Peter Hagen

At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating . At a larger company, the best you get is "enjoyable".

I would rate Ingenuity among the three most innovative and important things that NASA has done during the 21st century. The other two are the James Webb Space Telescope and the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, program.

Like every human endeavour, every social network is there for a limited duration and will be useful to a limited niche of people. That niche may grow to the point of being huge, like Facebook and WhatsApp. But, to this day, there are more people in the world without an account on Facebook than people with one. Every single social network is only re... See more

Each day a topic is chosen by a member of the walk-n-talk crew. In China, some examples: friendship, the future of art, adventure, failure. In Spain, last year along the Camino, we had a fairly candid and revealing conversation about money and our individual philosophies around money therein.

The case board, inspired by HBO show True Detective, originally featured free placement of clues and gated progress until players found a specific answer, but this led to high player frustration. Remedy shifted to a board that featured more questions with easier answers, leading to more dopamine hits with players, and finally scrapped free clue pla... See more

Probably the bigger change, from what I've heard, was losing Amit Singhal who led Search until 2016. Amit fought against creeping complexity. There is a semi-famous internal document he wrote where he argued against the other search leads that Google should use less machine-learning, or at least contain it as much as possible, so that ranking stays... See more

The reason so much of the news media sucks is they aren’t writing for you. They’re writing for their sources in Washington, for the industries they cover, for rich people, and for fancy awards committees. Just take a look at the ads they run: for investment banks, defense contractors, oil companies. Unless you’re in the market for any of these prod... See more