innovation
Betting on Unknown Unknowns - by Alexandr Wang Betting on Unknown Unknowns
Alexandr Wangalexw.substack.com
World's Hardest Problems
Sustainability + Human Development Is the food we eat scalable, sustainable, healthy, nutritious and tasty? Is the air we breathe clean? Is the water we drink pure? Is there a way to produce energy that is relatively abundant, cheap and clean? Is there a way to reverse or mitigate climate chan...
docs.google.com
The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more
Anton Howes • Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III
Iconic successes seemed outright strange at first: Amazon (wait days to receive a product you’ve never seen), eBay (buy beanie babies from someone thousands of miles away), Google (trust an algorithm to answer your questions), LinkedIn (publicly post your resume), Facebook (share personal updates with people you haven’t seen in years), Airbnb (stay... See more