Peter Hagen

During this Thailand walk, our nightly conversation topics were:

• How do you stay motivated?


• What do you escape or resist?


• What does home mean to you?


• Shocking solutions to public problems.


• Tell us about a failure.


• Frameworks to make big decisions.


• What is your health regime?


• How do you use lists?


• What do you believe that your heroes do

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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

If you’ve read this far, then I’ll tell you the honest truth: we don’t actually know what we’re doing. Artificial intelligence is a vast and complex topic, and I’m very skeptical of anyone that claims they’ve got it all figured out. Indeed, Faraday felt the same way about electricity—he wasn’t even sure it was going to be of any import:

“I am busy

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Twitter is not a Silicon Valley giant. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are tremendously attractive to the average person; Twitter never was and never will be. But it loomed large in the lives of journalists and was over-represented in activist circles as well. Images, videos, and stories about unrest, protests, riots, and police crackdowns reached... See more

Note how different Apple’s strategy is from the vision in Meta’s and MagicLeap’s pitches. These companies point towards radically different visions of computing, in which interfaces are primarily three-dimensional and intrinsically spatial. Operations have places; the desired paradigm is more object-oriented (“things” in the “meta-verse”) than... See more

My take on it is that fun comes from interacting with a system with enough depth for interesting stuff to emerge - maybe even things that will surprise you as a designer. I find that this happens when you get a few simple systems, get them working well independently, and then find as many ways as possible to interconnect them.