innovation culture

Conway’s Law is so commonly referenced in Silicon Valley at this point it’s almost a meme. But I still don’t think we take it seriously enough. Because your product will be a mirror of your teams. You will ship your org chart.

Make an Org Chart You Want to Ship — Advice from Linear on Designing Your Team

Flashbots

flashbots.net

Together, Hobart and Huber argue that bubbles are coordination mechanisms for progress: by linking collective risk to potential financial rewards, bubbles enable megaprojects beyond the capability of any single person or industry—megaprojects which, although risky, mark inflection points in technology, economics, and culture when they are... See more

Bubbling Up | ARENA

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

Nabeel S. Qureshi • Reflections on Palantir

The default outcome?

Let's grant the assumptions at the start of this post and the above analysis. Then, the post-labour-replacing-AI world involves:

Money will be able to buy results in the real world better than ever.

People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.

Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now

L Rudolf L • By Default, Capital Will Matter More Than Ever After AGI

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world:... See more

Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?

Ideas have this amazing property. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

For instance, sometimes we create abstraction layers that allow people to create things on top of them explicitly without having to understand anything beneath them. We call those “platforms.” The expectation is that when we create abstraction layers like that, we should see an explosion of creativity, since now people can focus only on the... See more

Moxie Marlinspike • The Magic of Software; Or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization

This silicon union of intellect and action creates a culture fond of big ideas. The expectation that anyone sufficiently intelligent can grasp, and perhaps master, any conceivable subject incentivizes technologists to become conversant in as many subjects as possible. The technologist is thus attracted to general, sweeping ideas with application... See more