innovation culture

The “Tech Right” is just one faction in a rising alliance of thinkers, policymakers, and industrialists that spans the political spectrum, united by their focus on accelerating American innovation to drive growth and global primacy. I’ll refer to this blob as the “progress coalition.”3 They are the most dynamic and interesting policy machine on the... See more

First is the observation I’ve made throughout: that people are building companies based on ideas from the 1950s and 1960s.

This is a very real thing. Earlier this week, I met with Tyler Hayes at Atom Limbs to see the robotic prosthetic he and his team are building. After he slipped the cuff on my arm and as we were waiting for the system to boot... See more

By the time those ideas’ productivity was realized, they were relatively old ideas. As Perplexity concluded, “In conclusion, while the 1950s and 1960s saw remarkable TFP growth, this ‘golden age’ was largely built on technological innovations and research from earlier decades, particularly the 1930s and 1940s.” There was a two decade lag.

So given... See more

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change,... See more

One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines). Commercial aircraft must couple a high level of performance in some of the most... See more

One of the lessons that TMitTB has tried to get across to you, the big message that matters most to him, is that code is never done; after shipping the new platform (no longer a website, this is a platform), with all its interlocking components, he and his team will continue to work on it forever. There will always be new bugs, new features, new... See more

Listen deeply to what people have to say about your brand and your product. The answer key is already in front of us. This is not new, but it is becoming more and more important, and rarely is it being implemented at the right moments, (again, during R&D vs. post-campaign analysis.)

How do we do this? I’ve dubbed it “Layering & Triangulating.”... See more

But it's also true that right now is a great time to do something ambitious. Robin Hanson calls the present "the dreamtime", following a concept in Aboriginal myths: the time when the future world order and its values are still liquid, not yet set in stone.