Juan Orbea

Without rubber and another kind of tree resin called gutta-percha, it would not have been possible to wire the world. Early telegraph lines were just naked conductors strung from pole to pole, but this worked poorly, especially in wet conditions, so some kind of flexible but durable insulation was needed. After much trial and error, rubber became... See more

Giving What We Can member Henry Howard donated 50% of his income to charity in 2021 during his first year working as a junior doctor in Australia.

Anchors around case studies on innovations and creative processes at 8 New Polymath enterprises - BP, Cognizant, GE, Kleiner Perkins, National Hurricane Center, Plantronics and more.

Funds taking a more concentrated approach and investing in fewer companies most likely are assuming that one of their investments has an extremely large outcome while the rest either go to zero or whose exits are much more modest. This is called the power law dynamic and historically, this can be seen happening often in venture capital. Funds... See more

Who are the mitochondria in your company? Make that list. Invest in your relationships with these people, and in the people themselves.

The spherical shape of triso fuel is designed so it contains the uranium in an impenetrable ceramic fuel element. I t can be stored long term right on site, taking up minimal space and it yields 5x the output of traditional fuel. 

Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the... See more

"I'm a big believer that the only real driver of human progress and economic growth over the long term is the societal structure that enables scientific progress, and then scientific progress itself."