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

I really like the approach of Netflix of 10 years ago when it was still small. They hired mature people so they could get rid of processes. Indeed, they actually tried to de-process everything. As a result, things just happened. Non-event was often mentioned and expected in Netflix at that time. Case in point, active-active regions just happened in... See more

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s)... See more

First, Facebook views itself first-and-foremost as a social network, so it is disinclined to see that as a liability. Second, that view was reinforced by the way in which Facebook took on Snapchat. The point of The Audacity of Copying Well is that Facebook leveraged Instagram’s social network to halt Snapchat’s growth, which only reinforced that

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“You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

Touching the product makes it different — At CB Insights, we deliver data to customers. At Atlas, we deliver drums to customers. There is something unique and gratifying about making a tangible product which was new to me. Turning a bunch of raw materials into a finished product and watching them move from step-to-step in the production process is... See more

Facebook inflated its video metrics, a bunch of digital media executives carelessly pivoted to video in the hopes that they would become essential content suppliers to Mark Zuckerberg, and then he imperiously killed them all because he realized it was far easier to negotiate with an infinite supply of individual burned-out Instagram influencers.... See more

To start with, leaders must not be afraid of their teams making mistakes. Copying from another comment: "Netflix's culture demands very strong leadership and probably works only when the company is small enough. From CEO and down, leaders in every level need to know how to set context for their teams, give enough freedom to their teams, while... See more