modelthinking

All of my agency hacks are kind of like this—seeking out big, glaring edges that most people might rather ignore.

Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.

And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, b

The tone was generally utopian, because back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice. Meanwhile

state or productivity state of the technology” is “shifting as we go a

The Law of Business Model Distribution

There are two fundamental questions to ask here:

First, why do these distinct formats emerge in the first place? Second, why do they ultimately converge?

The answer to both is what I refer to as The Law of Business Model Distribution . It states: Formats are defined by available business models. And business mode

And so why do we continue to delineate between the two formats of audiobooks and podcasting, and how much longer will that delineation survive? In response to that question about the future of the formats, my response typically went something like this: “In the future there won’t be audiobooks or podcasts. There will just be audio.”

The forced separ

Now we get to the second part of the law: Business models need distribution. Without the ability to reach an audience, a business model cannot unlock demand and therefore fizzles out. There’s survivorship bias here; the only content that we know about and can pay for is that which has managed to reach us as consumers. Business models needs distribu

Vicente jokes that they have an internal “wrapper-death countdown” which keeps track of the number of days the company survived since the last time it was “pronounced dead.” Here are his thoughts on how startups can be successful in a market where the capabilities of frontier models continues to expand: • Do one thing really well. Vicente takes the

Broaden the possibilities of what you can do. From his experience as a product manager at Meta, Vicente explains that AI enables him to do many of the tasks he would have had to delegate to engineers—which would inevitably take more time—himself. “With the tools that we have now, we should be able to be a lot more efficient, and do things that woul