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.
What Tim Learned at Business School 