Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent. You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they’re afraid to be punished if they don’t. For startups, there's so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape.
At Stripe, I believe they call this the Sunday test—would you be likely to come into the office on a Sunday because you want to hang out with this person?
Most people do whatever most people they hang out with do. This mimetic behavior is usually a mistake—if you’re doing the same thing everyone else is doing, you will not be hard to compete with.
The absence of a contingency plan is a fatal design flaw for UBI. Top-down complexity has a cost. If UBI fails 10–30 years into the future we may have a significant population percentage that has never done any work and suddenly needs to. Because any UBI program failure would likely be a result of running out of money, it could be catastrophic for... See more
So, if good intentions don’t help you reduce mistakes, what does? At Amazon, Gupta learned that the answer is mechanisms — processes that are repeatable, measurable, auditable and improvable.
The rate at which you learn and progress in the world depends on how willing you are to weigh the merit of new ideas, even if you don’t instinctively like them. Perhaps especially if you don’t like them.
The thing is, consumers in the bottom 78% of US workers live paycheck to paycheck, they already spend everything they have each month.They’re not holding back additional money, waiting for the right product to appear. Which means all this advertising is creating little additional growth and wealth, it’s just taking it from other companies.
“I think the idea of air taxis is kind of bullshit,” Carlo Ratti, an architect and urban theorist who serves as director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, told me. “Technology can change many things, but it cannot change physics. Helicopters are loud and expensive and, for most forms of transportation, inconvenient.” As near-silent electric and... See more