Juan Orbea

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

For those growing into adulthood during most of the twentieth century, therefore, the backdrop to life was the loss of faith in coherent systems of thought and morality. Sophisticated people knew they were supposed to rebel against authority, reject old certainties, and liberate themselves from hidebound customs and prejudices. Artists rebelled... See more

We can organize these observations into what I call the law of accelerating returns as follows:Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of... See more

He argues that a low entropy, or predictable and stable, carrier is required for the emergence of knowledge -- whether it be a fiber optic cable and communication, or a social system governed by the rule of law and economic innovation. Such a social system is not spontaneous, but rather developed through sacrifice and a religious order.

Presumably, parents in the past cared as much about their kids' safety as parents today do. But they took far fewer precautions than parents today, and exerted far fewer controls over kids' behavior. Perhaps they thought it was important that children learn to take risks in order to develop courage. Or perhaps they thought that getting into scrapes... See more

[2] is exciting because it fixes a major problem in politics: unlike startups, where the early stage of the process looks somewhat like a mini version of the later stage, in politics the early stage is a public discourse game that often selects for very different things than what actually work in practice. 

One area that’s often underinvested in (e.g. lots of room to work in) while also being highly leveraged is growing the team around you. If you start dedicating even a couple hours a week to developing the team around you, it’s quite likely that will become your legacy long after your tech specs and pull requests are forgotten.

The values of a company should be a blueprint for how to be successful in that company; the canon for how the team behaves and makes decisions. As I mentioned earlier, mitochondria aren’t just good at what they do — they best embody a company’s values. That's why you can’t just interview for competence. You need to interview for values.