Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
Microessay about how things take time by Justin Duke
https://x.com/jmduke/status/1788307295526338883
Things take time.
Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation - Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD - was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of electronics before coming out with their first piece of electronic hardware.
The Lego Group began in a Danish workshop in 1932; it took them 26 years until a confluence of technology, iteration, and luck led them to what we now refer to as a Lego. (Er, sorry - a Lego brick.)
Nike spent eight years merely re-selling (literally, not figuratively) Onitsuka shoes to a U.S. audience.
Gates and Allen ran Microsoft as what was essentially a freelance firm for eight years, too, before scoring a contract with IBM (and even that took an additional two years to be parlayed into MSDOS.)
(There are, of course, some companies that like Athena sprout fully-formed from the head of their creators - Amazon and TSMC come to mind.)
When we build hagiographies of the companies we love (or at least find most interesting), it can be tempting to draw clean, neat, satisfying arcs and fast forward through the boring eras that do not inform our modern understanding of those organizations.
But neither the Nike Cortez nor the Lego System 236 Garage with Automatic Door came from the first decade of either company's existence.
Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once.
But I was learning that succeeding at a research institution like Penn required skills that had little to do with science. You needed the ability to sell yourself and your work. You needed to attract funding. You needed the kind of interpersonal savvy that got you invited to speak at conferences and made people eager to mentor and support you. You... See more
The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs
A quote from (Katalin Karikó, the co-inventor of the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines and 2023 Nobel Prize winner.)
Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps a noble one (though not always), and see if we can conquer it.
To build a successful startup, you need to build a cult
To build a cult, you need shibboleths
That’s why deranged slack emojis and esoteric inside jokes are so crucial to company culture
In all seriousness - if you don’t have insane inside jokes, your culture... See more
Lulu Cheng Meserveyx.comGenerative AI and ChatGPT
Creative re-imagining of widely panned Apple ad by reversing the order
River flows in you pen tap freestyle 🔥🔥
#foryoupage #fyp #pentapping #riverflowsinyou
tiktok.comYou know a river runs through it but have you heard it with a pen tap percussion beat?
“You do realize that I’m management now, right? I’m not service anymore, John, so I don’t go around shooting people in the head,” Sofia notes. She’s essentially a tech platform executive now, trying to avoid getting pulled into social media battles.
“Look, I made a deal when I agreed to run this hotel, and that deal said I had to follow the rules of... See more
“Look, I made a deal when I agreed to run this hotel, and that deal said I had to follow the rules of... See more
The John Wick Universe is Cancel Culture — Remains of the Day
John Wick and Cancel Culture
91% of “Great Funds” returns come from 14% of their investments. This is the Power Law in venture