sari

One of my favorite examples of TAM’s irrelevance is Etsy. Early on, our peers were thinking, “How big could arts and crafts possibly be? I go to farmers markets, and maybe two or three people are polishing wooden bowls or selling earrings they’ve made in their free time. How many of those folks are there, and how many will actually use something... See more

Communities help companies because they can generate functional value such as content, product development, marketing, customer support, open-source code, as well as more subjective values such as a sense of belonging, purpose and social status.

The same question comes up if you apply this to Google search: you could require a choice screen to ask people if they want to see Yelp reviews or Google reviews when they search for a restaurant (and oblige Google to create APIs to enable third parties to plug into its results). But again, we’re not talking about one vertical search category, but... See more

The single biggest commonality that every thinker you’d consider as a generational genius has had is room to think. Sometimes enforced, like with Newton and the plague years, sometimes chosen, like Darwin and his extended voyages, and sometimes through creative work life balance, like Einstein during his patent clerk years.

ost existing recommender systems fail to offer us recsplanations (i.e., human-understandable explanations for why they’ve recommended specific things). This makes it difficult for us to estimate how much satisfaction we might experience from a given option. Research in the field of recommender systems shows that recsplanations increase user... See more