Peter Hagen

What you "need" to do is a dangerous trigger word. Almost always the perceived need is based on a particular understanding of trade-offs that could be misguided. One engineer's need to recover some technical debt (while noble, of course) might be the opposite for CEO, who might be seeing a bigger picture existential need to the business. A thing is... See more

There is an all out war for search supremacy right now between two trillion dollar companies, with one having everything to win and the other everything to lose. In those circumstances a standard VC model of buying growth does not work even if you have a huge war chest, as you will be outspent no matter how big your investors are.

As a founder of a... See more

So How Can You Survive?

Simple. You provide something nobody else can ever provide. Something cool and distinctive that people will rather pay money for your game than get someone else's for free.

Consider me. I'm an OK programmer. I'm not good at art and visual stuff, and I haven't been since I was a kid.

But I can write well. I make good settings... See more

We’re inspired by our city and everything in it — the most ancient social network that has stood the test of time. The art, fashion, and the city’s magical ability to connect us at the right time, night or day. Hundreds of different places to hang out, be inspired, meetup, or split up.

A huge majority of Apple's revenue (from IAP) came from gaming purchases. This would continue to be the case. A gaming app would have ads + options for purchases (none can survive without it) and Apple now earns both on downloads and IAPs. Many games cross the 1M threshold once they are popular enough. Gaming apps have low retention, and a power... See more

As all of this unfolded, I spoke twice with Substack’s co-founders. And while they asked that those conversations be off the record, my understanding from our conversations — based on material they had shared with me in writing — was that in the future they would regard explicitly Nazi and pro-Holocaust material to be a violation of their existing... See more

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics.

Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced... See more