Sixian

“It’s sort of like: ‘What do you want to be in life?’”, Thiel tells me. “And the answer, more often than not, is ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’”

Transparency and data provide ruthless meritocracy.

One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. You made a certain amount of money last year, so you aim to make some ‘reasonable’ proportion more this year. But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you... See more

The thinking behind building network effects is less about emotion and more about the math for customers around getting value — utility. Giving the customer more value out of your product by getting your other customers to put value in it. Customers are not even usually aware that they are doing mental math around the value they are getting from... See more

This was unexpected – because phones are such deeply tactile things. I pick up my iPhone X forty-five times a day, Apple Screen Time informs me: no wonder irreverent UK tech site The Register has christened phones ‘fondle slabs’. Our phones are not simply media devices or transparent conduits for the vast amount and variety of information that... See more

5. Data Is Central to Customer ValueNetflix’s core product value, it turns out, is content licensing and content production. Recently, they have even dropped the long tail of titles they used to match you to. The data network effect they thought they had turned out to be peripheral to the real value of the product.

To blog you need to move. You need to sail in the Zeitgeist Sea to where the memefish are biting, find the there there, and capture things while they still have thingness. You need to have been there, done that, and tell tall tales about it. You need to play ironic, Quixotic hero, tilting at windmills (premium mediocre dragons).But you also need to... See more