Understanding incentive structures genuinely matters. If you're building a company or investing in one, you need to think carefully about why people do what they do. You need to design compensation that rewards the outcomes you want. You need to anticipate how partnerships might evolve when interests diverge. Ignoring incentives is naive, and... See more

My goal is to structure teams around minimizing “coordination headwind,” as described by Alex Komoroske in this deck on seeing organizations as slime mold. The rough idea is that coordination costs (caused by uncertainty and disagreements) increase with scale, and adding managers doesn’t improve things. People’s incentives become misaligned. People... See more