Luc Cheung

“Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they are doing.” -Warren Buffet

Compounding Growth Loops for API-First Companies

A common API-First company’s North Star metric is developer adoption, and the number of developers in an API-ecosystem tends to compound naturally in four growth loops that reinforce each other .

1. The Developer Experience (DX) Loop: Developers who explore (and eventually thrive) with the API will... See more

Other books throughout the years kept changing my life in new and exciting ways, usually by changing the way I thought in some meaningful aspect. “Antifragile,” “Letters from a Stoic,” “Finite and Infinite Games,” “Infinite Jest,” “The Denial of Death,” “Words that Work,” “Seeing Like a State,” every now and then I’d pick up a book and come out the... See more

We don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them based on where they are currently, not based on what they could become. The same is true for how we judge people. Someone should create a Substack newsletter called Early Days where they use Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to... See more

Ads have ruined company priorities

It used to be that we design for the best possible experience. But then “free” came around. Nothing is really free, however – you may not pay for it but you do with your data to improve ad targeting.

As a result, the incentives for the creators of these products is not to create a better experience for you. It’s to... See more

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping... See more

Most of the time you see someone do something incredible, with what seems like little effort, and you ask “How did you do that?”, the honest answer is, “I’ve been doing this every day for 10+ years.” Noticing patterns and connecting the subtle dots is something that’s hard to teach in a classroom but becomes obvious when you’ve lived and breathed a... See more