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50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
David shares 50 ideas that changed his life. Read here.
Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.
Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.
Life is easier when you don’t compete. (
Demand Curves Slope Down: The harder something is to do, the fewer people will do it.
Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.
Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset
The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.
·perell.com·
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
untitled-1: (sic.) &wired Case Study
untitled-1: (sic.) &wired Case Study
A participatory installation where audience members are invited to design on an experimental design tool.
What if design tools were more upfront about being opinionated?
The features of untitled-1’s design tool were an aggregate of features I used often across Photoshop, Illustrator and Figma. However, I realised that these features were severely limiting, and not embracing the full potential of what digital imaging can create. This made my tool less disruptive than I wanted it to be. In future iterations, I would like to create features that would be unique to my design tool.
·laurentyee.webflow.io·
untitled-1: (sic.) &wired Case Study
Overcoming male reproductive greed
Overcoming male reproductive greed
In bestseller book Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), geographer Jared Diamond launched the theory that geographic conditions explain why some parts of the world are more developed than others. Eurasia became more developed because it had the best wild plants and animals to domesticate, according to the book. The continent also had a good east-west elongation, so plants and animals domesticated in one place could be brought to many other places. In America, animals and plants would not easily travel over the bottleneck of Central America with its warm climate.
·woodfromeden.substack.com·
Overcoming male reproductive greed
Wrong Sequences For Startups
Wrong Sequences For Startups
I've written about the importance of sequencing before – doing things in the right order. Yet, it's hard for many to get right. Especially when they know what the "right" answer ultimately is. This is part of the reason why engineers at Google, Meta, and Microsoft sometimes struggle with adjusting to startups. A series of bad sequences for early-stage startups (n
Having a bug-tracking or complex internal knowledge base with a schema. Complex systems need to evolve from simple ones over time (Gall's Law).
Learning a new technology in the process. Some of the most interesting parts of the stack are being rewritten in Rust, but if you don't know Rust, a startup is not the time to learn it. Unless the technology is critical to your domain, there are better things to do.
·matt-rickard.com·
Wrong Sequences For Startups
Dueling Over Platforms
Dueling Over Platforms
Plus! De-Googling; Reshoring; Attribution; Volatility; The State of AI Workers; Diff Jobs
A market structure where there's opportunity for value creation at the level of individual companies and value destruction at the level of overall industries is a tricky situation.
Some of Microsoft's most profitable channel partners were pirates who ensured that Windows and Office would be standards even in developing-world countries where the sticker price for these products exceeded GDP per capita—at release, Windows 95 had a sticker price of $210 and Office '97, released in 1996, was priced at $599 if it wasn't an upgrade. China's GDP per capita crossed 800 in 1998; the market for full-priced software there was tiny
AI capabilities are improving far faster than our ability to intelligently reason about what these systems do, for example, but that sets a ceiling on productivity gains from using AI. If you can't reason about a system, it's hard to improve it.
It's exciting, but not especially fun. One big driver of this is the lag: the products that get announced now are the ones that have been in the works for months, and that's a long time in the AI world: "It seems like everyone is simultaneously extremely motivated and extremely close to burning out."
·thediff.co·
Dueling Over Platforms
The Path Dependence of YAML Templates
The Path Dependence of YAML Templates
Why did YAML templates come to dominate configuration? YAML was initially released a month after JSON (2001). A hypothesis is that YAML is not only popular because it is more human-readable/writable than JSON but also because it is significantly more machine writable as a raw string.
·blog.matt-rickard.com·
The Path Dependence of YAML Templates
No GPUs Before Product Market Fit
No GPUs Before Product Market Fit
Most AI-focused startups shouldn’t focus on training, fine-tuning, or otherwise making significant hardware investments (e.g., GPUs) before finding product market fit. (GPUs for inference is, of course, OK). In many cases, this is the wrong sequence for startups
·blog.matt-rickard.com·
No GPUs Before Product Market Fit
Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple
Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple
In a frank conversation, the Apple CEO offers new insight into his leadership—and explains how he has refashioned the world’s most creative company (from its privacy policy to its Oscar-winning movies to what’s coming next) on his own exacting terms.
·gq.com·
Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple
The Future of Headless
The Future of Headless
James Mikrut (CEO, Payload CMS) and Steven Tey (Vercel) discuss what the future of headless looks like.Hit the links below for the repos featured in the vide...
·youtube.com·
The Future of Headless
You Don't Need a Build Step
You Don't Need a Build Step
The build step helps Node.js/npm run in the browser, optimize end-user performance, etc. But long build times limit productivity. With modern tooling, do we still need a build step?
Each step in the build process is either to support developer experience in writing code or to improve performance for the end user. Let's dive in.
Node's server-side JavaScript isn't compatible with browser JavaScript, because each implementation satisfies two entirely different systems: Node is built around a filesystem. A server has HTTP-driven IO, but the internals are all about finding the right files within the filesystem. JavaScript was created for browsers where scripts/resources are imported asynchronously via URLs.
·deno.com·
You Don't Need a Build Step
Buyers in the Foundational Model Stack
Buyers in the Foundational Model Stack
Product teams and application engineers will be the buyers of the foundational model stack, not data teams. Why? Direct value without a data pipeline. Application engineers can get direct value out of LLMs without involving a data team. For a proof-of-concept or demo, all they have to do is build some infrastructure around a hosted foundational model. They don’t need access to the data warehouse since a tiny bit of copy-pasted data can validate an idea.
·blog.matt-rickard.com·
Buyers in the Foundational Model Stack
Relationship Liquidity
Relationship Liquidity
Haaave you met so-and-so?
The only way to avoid making these kinds of interactions cringey beyond all reason is to focus on value creation, never value capture. Be a genuine human being who wants to connect people because you like these people, and you think their lives will be better as the result of meeting each other. If you're doing it in hopes of getting value out of those people, go touch some grass, cause you might be a scrub.
"The most curious people I know are constantly paying attention to how things work. Creativity is often remixing the things around us, but in order to remix we have to experience. We take in information, experiences, and perspectives, and then roll them into something new. 'The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.'"
As I started to unpack some aspects of what seemed to be logical ways to increase relationship liquidity, these are the three things that came to mind for me, often because they come up when I'm talking to my superconnector friend:Natural Curiosity"Start Where They Are"Specialization
"Listening and understanding people's lives is a prerequisite. If you start where they are, not where you want them to be, the process goes smoother. Too often missionaries are focused on teaching rather than learning. You will need to learn where they are in order to teach what they need to progress."
But that's not how relationships are built. Relationships are built, first, from listening and understanding. Understanding where someone is in their life, what makes them tick, what are their hopes and dreams, and then finding ways to fit into that, and add value to their life. That's how relationships are made.
You need to be able to articulate why someone would want to know you, respond to you, or spend time with you.
And all of these things compound. The more curious you are, the more able you are to understand where a specific person is. And the better understanding you have of them, the more capable you are of articulating what you could do to bring value into their lives.
He shared these charts demonstrating where the curiosity phase exists along several adoption curves for new technology, and I think it’s pretty illustrative of the moment in time.
·investing1012dot0.substack.com·
Relationship Liquidity
How to Get Rich
How to Get Rich
A collection of all my interviews about my ‘How to Get Rich’ tweetstorm.  Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep You probably know Naval from his Twitter account. We’re going to talk about his tweetstorm, “How To Get Rich (without getting lucky).” More
·nav.al·
How to Get Rich
Travis Fischer on Twitter
Travis Fischer on Twitter
A practical guide on how to use LLMs effectively: pic.twitter.com/ysv4ZnbDAU— Travis Fischer (@transitive_bs) April 3, 2023
·twitter.com·
Travis Fischer on Twitter
Reasons To Do a Startup
Reasons To Do a Startup
On Patrick Collison’s (the co-founder and CEO of Stripe) personal site, he has a page for “Advice.” It provides some life advice for readers aged 10-20, but under the 20-30 section, he puts, “If you're 20–30: I don't know yet. I plan to think about this when I'm 35-40.” I call this the
·blog.matt-rickard.com·
Reasons To Do a Startup
Bet-the-Company Ideas
Bet-the-Company Ideas
Plus! The Universal Second Language; Asset and Liability Management in Sports; Light Contagion; Buying Status; Shutting Down Banks
Microsoft made an aggressive pivot towards the Internet in the mid-90s. (Sample: "Amazingly, it is easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on the Microsoft Corporate Network. This inversion where a public network solves a problem better than a private network is quite stunning."[1]
But this turns out to be the signature of a well-timed bet-the-company choice—new models are purely accretive only when they've been perfected somewhere else, so a company whose big bets aren't costly is a company that's catching up to somebody else's earlier bet that's already paying off.
The big late-stage pivots tend to look too early from the outside and to feel too late from the inside.
In retrospect, it's a gaping economic inefficiency, because as the more forgettable but important half of the Stewart Brand quote goes, "information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life
·thediff.co·
Bet-the-Company Ideas
Inside The Matrix Awakens: a vision for the future of real-time graphics
Inside The Matrix Awakens: a vision for the future of real-time graphics
For Digital Foundry, the highlight of The Game Awards wasn't actually an award as such or even a massive triple-A revea…
[UPDATE: After publication, Epic asked for a correction here, the original piece quoted Michal Valient as saying the data throughput is 10MB/s - it's 10MB per frame. At 30fps, this would be 300MB per second.]
A core philosophy of Unreal Engine has been the democratisation of core technologies, but also in enabling much bigger projects from smaller studios - including Epic's special projects team itself. "It's a small team, so we don't have the army of artists that comes with Fortnite," adds Jerome Platteux. "So we wanted to prove to the world that we can generate a large scale city with a small team and the best approach is a procedural system. So that means we use Houdini extensively. This is where we create all the recipes for the world."
·eurogamer.net·
Inside The Matrix Awakens: a vision for the future of real-time graphics
Why Isn't Usage Based Billing A Bigger Category?
Why Isn't Usage Based Billing A Bigger Category?
Usage billing is the new hotness for SaaS, and I have personally seen the pain it caused, but I was ultimately scared off from investing in it.
It was possibly the most painful, yet high-revenue-impact work that an engineer could do. Over the course of >12 months we painstakingly instrumented every single part of the platform to not just work, but charge real money for the work we were doing. First we started metering bandwidth, the most obvious usage to charge for a web hosting company. Then, new charges for build minutes, quietly rolled out via email. Then over a year later, the journey ended with usage charges for everything else. (This happens to exactly match the main components of cloud businesses: Networking, Compute, and Storage)
·dev.to·
Why Isn't Usage Based Billing A Bigger Category?
Usage as the Moat in AI by @ttunguz
Usage as the Moat in AI by @ttunguz
As generative AI captivates Startupland, startups will do what they have always done: integrate new technology to build transformative businesses. Incumbents have seized the moment with Microsoft, Adobe, & others integrating generative AI into their products quickest. In response, startups must develop moats to stake out their market. What are these moats? At the moment, capital & technical expertise create competitive advantage. Models require millions of dollars & technical expertise to deploy: document chunking, vectorization, prompt-tuning or plugins for better accuracy & breadth.
·tomtunguz.com·
Usage as the Moat in AI by @ttunguz
What is Server-Driven UI? – Judo
What is Server-Driven UI? – Judo
Server-driven UI (SDUI) is an emerging technique used by companies like Airbnb and Lyft that leverage the server to build the user interfaces of their mobile apps. This opens up new possibilities and addresses some fundamental challenges with native mobile app development. Before we look at how server-driven UI works, let’s take a look at […]
·judo.app·
What is Server-Driven UI? – Judo
Consumption Pricing Units in AI
Consumption Pricing Units in AI
A look at some of the current consumption-based pricing units in AI (and some alternative ones). Consumption-based pricing units should fit the following general criteria: Relevant to the core functionality Easy to measure and understand Scalable and adaptable across customer segments
·blog.matt-rickard.com·
Consumption Pricing Units in AI