in the same space (although with a very different approach).

19 mins – Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping The World: technically a 2019 article but I only came across it this year and despite all that happened in 2020, these are even more relevant now (aging demographics, wealth inequality and information ubiquity). A great article to share with people to spark a discussion. It’s one thing to read and learn about this, it’s another to leverage that information.

14 mins (+ 22 mins) – Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage: this caused quite a stir (at least in the Twitter/HackerNews/Substack bubble where I hang out!) when it came out in May, probably lucky it didn’t happen in December when they IPO’d. Their “Demand Test” growth strategy is pretty interesting (we’re delivering your food with your consent or without it) and it’s worth a read of Alexandre Dewez’s S1 Analysis if you’re considering investing in Doordash (or Uber – given they’ve given up on a lot of other moonshots).

9 mins – Scale and Loyalty are more important online than offline which drives much of the “winner takes most” reality of the internet: built around the precept that the barriers to entry are low, but the barriers to scale are high. This is going to be really interesting given the looming regulatory banhammer coming in the US and EU and the online-only retailers experimenting with offline seems to support the theory.

20 mins – When Tailwinds Vanish: John Luttig makes the case that we are moving to a new model for growth rates and internet enabled consumption and that the blitzscaling model has had its day vs. sustainable growth. This aligns with the article that had the biggest impact on me this year, Debt is Coming, by Alex Danco (in his own section at the bottom!)

 

Data, Data and More Data

12 mins – Defining 90’s Music Canon: this is just a great bit of analysis on how to define a generational song. Specifically, what do the kids today recognize from Mum and Dad’s era? A bit limited by the dataset (Billboard top 100). Naturally, my one-year-old daughter Charlie has been getting Smashmouth Allstar on the change table to imprint it early. 

4 mins – Electric Cars emit less CO2 over their lifetime than diesels even when powered with dirtiest electricity: pretty much what it says on the label, but the reason it shows up in here is that it was one of the tipping points for EV this year. I’d bet that within our lifetime ICE vehicles will achieve the status of horses today; an expensive hobby.

9 mins – The truth behind filter bubbles: Bursting some myths: Dr. Richard Fletcher from Oxford University dove into what the data actually tells us and highlights that there is not a lot of evidence of a filter bubble effect. However something is clearly going on here (and we might be misattributing what we observe to filter bubbles) because while we have access to more diverse sources, polarization still appears to be occurring so finding the mechanism that is actually driving that is the next challenge. 

7 mins – Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs and skydiving: a great mental model for risk (a micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death) – running a marathon is 26 micromorts! Just “being alive” is 24 micromorts per day. I had a lot of fun with the calculator and when it got updated for microCOVIDs I was all over it. Note that the resolution is nation-level, so there’s probably additional fidelity that could be brought in here. On a side note… no public transport for me until I’m vaccinated!

 

Governments and Cultures

6 mins – The young hackers transforming rural China: a great article that prompted me to buy the book, about the shift from mega-city back to the country and bringing the latest technology along with them. The idea of Taobao towns is amazing and a little frightening but labour follows opportunity and the push to modernize rural China will be a generational endeavour.  

5 mins – Disdain for the Less Educated is the Last Acceptable Prejudice: Michael Sandel’s “Justice” was one of the required readings for our MBA and this builds on that theme. The 2016 US election results highlight how a disenfranchised group who feel undervalued by their society, reacts. Elitism isn’t just an issue in the US, but it gets more media coverage there and he gets to the heart of the issue with the classic American dream namely whether to attribute success to personal effort or environment?

35 mins – Swiss Political System: More than You ever Wanted to Know: fair warning, this is not for everyone! But as an immigrant in Switzerland, I find their model for direct democracy to be effective at empowering citizens and educating and creating a safe space for public political discourse. It’s not perfect but what I appreciate more and more is that the Swiss see the role of government as a tool to enact the will of the people, and I struggle to find other governments that do that. 

22 mins – A New Land Contract: focused on land/housing costs in the UK (although this is a problem that much of the world is facing –  Canada and Australia I’m looking at you) starting from the history of the concept all the way through to land rights and the massive transfer of accumulated wealth at the expense of the tax-payer. The suggestions at the end of the paper might appear a little socialist for my American readers, but given the push back on income equality that’s happening internationally, land ownership seems like the biggest bucket to approach.

 

Crypto, AI & Open Source

30 sec – Ethereum 2 Launchpad. This goes in here because of what it represents; a shift from proof-of-work (e.g.: mining – computationally and therefore resource expensive) to proof-of-stake (capital expensive but way more distributed and robust). eth2 will be what enables crypto to scale as a functional product vs. just be a store of value.

11 mins (+16 mins) – Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height: this is a pretty contrarian take but I found it valuable (given the focus on this inside MS and the large enterprise customers I work with). Obviously cloud infra costs are something that MS doesn’t see as a negative (!) but the rest of the points are valid particularly around reusability and this looking like software masquerading as a service. As a counter-narrative, check out Alex Danco’s take on the Silicon Valley contract around the suspension of disbelief required to innovate and draw your own conclusions.

13 mins – Why American Farmers are Hacking Their Tractors with Ukrainian Firmware: a very readable expose on black market tractor hacking! Manufacturers have always built in mechanisms for maintaining the service revenue stream but with software, things get tricky, particularly for a large investment like a tractor. Right-to-repair is important because it seeds innovation and breaks lock-in/planned obsolescence. The engineer (and the country boy) in me is firmly on one side on this! 

 

Storytelling 

21 mins (+19 mins) – The Metaverse: What it is, Where to Find it, Who will build it, and Fortnite: Matthew Ball wrote a lot of great pieces on gaming and storytelling this year but the Metaverse one is the one where the underlying idea resonated the strongest. When we look at why movie franchises and Harry Potter or Pokemon or Disney IP lasts, it’s because they have created the world (albeit pre-Internet) that people want to both use and go to for storytelling and escape. 

15 mins – To Get Good, Go After The Metagame: a worthy follow-on to the Metaverse article if the whole concept was a bit meta for you. Explaining what the metagame is; in some senses, another term for mastery but also combined with the idea of a doctoral study. i.e.: increasing the worlds knowledge by changing the rules as they are understood today.

28 mins – A Kingdom From Dust: maybe because I’d just read “Water Knife” by Paolo Bacigalupi, the storytelling craft that Mark Arax demonstrated here, really hit home. It’s a long read best saved for when you want to escape from whereever you are and bury yourself in the dry Californian dirt.  

12 mins – Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong: climate modelling is worth paying attention to because there’s a high likelihood that sometime in the next hundred years, water is not going to be where we expect/need it (fresh water sources as well as sea level). I was under the assumption that sea levels are “averaged” around the world, but Jerry Mitrovica makes a strong case for there being meaningful localized effects.

13 mins – For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Cover Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps: OK… so this is in here because it’s just plain cool. This is the mapping equivalent of easter eggs in code and I love it.

 

Biographies

A quick callout here because most of the biographical stuff I’ve ingested this year has come via podcasts. The wonderful Tyler Cowen in Conversations with Tyler is a great place to start. Likewise, had some hits with Tim Ferris, but found that it depended on who he was interviewing.

24 mins (+26 mins) – Daniel Ek via the Observer Effect: I hadn’t really read much about the CEO of Spotify previously. I’ve really liked what they’re doing in the podcasting space as well as their mix of human/automated curation (check this out from Brett Bivens if you want more of a ‘Spotify product’ focus) so I was interested in how he thinks. Sriram Krishnan is an amazing interviewer and he helps uncover how a lot of Swedish/European values guide the organization, even at scale, which helps it zig vs. the US cultural zeitgeist of zagging.

12 mins – What Matters More Than Your Talents: I always seem to end up with something from Jeff Bezos in these lists! This is from Princeton graduation speech in 2010, but it’s a timeless reflection on gifts (and by extension – privilege) and choices as to how we leverage those. His personal story of being clever at the expense of being kind is a lesson I value being reminded of. 

 

Remote Working 

10 mins – The Five Levels of Remote Working: the first half of my 2020 was spent helping traditional, large organizations make the shift to remote work, most of them are at level 2 but I’ve observed with interest the broadening perspective that leads to stages 3 & 4.

6 mins – Sustainability over speed: adopting asynchronous communication: not being able to lean over your shoulder to ask your co-worker a question or get a second opinion is something most of us have had to come to terms with this year. Thinking about a new mode for interaction in the workplace (see level 3 & 4 above!) will go a long way to reducing some of the stresses created by the change.

8 mins – Surviving disillusionment: while this is written for a programmer audience, the idea of burnout and ways to counter that is a common theme for all professions. What’s interesting here is how he applies it to jobs that don’t have an obvious “higher calling”, a programmer and a doctor have a very different perspective on how their work impacts society and people directly and Slava taps into with strategies to keep your practice fresh.

 

The Future of Work

9 mins – Collectives in the Creative and Business Worlds: I’m fascinated by the idea of collectives and the resurgence that was going on pre-COVID in this type of structure for gaming, influencers, musicians and digital artists. Alexandre Dewez dives into the history, via French hip-hop and then links it to a future state of work for freelancers and members of the gig economy. Some interesting tools to try and challenges to be aware of.

5 mins – Time for a new social contract for the gig economy – pair with the last article and you start to get a picture of how Europe could legislate/regulate it’s way back into relevance after losing the entrepreneurship battle to the US. Some great frameworks in here for what this could look like.

 

Three Thinkers 2021

Here are three new people to add to my list (already included: Ben Thompson; Tim Urban and; Benedict Evans). I found everything these guys wrote, valuable, even (especially?) if I didn’t agree. Definitely worth subscribing to their newsletters if you’ve enjoyed the themes above. 

Alex Danco: a reformed VC (headhunted in 2020 to head up Shopify Money’s strategy unit) who I stumbled across via this article on how the start-up ecosystem is ready to evolve using debt in addition to equity to fund expansion at SaaS companies. A credible hypothesis and my most read, referred back to and shared article of 2020. Watch this space. Also worth checking out this piece on subsidizing rent via amazon prime (!) and Cooking as a Service (Mr.Beast + TK are there… definitely a bet for the post-COVID world).

Byrne Hobart: has an awesome newsletter called the Diff, does consistently great analysis and critical thinking. Explored topics like why are Frequent Flyer programs are worth more than the airlines that run them as well as income inequality (riffing on Piketty’s r > g) and plenty of Uber coverage! 

Yannick Oswald: A VC based in Paris with an amazing process for thinking about start-ups and innovation and what comes next. He got me hooked with this article on Annual Run Rate and it snowballed from there. Then there’s this piece on different subscription billing models and what that means for your business in terms of cashflow. Complex concepts, simply explained.

That’s it! If you’re looking for more during the year, you can always check out my flipboard feed and drop me a line and let me know what you liked or didn’t, what you’d already seen, and anything you’ve read that adds to the conversation! Have a great 2021.

 

One Thing I Learned Each Week – 2018

Last year I did a collection of articles based on one thing I learned each week. Turns out, people liked that so here’s my list for 2018, plus a special section shout out to the three writers that impacted me the most.

There’s no expectation that you read them all, instead; pick and choose. What looks interesting? What’s outside your filter bubble? What can you use as a conversation starter over a whiskey after a meal?

 

Ethics & Psychology in Tech

16 mins – The Truth is Useless: We’ve been told that facts have lost their power, that debunking lies only makes them stronger and that the internet divides us. This article examines the science behind the post-truth world and concludes that we shouldn’t believe any of it.

14 mins – Why Cloudflare Let an Extremist Stronghold Burn: Cloudflare prevents DDOS attacks on websites, but when they choose which websites can access their services and which can’t, they’re effectively filtering the internet. We’ve seen similar discussions happening at Google and FaceBook. It begs the question: is Internet access a “utility” like power and water and therefore should be treated (and regulated) in the same way? Is that even possible?

18 mins – Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet: Andrew Marantz and the New Yorker tackle one of the trending topics for this year, how do you allow people to have open, honest and authentic conversations without limiting free speech? And similar to Cloudflare, who should have the power to police topics and conversations?

12 mins – Who owns a Scientists Mind: a fascinating dive into the history of how businesses have taken control of knowledge and ideas by Physics Today. As jobs transition to more and more “knowledge work” this becomes a bigger issue for the wider economy as businesses try and extend control through non-competes and trade secrets acts while economic research seems to suggest that knowledge mobility (employees being able to take their skills to a new role) benefits society more as a whole. Watch this space!

17 mins – The Follower Factory: A New York Times expose into the black market that traffics in social media followers (primarily bots but also click farmers). Had some really interesting conversations with my data science friends about how this messes up analytics and how bad this could get with improvements in conversational AI.

22 mins – The Psychology of Money: is an insightful inspection of our biases and wants that drive our behaviour towards money. The ‘earned success and deserved failure’ fallacy, cost avoidance, signaling, compounding value, pessimism vs. Optimism,  our inability to forecast and an overweighted sample size of one (our own experience) are all identified, cataloged as well as the antidote. A great read to help understand yourself.

7 mins – Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test: and while we’re thinking about psychology and money, some additional insight into the classic Marshmallow test of children’s willpower which was retested (it’s been a great year for scientists retesting previously accepted results). Qualitative sociological research supports the idea that environmental context has as much to do with behaviour as willpower or any other character trait.

9 mins – People Don’t Actually Know Themselves Very Well: self-awareness (or the lack of it) is a fascinating topic and any article that helps uncover the patchwork of biases and shortcuts used to protect our ego is guaranteed a click from me. Adam Grant from the Atlantic does a great job of identifying where those traps are so you can get an external reference point to work from.

7 mins – Thinking of your work self as separate from your home self could lead to unethical decisions: a treatise on the dangers of compartmentalization and while your mileage may vary, understanding the context in which you can potentially fool yourself (or put others in a position to compromise their morals) help you avoid it.

15 mins – Half-Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It: an exploration of the time that it takes knowledge to “lose half its effects”. The rate of change for facts varies widely across subjects but we often treat them the same way. e.g.: you learn it in school, then it’s learned, which is generally fine for mathematics but unlikely to be so for psychology or economics. All of which supports the idea that lifelong learning is the best way to minimize the traps here.

40 mins – How to configure your iPhone to work for you: the treatise on taking control back from your phone. No matter what level of life-hacking you operate at, if one of your new year’s resolutions is to have a healthier interaction with your mobile device, this is the most robust and well-researched piece I’ve seen on the topic.

 

Disruption

17 mins – Killing Strategy: The Disruption Of Management Consulting: the team at CB insights dives into an industry that meets all the criteria for disruption. Some interesting questions like “will consulting follow the path of law firms?” Back in the day, the in-house counsel was very much second chair to the big law firms and technology was the enabler for this rebalancing of power.

9 mins – How To Keep Your Job As Your Startup Grows: disrupting work. Steve Blank hits the nail on the head about the different skills and attitudes needed as a start-up grows. Some great guidelines for founders and early employees combined with thoughtful ideas for everyone on how to remain flexible and intellectually curious.

13 mins – Nikon versus Canon: A Story Of Technology Change: while we’re on disruption, this is the best article explaining what’s happened, competition-wise, in the photography world in the 30 years (70’s-2000’s) pre-digitization. There’s plenty written about what happened with Kodak and missing the digital opportunity but this is a great way to establish context and understand the forces that led to this.

12 mins – Beware the lessons of growing up Galapagos: plenty of people were thinking about the “end of the age of scarcity” this year. Eugene Wei has some great reflections on how that’s affecting the entertainment models of Hollywood movies, TV and professional sports. The question you’re left with is: which models aren’t going to survive the shift and will be the ‘opera’ of the next generation (NFL?) and what will replace it (e-sports?)

 

The Economy and Tech

9 mins – You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks: an amazing interactive site put together by Inga Ting, Mark Doman, Ri Liu, and Nathan Hoad at the ABC where you can pull the demographic and political levers and see what the impact is on the population. Very cleverly tells the story of how different factors drive the change, how long we can kick the ‘aging population’ can down the road and the likely impact when that’s no longer an option and the role immigration will play in softening it.

8 mins – ~1 trillion of real estate is on the move… here’s why: an amazing article by Phil Levin of 99mph looking at how Autonomous Vehicles are going to impact the real estate market. US-centric but the change will happen everywhere. The implications section highlights some of the systemic risk that the market isn’t thinking about yet.

15 mins – Yes it’s a bubble. So what? Mostly in here because of the quote “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” but also because there’s some good, practical advice around how to manage your asset exposure for when the next downturn happens. Really interesting when paired with this article on sources of risk in 2019 (Student Debt, Chinese Debt, Brexit/Further exits from the EU).

6 mins – The Economy Is Soaring, And Now So Is The Deficit. That’s A Bad Combination: Evan Horowitz from fivethirtyeight has a great, inward-facing piece on what a growing economy and a growing budget deficit means for the US (fewer levers to pull in the next down-cycle). A shout-out on the side to fivethirtyeight’s Significant Digits, a daily digest of numbers in the news, which is well worth subscribing to!

7 mins – Tariffs Can Work — When They’re Part Of A Plan: despite reading FiveThirtyEight pretty much every day, I’ve tried to avoid including too many of their articles but this one is really handy for understanding where trade tariffs can help. I found this interesting because a lot of what I’ve read up to now has universally decried tariffs as a bad thing (protectionist) and this was a well-reasoned counterpoint.

5 mins – How the U.S. Squandered Its Steel Superiority: suggests that the problems facing US steel don’t stem from unfair trade practices but rather a lack of innovation and re-investment in technology and the eventual disruption within the industry itself. Interesting that the last true “steel baron” in the US was distinctly anti-protectionist.

6 mins – Why doe the US run a trade deficit? To maintain the dollars privileged position: and then there’s the other side of the fiscal policy coin where economists explain why you can’t have a trade surplus and be the worlds reserve currency. Good to reinforce the understanding that national debt is not like household debt.

14 mins – The 8 Major Forces Shaping the Future of the Global Economy: the visual economist has some of the most engaging graphics that thoughtfully present a lot of information while still remaining digestible. Where we are today is not where we will be in 5 years and the information here will help you understand the spectrum of options and maybe select the future you want to see.

7 mins – What Theme Parks Teach Us About Market Segmentation: how theme parks capture surplus value, written in a style that makes you appreciate and commiserate all at once.

 

Lies, Bugs, Scams and Damned Statistics

12 mins – The Great Big Spotify Scam: a deep-dive into how a Bulgarian playlist creator allegedly made a fortune on Spotify over a couple of months in 2017. I’m fascinated by the creativity that goes into something like this. This was pre-IPO and I can only imagine the frantic work that would have been going on to limit the damage before they listed.

11 mins – Bugs Are Coming Soon to Your Dinner Table: in Switzerland, regulators approved insects as a source of protein for humans in 2017 and this year we started to see products available in supermarkets and restaurants. As someone who grew up on a farm, I can appreciate that the consumption footprint we have today cannot meet the needs of the expected population in 2050.

9 mins – How to Steal 50 Million Bees: while we’re on the illegal theme, an awesome investigation into the larcenous activities that go on as beekeepers bring their hives to California each year to pollinate the almond trees there (there’s also one more 20 min read on the dirty games played by Amazon sellers which rounds out the illicit activities section!)

6 mins – Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from human mortality rates: a 6-minute read with 25-minutes worth of comments underneath on the probability theory around mortality rates (otherwise known as insurance curves!) A fascinating blend of statistics, physiology and human biases!

18 mins – How to spot a perfect fake: the world’s top art forgery detective: a fascinating insight into the world of high-priced art forgeries. Better than an episode of CSI because there’s so much here to explore. Hat tip Krys Modrewski for sparking my interest in this area. Really interested to see how blockchain is going to impact traceability because of its ability to verify ownership, anonymously.

 

FAANG

9 mins – Tech Platforms and the Knowledge Problem: a lot of the ways we think about distributed and unstructured knowledge are changing in the face of AI and data aggregators. Several of my favorite writers explored the topic of how this changes the definition of monopoly and how the existing anti-trust rules based around “harm to the consumer” tests don’t work anymore because stuff is getting cheaper and better but this misses the systemic cost.

12 mins – How Amazon’s Bottomless Appetite Became Corporate America’s Nightmare: there were a lot of articles on Amazon this year as it contended for the worlds most valuable company. Can easily be extrapolated to what’s happening in China with Ali Baba and Tencent and give some great background context for a lot of the other Amazon articles.

15 mins – The Friendship That Made Google Huge: the New Yorker captures the essence of the professional relationship between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat that helped Google build some of the most important features in their products. Got me thinking a lot about pair programming and collaboration and encouraged me to start experimenting again with this to drive outsized results.

20 mins – Inside the Two Years That Shook Facebook—and the World: this is worth it just for the ‘Zuck as Atlas’ graphic but Wired does a great job of summarizing the challenges (internal and external) that Facebook has faced over the last couple of years. The massive psychological toll on employees (and Mark) feels all too familiar after working at (Uber), I found this article timely, relatable and incredibly sad.

6 mins – Instead of courting Amazon, cities should court freelancers: a fascinating exploration of the idea that as the nature of work shifts, there are things that cities can do to attract the mobile, gig economy and the knock-on benefits to the local economy (and the workers). Also not being beholden to a single entity for your region’s economy is a lesson we probably should have learned last century.

 

US, China & the Nature of Work & Wealth

7 mins – Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country: one of the themes I spent a lot of time reading about this year was income inequality and its impact on society. Umair Haque explores how the relatively high cost of necessities means that it’s much harder for people to maintain their quality of life on a low income and the shift in who carries the risk, from institutions to people, without a rebalancing of the reward.

5 mins – American Workers are getting Ripped Off: continuing the theme, traditional macroeconomic indicators are great: unemployment is low; openings outnumber people looking for work. But other parts of the labour agreement aren’t working. Wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation and the surplus is going to shareholders and owners. OECD reporting cites the lack of protection for American workers, multi-generational financial disadvantage and lack of government safety net as factors driving some really scary numbers.

13 mins – Why We Should Value ‘Invisible Labor’: last year I posted quite a few articles on universal basic income and I’m continuing to explore the topic because the system we have right now (post-capitalism or whatever you want to call it) is definitely going to need to change as AI and automation reshape how we define work. Reading this makes you feel incredibly lucky to be alive and in the position you are at this time in our journey as a species.

8 mins – Your “Financial Shock” Wealth: explores the idea that being wealthy can be defined as your ability to withstand financial shock (unexpected health issues, car accident etc.) Really important in light of the other two articles because it shows how if people are unable to save up a financial buffer, how skewed the odds are of them ending up financially destitute.

11 mins – Disposable America: the history of capitalism in the US, told from the perspective of a straw (the thing you stick in your drink). A treatise on the nature of the rise of the disposable and how that influenced both companies and the economic system and eventually, the way that people live.

8 mins – The Origins of America’s Unique and Spectacular Cruelty: a brutal finale on the state of US society. The author states that because of what a predatory capitalist society rewards, its people are disincentivized to develop values like gentleness and empathy and in so doing, have lost their ability to be civil.

13 mins – China’s Great Leap Backward: a foreign policy piece on the reforms that led to the unprecedented growth in China and how Xi Jinping is dismantling those in his bid to concentrate his powerbase. An introduction into the mindset that Chinas ruling elite hold and the potential knock-on-effects that the rest of the world should be aware of.

 

Crypto & Blockchain

9 + 9 mins – Two articles from Hackernoon on Crypto: a perspective on the cycle behind the crypto market bust and a fascinating read on how the technology behind crypto is what is valuable, specifically because it enables triple ledger accounting (trustless ledger) which is a game changer.

10 mins/article – A multi-article series (still going) by Viktor Makarskyy looking at how crypto impacts economic theory and social order. Dives into the: history of chaos to order; market vs. Planned economies; pricing and game theory. Start here.

 

Biographies

17 mins – How New Zealand made Edmund Hillary, the man who conquered Everest: I don’t read a lot of biographical pieces but this one on Sir Edmund Hillary is fascinating. Not only Everest but Antartica, filmmaking, engineering, humanitarian and political service contribute to the tale of an introvert who just got on with it. Well written and researched and a nice break from all the economics and politics!

12 mins – The Tragedy of Fritz Haber: The Monster Who Fed The World: the dichotomy of the man responsible for the use of Chlorine gas by Germany in WW1 but also a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry for the creation of liquid fertilizer. Worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy, the author, Paul Barach, captures the genius and the cruelty of humankind.

 

Millennials

25 mins – In a news cycle that focused on my generation eating too much avocado on toast and traveling while not doing our part for the economy by buying the stuff we’re supposed to (cars, houses!) these were a couple of standout articles. The Atlantic on that very topic as well as millennial voting patterns and impact of disengagement.

14 mins – Style Is an Algorithm: Vox takes a peek into the near future as IoT devices begin to leverage cameras (Amazon Echo Look, Facebook Portal) and how that could impact clothing selection and styling especially as it’s a natural endpoint for advertising (Facebook) and selling (Amazon). Extending existing tools to data-based fashion and algorithmic curation gives an interesting insight into a potential future for fashionistas. Not sure I agree with the homogenization position they take but it’s a reasonable argument to make.

 

My Top Three Thinkers

I read everything they write and half of this list would’ve been their articles if I didn’t pull their stuff out here. If you want engaging ideas combined with amazing writing for a snapshot of a potential future, look no further.

Benedict Evans is a Partner at a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). His superpower is synthesizing ideas so that they are understandable and relatable without losing their complexity. His presentation “The End of the Beginning” is the best way you can possibly invest 24 minutes. If you want writing rather than video, check out: his take on Smart Homes and IoT; the steps to autonomous vehicles and; his thoughts on newsfeeds.

Ben Thompson has an amazing website (Stratechery) and podcast (Exponent) where he explores strategy, technology and the competitive marketplace. He constantly tests and expands his pet theory (aggregation theory) and if you’re looking for a place to start, check out: Apple’s Middle Age; Amazon Health; Lessons from Spotify and; Techs two Philosophies.

Tim Urban, author of Wait But Why isn’t as prolific as the other two but his long-form pieces are truly amazing. This year he did an article on how to pick a career (that actually fits you) and that was pretty much it, but that one piece… man… that was worth waiting for. He also did a great podcast with Tim Ferriss. Technically this was 2017 but if you agree to bend the rules on this one then I’ll give you a special offer: if you can make it through without laughing I’ll buy you lunch!

 

If you made it to the bottom, good on you!

Drop me a line and let me know what you liked or didn’t, what you’d already seen, and anything you’ve read that adds to the conversation! Have a great break.

One thing I learned each week in 2017

So I was recently inspired by a really cool post by Tom Whitwell from Flux who posted a list of the 52 things he learned in 2017.  I use Flipboard as my aggregator for stories that I find interesting. These are the articles that I forward to friends, the ideas that I discuss on facetime with buddies back in Australia or on slack channels at work.

The end of the year is a great time to reflect, re-visit and remind myself of all the amazing ideas that are buzzing around out there, plus I feel like it’s one of the few times in the year where there is time for doing that. So without further ado, my Christmas present from me to you: 52 articles on a range of tech, entrepreneurship and management, that I learned from this year.

1. AI was on the media hype train this year which meant some really interesting debates about the ethics of intelligence. I really like this explanation of why a rogue AI destroying humankind is best left to sci-fi movies.
2. Death and grief are two topics I don’t know a lot about but got uncomfortably close to last year. Nothing impacts more, that we talk about less. This account of a widower in her 30’s is empathizable and might give you insight into how to help someone who is suffering.
3. As an ex-pat Australian, I’m saddened to hear of the ongoing campaign to cripple the ABC. It’s an amazing resource for Australians, it helps them think bigger and understand the world beyond Australia’s borders. This article on the Panama papers, relating it to the production of a pair of Nike shoes is just great journalism. Plus the design elements in the storytelling are so well executed. Hat tip ABC.
4. The Atlantic is another source that I love. Lots of great staff writers and a range of topics that are more well rounded than you normally get from US media. This piece, on the advent of pricing discrimination strategies online due to the massive amounts of feedback that markters have access to, is a gem.
5. Still on pricing, I fly quite a bit and I’m always fascinated by the game theory that is, airline pricing. Gary Leff is way more into it than I am and has a great piece on how Basic Economy Fares are a way for airlines to get some people to pay more for their tickets.
6. And while we’re on airlines, using behavioural economics to frame the problem of people leaning their seats back makes for a great read. But as a 2m tall guy, I kind of think the onus is on airlines to provide seating that I can sit in regardless of what the person in front is doing…
7. Financial scandals are my reality TV. Apart from Michael Lewis’ seminal piece on the 2008 GFC, this was the best piece I read all year on bankers behaving badly in 2012.
8. I love a bit of forecasting, particularly in tech and this Above Avalon article sums up the shift to mobile really well and, while it’s an Apple-centric view, it identifies the battlegrounds that tech companies will be fighting over for the next 10 years.
9. An article supporting the claim by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer that the human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and the numbers are frightening!
10. Universal Basic Income fascinates me. I haven’t seen anything that indicates that there is a model that works (sorry Finland) but the fact that Y-combinator is trying to crack it makes me hopeful! This article on tests in Kenya is a great, practical piece on what methodologies (pay it forward) are being trialled but there are quite a few barriers to overcome.
11. I’ve long suspected that LinkedIn Endorsements are completely rubbish and here’s the data to support that (over and above my wife’s experiment where she put Dragon Training up as a skill and a bunch of people endorsed her for it!)
12. In 2017 I heard the term “Market-Networks” for the first time and I couldn’t agree more with this article by NfX which highlights how they take the best parts of social networks to build trust (read: repeated games) in a marketplace and then use a SaaS model for value distribution.
13. Russia’s Cyberwar in the Ukraine is scary. This is the digital equivalent of pointing your army at your neighbour and giving them free reign. As life becomes more and more digitized, the effecacy of this style of warfare increases. In 20 years no one is going to be nearly as worried about invasion by a land based armed force as a digital incursion that bricks a nation.
14. This wasn’t so much a cool article as just a good question: What is someone going to stop doing when they start using your product? Kicked off a whole bunch of conversations with my friends in Product and working on Startups.
15. Every year Jeff Bezos writes a letter to shareholders. This, (along with Warren Buffet’s letter to shareholders) is a must read. My key take away this year was ‘Don’t let process be a proxy for results’, in other words, don’t get so focused on checking boxes that you lose sight of why you were doing those checks in the first place (I’m looking at you NPS!)
16. Henry Rollins is someone I greatly admire. He does interesting things, he thinks before speaking and he is relentless about improving himself. This article on how he defines success is a fascinating glimpse into the life of a self taught stoic (a philosophy I spent a lot of time reading about this year, thanks Tim Feriss).
17. “It’s not even wrong.” A great article by Benedict Evans on the strategies that people use to dismiss technology and defend the status quo and how these techniques don’t give a position that can be proven or disproven, which then shifts the debate about something that should be quantifiable (even if wrong) into the realm of opinion.
18. The fashion label Supreme is an amazing example of on-trend brand management and Wired has a dig into the bot systems that people have created to buy the labels limited edition releases. Fascinating look at the underlying issues around high-demand products (concert tickets anyone!) and how the problem could be solved, but isn’t because of the benefits (tangible and intangible) to the incumbents.
19. The whole idea of how “cool” works and the design element of branding is an ongoing fascination for me (although definitely as an observer from the sidelines!) and this article in the Atlantic about Raymond Loewys sense of populist design aesthetic gives a reasonable hypothesis on why the highest grossing movies for 14 of the last 15 years have been sequels.
20. Pretty much everything that Ben Thompson writes is gold. I read his Stratechery blog every week (and I think a subscription might be on the way this Christmas!) so it’s hard to single out one article but this one on how Facebook is a form of monopoly we haven’t seen and how the US doesn’t have a regulatory system that is equipped to deal with this new type of monopoly, is great. Good to read alongside this, from Bloomberg, asking whether regulators should take action.
21. Which then begs the question, what does fulltime work look like in the future? This is an interesting idea of the “pop-up team” which assembles to solve a specific problem or project, then disappears. If you’re working but you’re not thinking about this then you’re missing out on shaping the conversation that will set your future.
22. Although I’ve tried to stay away from Trump articles in this list¹, I am very interested in the root cause of his rise to power. Joblessness, in a population segment that has been employed is definitely one of the primary factors. Worth a read because this isn’t just a change the US, this is a societal change and it’s just the US is the most visible example.
23. Alongside the joblessness of your father, there are more people starting to look at how the education and cultural values of boys impact their internal measure for what it is to be a man. While this article is written with a focus on the Middle East, this is a conversation the West needs to having as well.
24. I couldn’t get through this without having something about bitcoin but I’m going to keep them all in one place.
    1. This is a great primer on blockchain (the underlying tech behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin) and explains why this is such a big idea.
    2. Medium is such a great source of interesting ideas for crypto and this article on “What will Bitcoin look like in 20 years” is one of my favorites. I love a futurists take on the world of today, and this cleverly integrates a likelihood with each prediction.
    3. Digging a little deeper into the impact of a non-state owned financial asset, this is an excellent explanation of how scary that is for governments and gives some scenario’s around how that might play out without getting too far into tinfoil hat land.
    4. The three economic era’s of bitcoin is a great article to help you understand who has the power at each stage (and who is going to resist moving to the next era as the balance of power shifts).
    5. Lastly, some market analysis. I’ve tried to stay away from these kind of things because I suspect they’ll date poorly in terms of information relevancy but this is a great “short history of bitcoin”
25. A couple of links here to the Gig Economy. The Conversation reinforces that nothing is new under the sun, including sharing economy services, which were par for the course in the 18th century. And then this article was out there trying to put some data behind earnings from platforms like Uber and AirBnB and highlights some of the challenges that will be faced in relying on this type of work for a full time income.
26. If you want to know what freaked me out the most this year, it’s this article by Zero Hedge on just how bad a shape the global bond market is in post-quantative easing. This is scarier than Trump and Kim Jong Il. If anyone figures out a good way to short the bond market (for an asset that will be worth something when the world economy implodes) let me know.
27. And here’s the economics double-header; why LIBOR is unreliable and how massive an undertaking it’s going to be to unwind $350 trillion of contracts that tie to it!
28. But speaking of North Korea, it’s easy to dismiss them as crazy people (or at least the government) based on the coverage that they get from Western Media. While they are doing terrible, terrible things to their populace, there’s a method to their madness. Much like Trumps brand of political chaos.
29. Farnam Street is a blog I only subscribed to this year, but I find their weekly emails really interesting. This one in particular caught my eye, I’ve always wondered about Critical Mass, how it differs depending on the activity (governmental revolution vs. a viral marketing stunt), the risk involved and the amount of change required.
30. NYT had an amazing article on the dying art of disagreement (open in an incognito window if you’ve read too many NYT articles without a subscription this month!) I think it’s really important to be able to discuss topics, even the uncomfortable ones, in public because that discourse is what forces people to think about why they believe or support something. I’ll be the first to admit that I regularly put my foot in my mouth when it comes to political correctness and a huge thank you needs to go out to the people who put up with me and help enlighten my outlook.
31. And the best example I can think of this year of this was the discussion around Google’s firing of James Damore. There’s a lot of complexity to that discussion (more than I can cover in a paragraph here) but if we silence the conversation then we drive these behaviours underground which is far more dangerous. It’s also worth noting that his perspective is not unique, nor is it limited to men.
32. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an amazing example of the evolution of the civil liberties movement. This article on DRM is a great example of the amazing work that they do. And if you’re wondering, why does this matter and how does it affect you, here’s an example of the impact of internet surveillance on the conversations I was advocating in the previous item!
33. I’d never thought about McDonalds and Starbucks as bar-raisers but this article makes a really good case that they lift the bar at the bottom. The minimum standard for a coffee in most cities in the world is Starbucks. Hopefully you live somewhere where there are better options but a Starbucks quality coffee is such an upgrade over what existed 10 years ago. And that minimum is going to continue to increase.
34. Only one more Stratechery article, I promise! This one is a great explanation about how the internet has led to the end of gatekeepers. Relevant for businesses but also for politicians, Hollywood and the press.
35. I want to be clear, I don’t run marathons (and given the state of my knees, I never will) but I’m fascinated with the mindset that is required for this type of activity. Resilience was a big buzzword last year but this is a whole new level of masochism. Read on if you want to learn about a race that only 14 people have ever finished (so far!)
36. Speaking of which, I’ve always scored high on tests that measure resilience which was something I took a lot of pride in. However, no character trait comes without a cost and this year I learned about how too much resilience can hurt not only yourself, but those around you.
37. Spotify is my favorite service for streamed music and I love their Weekly Discovery playlist. This dives into the tech behind how they select songs for the list and just generally, some of the technical challenges behind building an algorithm for such a “human” set of preferences. And if you enjoyed that article, check out this one on how songs end up on playlists at Spotify (see what I did there!)
38. Silicon, it’s in every complex product we produce these days but the production of this component is fascinating as well as the secondary market that’s grown up around it. Which in turn leads to people behaving badly and the worlds greatest Silicon heist! With the advent of electric cars, this same article will be written about Cobalt or Lithium or Manganese in the future.
39. Speaking of which, this seems the right time to segue into an article called Carmageddon. I would have read it for the title alone but between my time at Uber with self driving cars and the fact that it had an excerpt of an Oatmeal comic in it (check that out if you’re sick of reading!) completely won me over.
40. And while we are here, autonomous vehicles are right up there with AI on the 2017 buzzword list but this article asks a great question about how the social relationship in shared space changes when “human driving and human walking” becomes “human walking and software driving” (hint: some people are assholes and they’re going to make life really difficult for self driving cars).
41. In 2006, Netflix held a competition with a prize of $1m; all you had to do was improve the accuracy of the recommendation engine by 10%. This ultimately contributed to Netflix’s ascent to dominance over the incumbents as well as burgeoning competitors but the use of data and the development it spurred in the field are an amazing story.
42. Time for some science! This was one of my favorite articles about the way our jaws evolved and how the changes in our diets over the last 10,000 years have shrunk our jaws. On the upside, people with weak chins (like me!) can enlarge their jaws by chewing more. Or you can grow a beard… whatever.
43. This has been a watershed year for calling out long-ignored biases and behaviours in the workplace. I was at Uber while Susan Fowler was there and while I didn’t have contact with her or her team, I can totally understand how that situation occurred. Ellen Pao was one of the first people to try and expose this and maybe the timing wasn’t quite right but if you are in an industry that behaves like this, understand that this is not going to be tolerated. Change. Now.
44. A history of the humble sandwich. Just one of those things that no one thinks about but is actually an amazing story and a complex behemoth in its own right. Will be fascinated to see how the Brexit affects the sandwich manufacturing process. If consumer demand is there but no one wants a career as a sandwich maker, is automation the only answer?
45. I like to read pieces about the Australian Economy from a broader perspective and this hour long masterpiece by Matt Barrie, the CEO of freelancer.com is well worth the time. You won’t agree with everything but it’s a fascinating read backed up by good use of data.
46. Income inequality continued to trend this year but with a lot more data than was present at the outset of the 99% movement. Understanding around what moves people into the 1% bracket was much better understood as well as the effects of inherited wealth and the rate at which income has grown for the rich vs. the working class.
47. Which then begs the question, why? Bloomberg has a balanced analysis of this as well as an exploration of what the potential impacts are as wages, and therefore the spending power of the middle class reduces and the economic engine of growth stalls.
48. When we ask why is it so, there is a school of thought around “rentier capital” that suggest that the current, shareholder first, actually stifles innovation and enriches value extractors, not value creators (part of the reason I think it’s worth looking into the seismic shift that is cryptocurrency).
49. One of the best lenses for understanding the different approaches to capitalism is looking at Google vs. Apple. One of the biggest questions that successful public corporations have faced recently is what to do with the profits they are making? Who is responsible for deciding what to do with those profits (management or investors)?
50. One of the ways that companies have avoided taking a position on this (apart from not making big profits!) is by spending it acquiring other companies. But Vox makes the argument that the size of the warchests (~3T on US company balance sheets) is unbalanced and startups are less keen than ever to go public or be acquired for fear of loss of control or profit.
51. Who knew the market for online mattress retailing was so… sordid!?! The story itself is a great read but it also makes you pause and think about all the reviews you read online and who you trust. Makes me feel much sadder about the wirecutters purchase earlier this year by the NYT.
52. Even though this appeared in the middle of year, I’ve included this last because if you’re a New Years resolution person, I reckon this is good way to go about it. Seth Godin and two lists to define your outlook for 2018.

If there was something in here that you likes, or if you learned something new, let me know in the comments, I’d love to chat some more on it with you.

 

 

¹ There were no articles on Trump included because, while there were some nuggets of gold in the unrelenting media shitshow that has been his year in office, I didn’t actually learn much from them. It was more like a slow motion trainwreck that you can’t not watch. That said, I’m happy to share some of the better articles like “How to build an Autocracy”, “Trial balloon for a Coup” and “I’ve got a Little List”, if anyone is still interested.

What Is Uber Doing With All That Cash

There’s a pattern in tech IPOs where the company, preparing to go public, makes a significant acquisition which is used to direct the growth narrative.

• Facebook acquired Instagram building it’s mobile presence and signaling the start of it’s social conglomerate strategy
• Twitter acquired Bluefin to link to TV (and the advertising $ there)
• Google acquired Applied Semantics which was the core of AdSense

When a firm IPOs, it’s the first chance the wider community has to get a look at its books. The market then estimates the growth ceiling based on current operations. To build the valuation you need to show how you intend to grow the business and convince your investors that there’s still money to be made.

If you’re already valued at $62.5b that could be a tall order. No matter what the PE ratio is, people will argue that it’s too high or too low and given the low asset base, the market may struggle to find comparators and to value the stock correctly.

So what about the $11b in cash raised so far? Sure some of it has gone to expansion (in China in particular) but don’t be fooled into thinking that Uber has a growth at all costs strategy. Travis Kalanick and the executive team have seen enough companies crucified for unprofitable growth that have served as a warning to ensure that they can demonstrate solid fundamentals before they IPO. But let’s say that they have burned through 25% of that raised amount (remember, China was on track for $1b/y, 12m a go).

That leaves $8b sitting around and while it might make strategic sense to build a warchest (and thus prevent your competitors from raising it) , the market is not going to reward Uber for having cash laying around.

Which brings us back to an acquisition, the Carnegie-Mellon (self driving cars) and the Decarta (mapping software) purchases future proof and create independence for the existing product offering but neither create that growth story. I’m going to look at two options; there are lots more, like “do nothing” or “grow internally” but I want to focus on acquisitions:

1. Acquiring a competitor (Didi, Grab, Lyft, Hailo etc.)

There isn’t a lot of precedent for this pre-IPO (even Instagram was more of a complementer than a competitor to Facebook) and Uber already has a presence (or has demonstrated it is able to build on) in any market they choose. Plus you’re inviting accusations of monopolistic behavior which is one of the tools that Uber uses to attack incumbents in the market.

This becomes more plausible if you look at non-core services, like UberEATS. Uber was late to market with their food delivery product and is going to have to capture marketshare from direct competitors (Deliveroo, FoodPanda, Ele.me) as well as existing incumbents (the current home delivery system). The tech is similar and Uber doesn’t benefit from the scale of it’s other operations (at this stage) so it’s undifferentiated and late to market, not the growth story that investors want to hear.

2. Diversifying Further

When people are asked “what does Uber do besides move people?” the response is UberEATS but UberRUSH might be the one worth having a close look at. Just like food delivery, package delivery is hyper competitive but here Uber can leverage the scale of their network. They already have the liquidity of vehicles on the streets, moving people, so it makes sense to pickup and dropoff packages that are on the way.

This forms a virtuous cycle, by transporting packages and passengers you can increase utilization (more  at a lower cost because you are moving both at once. There are some elements to manage around time-criticality (I don’t want to stop for a package when I’m late for a meeting) but this can be done with price discrimination.

This also sets Uber up for a really exciting end point with the UberRUSH product. If you can nail the last mile delivery, there’s a strong incentive to vertically integrate and this is where the acquisition space gets really interesting. Imagine if Uber decides to connect all of their last mile delivery services by acquiring a logistics company. Uber keeps the local distribution centres and the international connections and divests the rest giving them end-to-end solution that delivers internationally but leverages their existing system for last mile delivery. That should allow them to significantly undercut the incumbents on pricing and they’re right back into the familiar pattern of being the disrupter but without nearly as large a regulatory overhead.

This is particularly important in markets where there is strong resistance to regulatory change. Uber can establish and grow the delivery market which provides them with a driverbase that can be quickly converted to passenger transport giving them scale much quicker than competitors in the event of regulatory change.

The other thing to like as an investor is that an end-to-end delivery solution has the potential to give Uber a much larger slice of the revenue pie. Typically Uber receives 25-30% of a passenger fare but with a delivery service they would be providing the bulk of the value and could demonstrate to the market that they are capable of capturing additional value from their product line.

What Does The Future Look Like?

Imagine it’s your birthday and your mom (in California) wants to send you cookies (in New York). She bakes them and packages them up, then she opens the UberRUSH app and in 3 minutes a driver is there to collect the box. Meanwhile at your end, you get a notification saying that there is a package from your mom that you can get delivered any time after 3pm. When the cookies get to the distribution center closest to you in New York there’s another message confirming the delivery time and asking if you’d like it delivered to your location or to somewhere specific. There’s final a notification when the vehicle is arriving outside work and less than 24 hours after they were baked, those cookies are in your hands, along with a birthday card.

That’s a growth story I’d invest in.

 

Disclaimer: I worked for Uber until April 2016. To my knowledge, there is no internal plan as described above, this is just a thought exercise by me, based on what I think Uber should do, for my own edification.

3D Printing 2.0 – Democratizing Design

So this was not the blog I imagined I’d be writing post-MBA. That’s right, it’s all done, graduation has been and gone and I’m currently reflecting on the experience and trying to write down some insights that aren’t obvious so I can share them with you and close out that chapter but… I’ve gotten side-tracked, in a good way, but it’s consuming processing power like cookie clicker when you hit the trillion cookies/sec mark in v1.035 (incidentally, if you’re OCD best you stay away from that one. It’s awesome but it’s been running on my desktop for ~20 days now and I dream of golden cookies)

I briefly mentioned it in a couple of previous posts; a new start-up idea around 3D printing (additive manufacturing is the pro term here but I like 3D printing because most people, by which I mean my parents, have an intrinsic understanding of what that is and if my parents understand it then it’s being explained right) but the more time I spent on it, the better it got. It’s ended up with me enrolling friends and family, meeting new people who love the idea or want to work in the same space and the idea has evolved so I thought now was a good time to share it a little further and get some feedback.

I’m going to go high level to start with and address the headlining topic, 3D printing is awesome, it allows you to print anything you want, out of a ton of materials (flexible and rigid plastics, metals like titanium, aluminium and gold, human cells, wood, sand), truly amazing stuff. But like any tech, there are some catches. Firstly, you’ve got to have some skills. You need to be able to CAD stuff (or at least model it in 3DS or blender or something), you also need to have access to a printer and with that you need access to some time and patience because it’s still trial and error for a lot of things. You design something, you hit the print button, you go over to the machine, you watch it build the first 3mm and then it starts drooping because your overhang is too large or your layer thickness is too fine or any number of issues. So you throw that one out, go back to your model, change the design and you try again.

This is fine for enthusiasts and tinkerers (the vast majority of the market who currently own a printer) because that’s part of the experience and you’re doing it because you love it and you’re excited about it. But for the market outside of that select group, it needs to be simpler. This is where professional groups come in who can take your model and print it for you and further to the skills requirement above, if you can’t CAD then you can contract someone who can or license prints of things that they have designed.

So this is where the market is right now, sites like shapeways, sculpteo and cubify all have these online stores where you can buy objects designed by someone else and either print them yourself or get the site to print them for you.

I like to think of these guys as 3D Printing 1.0. They’re using the technology and trying to make it available for others but they’re kind of missing the point: buying cool stuff is awesome, buying customized cool stuff is even better but the end-game here to be able to make it yourself so that what you see in your imagination is what you (or some third party fulfillment group) print.

To do this we need to talk about tools, specifically CAD. I don’t have a lot of experience with modeling tools like blender so I’m not going to say a whole lot about them but if that’s your area of expertise, tell me if it’s the same experience for you. CAD is a tool, designed for a specific job, initially allowing for the digitization of 2D drawings and then and over the years it’s evolved to become a tool for development of 3D models. It’s incredibly powerful and you can’t be an engineer without being able to CAD your ideas because that’s how people expect you to communicate them. But that really only works for us engineers. We’ve been taught to think in a particular way to make it easy for us to create 3D models using the existing system. But there’s a pretty significant barrier to entry here in terms of learning to use the software proficiently and this is a problem because that barrier is what’s stopping people outside of that early adopter/engineer/tinkerer community from adopting 3D printing.

The problem is recognized, people and companies are taking steps to try and fix it. Products like DesignSpark, Google Sketchup, TinkerCAD and AutoCAD’s 123D suite make some stuff easier or cheaper to do but we’re boxed in by who we are and the way we think. We’re engineers so we’re trying to make a better CAD program without thinking about whether it’s the right tool for the job and I’d like to argue that its not.

It comes down to a fundamental understanding of the differences between the way an engineer designs things and the way everyone else does:

1. Complexity: if you’ve got a tool that can make anything then it’s probably going to be pretty complex. For anyone but advanced users, complexity is scary, not only because there’s all this stuff there and what the hell does it do but you also create a sense of “dammit, one of these buttons probably does what I want to do with a click if only I could figure out which button to push” for the user which causes all sorts of cognitive dissonance. Don’t make the user feel stupid.
2.  The Paradox of Choice: unless you, the user, know exactly what you want then you’ll end up paralyzed by choice, both technical and design based, because the software you have will let you do everything. There’s a really interesting book called The Paradox of Choice (great overview via this TED talk) that I read recently (finishing the MBA = start working on the book backlog!) which I would highly recommend as it talks exactly about this problem and how it’s going to affect your users.
3. Attention: all of this stuff takes time and if you’re not an expert the temptation of “I wonder if someone’s already done it somewhere else?” is massive. Now your user is off to hunt through forums or 3D Warehouse for ready-made components and bam, they’re gone and so is the experience.

Advanced CAD packages are important, some people need access to that functionality because that’s what they do for a living. They need that. But the mass market doesn’t. I’m going to make another completely unsubstantiated prediction here and say that the people that are using CAD already are most of the people that are ever going to use it. You’re not going to convert the mass market to those sorts of tools because they’re not interested. They need a different tool.

So here’s where I think the 2.0 will go; web-based tools that help you build a specific product. Let’s say you’re a Dungeons and Dragons player (I know it’s a bit of a stretch but if you’re having trouble, just imagine you’re me, but shorter and less verbose) and you’re about to start a new game. There’s 5-6 of you playing, one person is the dungeon master running the campaign and the rest are players with characters. A lot of time and effort goes into creating those characters, you need to chose a race, and a class then skills and feats and equipment etc. You probably want to spend some time on the backstory too, right, so that your character has some motivation and intention behind what they are doing. So you, the young dwarven miner-warrior are the sole survivor of an orc raid on your isolated mountain quarry that left you badly wounded (I don’t know, you lost your hand or something) and you’ve sworn a blood oath to destroy the leader of the orc clan. Now in your head you can probably picture what your dwarf looks like, he’s short and bald (or maybe he has a mohawk) and he’s missing a hand and his weapon is a mining pick salvaged from the collapsed mine. Sweet.

At this point you’ve invested at least an hour, probably more. Over the course of the next 18 months you’ll play one night a week with your dwarf and he’ll become something special to you. He’ll have character flaws and adventures and will the basis for the engagement you have with the party and the game. He will be important, specifically he’ll be important to you (and to a lesser extent, to those people you play with).

But there’s one last piece before you start playing, most table top games these days use miniatures to represent characters and monsters and also include some sort of terrain around them. So off to the local gaming store you go with the picture in your head of what you dwarf (“Grum’zak”?) looks like. And you get to the store and there are all these blister packs with dwarves in them, and every friggin’ dwarf has an axe or a crossbow. There’s 20 or the little bastards and all of them are in the same stoic pose and every one is kitted out in platemail. And inside, your imagination and engagement die a little. Because you have to make do.

Now agreed the story here is pretty specific but although the details and product might change, the underlying need won’t. Whether it’s model trains, dungeons and dragons figurines or toy army men, we have a tool here, in a 3D printer, that can create exactly what we imagined. The hardware is there, all that’s needed is the software, something that’s easy enough to use that anyone can make a character in 10 minutes that looks just like they see it in their head. Computer games have been doing this for years, you can change the hair color and style but you don’t have to have spent 4 years at an engineering or design school to do it. These guys have hit the nail on the head, customizable but within limits. There’s enough variety to be unique but this is balanced against overwhelming the user with choice, hell I know guys who have bought games just for the character creation process (eg: City of Heroes).

So this is what 3D Printing 2.0 will be; giving users the ability to design and hold their product so that it’s what they imagined. As many of you will know, this is what I’ve been spending my time doing over the last couple of months, specifically for people who want to make their own characters for dungeons and dragons. If you’re interested, we’ll be starting a closed beta sometime soon so if you’re interested in participating, drop me a line.

Let me know about the closed beta

Email(required)

Submit

Δ

Authors Note: I’ve used some fairly broad strokes of the brush to describe what’s going on here. There are exceptions to the 1.0 movement I’ve laid out. For example 3D Systems bought MyRobotNation who allow you to build awesome custom robots and then there’s sites like Zazzy.me and Sandboxr who are already playing the the user created design space but in terms of where the market currently sits, I think this is a reasonably fair assessment. If that doesn’t sit well with you, let me know why in the comments.

Personal Brand

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently after reading a blog by Mark Suster where he argues that if you don’t define your personal brand, someone else will. He’s absolutely right, it happens all the time and doing an MBA changes the way that you and other people perceive your brand. After reading the article I tried to remember back to the last time I actually stated my brand and for me, pretty much the only time I do it regularly and explicitly is when someone asks “So what do you do?”

When you answer this question, the person you are talking to puts you in a mental box: “that guy’s an engineer” or “she’s in finance”. That then gets packaged up with whatever preconceptions that person has about the box they’ve put you in “that guy’s an engineer; he must be socially incompetent” or “she’s in finance; she must be totally focused on money”. I might be focusing on the negative here, it could quite easily be “that guy’s an engineer; my dad was an engineer and he was awesome” but the outcome is the same. You, as the speaker, have almost no control over the impression you will leave.

This freaks me out a little and it stops me from actually telling people what I am. I want to say “I’m an entrepreneur who started an engineering company with a couple of buddies which went OK, then started a couple more businesses that didn’t go so well. I didn’t do much engineering (because the other guys are better at it than I am) so I filled in the gaps to let them do their jobs better (sales, marketing, accounting etc.) and our businesses didn’t fail because the engineering was wrong, they failed because of everything else so I went to school to learn some skills so I won’t screw up as badly next time and now I’m a student.”

But I don’t. Not just because it’s a bit of a mouthful but also because it’s not going to create the kind of first impression that I want. So how do you get around that?

It comes down to the message you want to communicate. The easiest way to stop being put in a box is to give people an answer they don’t have a box for (some people who have written on this topic before me have suggested things like: “I’m a pirate” or “I run around in circles waving my arms a lot” which gets a giggle but really doesn’t solve the problem). Some people deflect the conversation by stating who they work for rather than what they do (I work for Nike) to create a good impression but that doesn’t tell me who you are unless you’re the personal embodiment of Nike, and a certainly hope you’re not!

And back we come to personal branding: How do you want the world to perceive you? When I read through what I’d like to say but don’t there are three themes that I’m trying to get across.

1. How do I add value? I make other people better. This can be as simple as getting the little stuff done so that they can concentrate on their job and as complex as diagnosing when someone doesn’t have the skills that are needed for the task and can’t ask for help so you have to intervene so that the job gets done but the person doesn’t feel bad about the way that it went.
2. I am disruptive. Anyone who’s sat in a class with me knows I can’t keep my mouth shut, I believe that education is participatory experience, if you don’t challenge what’s being proposed then you’re going to fall for any old crap that someone pushes at you. This extends to my professional life as well, I love technology for it’s ability to completely change the landscape of an industry. It’s one of the big drivers behind my push into 3D printing. Change is amazing!
3. I like to learn. I’ve always been surrounded by people who value education (my parents, my brother, several cousins and many of my friends are teachers or in academia). This has led me to sign up for MOOC’s, use codecademy and spend at least an hour a day to reading blogs and education sites (I’d recommend the conversation, macrobusiness, hack-a-day and seth godin’s blog as a great range of interesting reads that you can digest quickly on a mobile device in between whatever you are doing). I’m interested in stuff.

Distilling this down, I can turn it into three key messages:

• I make others better
• I am disruptive
• I want to learn

How this ties back to the MBA is that I feel a bit like that about being a student. If I say I’m a student to someone, they look at me and think; here’s guy in his 30’s who’s still at school, mustn’t know what he wants to do. Some people might argue that if I gave some more information, “I’m doing an MBA at Melbourne Business School”, I might get a different reaction but I still have no control. Maybe the person I’m speaking to thinks an MBA is a waste of time, maybe they don’t like formal education. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether I’m a student or not, that’s not who I am. What I really want to communicate is those core concepts: Disrupting and making others better and learning. So now my response is clear, when I get a question like ‘what do you do’ I can answer it in terms of what I really want to communicate:

               “I’ve gone back to school to study so I can help the people I work with do their jobs better because we are going to change the world”

Plenty for the listener to respond to, creates a huge level of engagement, hard to put in a box and, creates a positive, memorable first impression. That’s what I wanted to say.

Planning for the Next Step

So I’m rapidly approaching the end of the MBA and that’s pushed a whole new challenge to the fore; the job-hunt.

Ideally I’d like to do a start-up (second only to a private equity buyout of Dungeons and Dragons from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro but that seems… unlikely, at least by me, at this point). The issue is, after 18 months of self-funded study I’m getting to the stage where I can’t even afford the big boxes of Mi-Goreng noodles anymore (check them out, terrible but amazing!) so I need to find another funding source if I’m going to do this. There are plenty of places out there that do this (packages that include: some seed funding to keep you in noodles and internet; sometimes physical resources like storefronts or workstations and; mentoring) but two worth checking out are:

• Y-combinator: the biggest and the best out of the States
• Sketchbook Ventures: a local incubator that’s just opened funded by the guys from Catch-of-the-Day

Y-Combinator is the grand-daddy of the incubator/VC scene, located in Silicon Valley in the States and having spawned a host of startups including some really successful ones like Dropbox, reddit and AirBnB. Sketchbook has just started up in Melbourne and just divested Vinomofo which was bought out earlier this year and has been the test case for their incubator.

So I’ve got together with a couple of people (if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 3G Engineering it’s: “everything is better in a team”) and we’re putting together some pitches for the incubators. I haven’t sat on the other side of the table so I can only imagine the huge principal agent problem that these guys face. Y-combinator gets a couple thousand entries for each batch (they run their program twice a year) and end up taking around 60 teams on. 10 guys, 200 hundred pitches to review each and then after the first cut, probably re-reading and sharing a bunch for discussion. And in every one, each team is convinced that their idea is going make everyone rich (or happy, or environmentally responsible, take your pick).

So there are two parts to this, firstly we need to work out what idea (or ideas) we want think are our best. The second part is communicating our idea to the judges; demonstrating competence without isolating people with too much detail. There are a lot of good tools out there for doing both of these things (one I really like is the business model canvas by Alexander Osterwalder) but because it’s trying to cover a lot of ground, it doesn’t focus on some of the stuff we think is pretty important. So we’ve decided to split up the ideas phase from the pitch phase using our own model:

Ideation Filtering Model: criteria for determining the best idea to pitch to incubators

In reality, nothing in any of the pie-sections is new, it’s just a different way of combining it and presenting the information but I guess that’s the secret to a good idea; looking at a bunch of information a different way and figuring out what’s important to you so that when you put it back together it tells the story we want.

So we’ll see how it goes. Right now I’m heads down on a new project in the 3D printing space, where the aim is to:  give the user the ability to make their board game character look exactly like it appears in their imagination. It’s fun, I get to combine my passion for dungeons and dragons with the exploration of a new technology and make a cool contribution to the community at the same time.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your feedback on the model, when you’re thinking of ideas, what other bits are important?

Exchange

So here is a long overdue updated from Vallendar in Germany where I am taking a two week intensive course on ‘The changing environment for international business in Europe’. This piece is going to be a little Australian-centric, simply because that’s my background and therefore the basis for my comparison other, your mileage may vary…

The decision to do an exchange involves some trade-offs in a 12 month program, heading overseas is difficult to do alongside an internship, especially when there are electives that prepare you for your upcoming return to the real world (or give you a last chance to check out something outside your field of expertise). I made the decision to drop the internship (having worked in Australia for most of my life) but a lot of my international friends opted to drop the exchange portion (somewhat reluctantly when they realized that it meant giving away a change to do Marketing at Kellogg or Finance at Stern!)

The intensive program suited me for a number of reasons: it’s closer to the pace of study that I’ve experienced during my time at MBS; it gave me a bit of time, post-exchange to travel around Europe and; there’s a different group dynamic when you drop 45 people in a brand new environment over the summer break (as opposed to joining someone elses’ program and sitting in with a cohort that’s already been together for 18 months).

One thing I’ve found particularly striking is the weight of history, coming from Australia with a little over 200 years behind us, my lifetime has already surpassed 10% of the nations lifespan. That leaves Australians with a different perspective on things, we’re just starting to find our feet as a nation; where your family comes from and what they’ve done for the last ten generations isn’t a question that comes up in conversation. The impact of being surrounded by other countries and cultures who at various times have been allies (perhaps even part of your empire, or you of theirs), enemies, competitors and betrayers and the cycle of conflict that has tracked with it has created a continent defined by differences.

And that’s the magic of the European Union, sure the additional bargaining power is nice (market representation of 550m people rather than 60m or 80m in the largest single countries) but what it has really created is interdependency and when you depend on someone, it’s a lot harder to go to war with them. This was really well described in one of our first lectures where the Dean of WHU (Professor Dr. Michael Frenkel) helped us model the levels of economic integration that develop between countries and their effects.

Reproduced without permission from MBA Knowledge Base (http://www.mbaknol.com/global-business-environment/regional-economic-integration/)

At the very base level you have a free trade agreement where the barriers to trade for goods and services between member countries are removed but each country may set its trade policies with non-members. It might not happen across all goods and services but the idea is that you get an increase in efficiency and a lowering of the cost of access to goods across all countries party to the agreement. Examples include the NAFTA and ASEAN agreements.

Next you have a customs union where in addition to the FTA conditions, you also align your trade policies across members to form a common external trade policy.

The next level up from there is a common market, this where things start to really integrate: restrictions on labour mobility are removed; standards are harmonized and; barriers to competition in capital markets are removed to drive down financing and borrowing costs.

After this, there’s an economic union (like the European Union) which is all of the above, plus a common currency and then the last step is a political union where a governing body is formed that coordinates economic, social and foreign policy for all member states.

As you can see, the level of integration in the EU is pretty amazing and it makes you appreciate what an achievement it must have been to pull this off (bearing in mind that there were precursor steps like the common market agreements prior to the EU formation). There are a lot of pressures that resist this kind of amalgamation, fears about sovereignty and loss of control but most of all it’s the history that you are giving up. In countries that are as littered with the bones of the past as those in Europe, this is no small thing and it’s clear that one of the primary concern of the EU during the coalescing period has been not to homogenize its members but rather to create an environment where they can be different but under a single flag.

For thousands of years, individuals and countries have tried to unite Europe leading to a variety of conflicts and the fall and destruction of empires. But when you look at an EU map today, they’re well on the way. There are  still some issues to work out: optimal currency area; sovereign rights and different economies at different stages of maturity (the German powerhouse vs. the emerging economies of Bulgaria or Estonia) but having seen it first hand, having been to the central European bank and listened to them talk about their vision for the future, having been lectured by professors who have observed and participated in the change itself, I have no doubt that the EU will grow, prosper and, in time, drive the world again.

That’s what I got from my exchange…