Peter Hagen

we should all learn from early-Google's example. When employees feel truly valued (which is rare!), it creates psychological safety, high morale, productivity, and creativity. Early employees would often encourage each other to "fail fast" as a means to innovation, but that's no longer easy in an environment where failure implies a layoff. If... See more

Planning a walk is hard. Planning a walk for a group is even harder. For months Chris sent research updates. During one reconnaissance trip he got lost and spent the night on the mountain curled up, waiting for dawn. On another he took a spill off his mountain bike while double-checking some of the road walking. His blood was on this path and soon,... 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

I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.

Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.

If you don't... See more

Implementing that feedback depends on how well-designed your UI code is, and focusing on good component design instead of wireframe/visual designs is time well spent. A product’s capacity to implement UI customer feedback is more important than a product’s initial UI, yet we tend to focus far too much on the latter with heavy design up front. Small... See more

I had countless conversations with reporters in the pre-Elon Musk Twitter era who could not fathom doing their jobs without the site, who insisted that Twitter was where sources and scoops and true insight lay. It was utterly wrong and also completely understandable in a way that made arguing about it futile: Twitter could feel like a direct... See more