Agalia Tan

McGrath’s theory of transient competitive advantage begins with a fundamentally different assumption of reality from Sharp's: In dynamic markets, sustainable advantages have been replaced by temporary ones. Success requires managing a portfolio of advantages across different lifecycle stages—emerging through experimentation, strengthening through... See more

Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads.

"Caring about everything is a disaster.

Caring about nothing is also a disaster.

Nurture the small pocket of things that truly matter to you."

What people really want is permission to feel and act in ways that ordinary life doesn't allow, and this is the right time to start pushing your experiences into uncomfortable territory.

We’ve written a lot about AI’s impact on work over the past few months, but I liked an example Derek Thompson wrote about last week. Excerpt here:

One way to think about AI’s effect on workers is asking the question: Is artificial intelligence a tractor or a spreadsheet?

When we invented tractors, the population of horses on farms plummeted, because

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Having a beginner’s mind doesn’t mean being naïve. It means resisting the reflex to slot new inputs into old categories. When we approach a system—or a person—as if we already understand it, we stop noticing what doesn’t fit. Complexity gets filtered out in favor of confirmation. And then we mistake recognition for understanding.

Beginner’s mind is... See more

Consider the difference between Trader Joe’s (a beloved grocery store with a wide variety of goods, all of which you can trust) and whatever new CPG goods are popular on TikTok. Hype is a flash in the pan. Narrative network effects are durable, long-lasting, and broadly applicable.