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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."

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.

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

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)

[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."