Luc Cheung

The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people.

This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows

you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last

longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks

explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a)... See more

Don’t waste time talking about what you plan to think about; instead, work through it immediately.

Intellectual laziness can easily sneak up on you. If you are sitting there talking about problems you plan to solve later, there’s a good chance you are being inefficient. Similarly, in GTD, you don’t put off tasks that only take a couple minutes. In... See more

If you look around, you’ll notice the people and organizations moving the fastest are the focused ones. Not only do they focus on a few ideas, but within the scope of those ideas, they are able to focus on the key variables.

Identifying the variables that matter comes with focus. When you commit to living in a problem, you understand things about... See more

One thing I do look back on fondly was how incredibly focused we were. Resources and time were so tight that you could feel the weight of all the things you weren’t working on. You had real conviction that the thing you were doing was the most important thing.

To pick a somewhat trivial example, at fireside chats with Mark (the predecessor to the... See more

With more creators , more content , and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet,... See more

Focus on one big thing

I used to make long to-do lists and feel guilty about not completing them.

Now, I structure my to-do list as follows:

One big thing

Less important thing

Less important thing

If I finish my one big thing, then my day is a success. To find it, I use this matrix:

The Eisenhower matrix

This matrix does have one flaw. From my... See more

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple. John Reed writes in his book Succeeding :

When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that

... See more

Self-Attention at a High Level

Don’t be fooled by me throwing around the word “self-attention” like it’s a concept everyone should be familiar with. I had personally never came across the concept until reading the Attention is All You Need paper. Let us distill how it works.

Say the following sentence is an input sentence we want to translate:

” The... See more

As the former CEO of both Data Domain and ServiceNow, two successful tech companies in recent years, I am often confronted with questions: what did you guys do? What is the secret sauce? How did you do it? We never thought of ourselves as that different. We certainly didn’t think we had stumbled on a silver bullet. Did we just get incredibly lucky... See more