Juan Orbea

As Chris explains, as fields develop they accumulate huge bodies of knowledge that researchers are meant to be familiar with before they start contributing themselves. But the weight of that existing knowledge — and the need to keep up with what everyone else is doing — can become crushing. It can take someone until their 30s or later to earn their... See more

A surprising number of projects are one small change away from succeeding. With your organizational privilege, relationships you’ve built across the company, and ability to see around corners derived from your experience, you can often shift a project outcomes by investing the smallest ounce of effort, and this is some of the most valuable work you... See more

I believe all employees in a startup are on a spectrum between two poles:

You are not just the recipient of value from your network. The people and nodes in your network want and expect an exchange from you, too. They want you to validate them and support them. You are in a dialogue with the network force. You don’t always see it, but it is exerting itself on you. It wants something from you. Your network force... See more

Complicated – Complicated systems require expertise in their management, but as long as the proper expertise is available and used, the attractiveness of complicated systems is that they generally can be successfully managed.

No phrase better encapsulates science investing today than the challenge of “condensing fact from the vapor of nuance.”

The underlying mechanism for Zipf’s law is not yet agreed on but the main hypothesis is that it’s an outgrowth of the Principle of Least Effort. In short, systems that survive and operate at steady state optimize for efficiency. When they do, things tend to look like Zipf distributions.