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Today we're tearing down the $9.7 million seed pitch deck used by Arkive, a startup that is trying to answer the question: "What if the Smithsonian was owned and curated by the internet?"

Adverse selection happens when there is information asymmetry between buyers and sellers. One side takes advantage of information that isn't known to the counterparty. It's one of the most important economic ideas to think about when starting a company or buying or selling anything. A few examples of adverse selection in technology markets: * SaaS. Complicated technology can be difficult to evaluate ahead of time. For decades, companies dealt with shelfware – enterprise software that was purc

Yesterday Mailbrew's launch was the most successful launch we ever had: * 1200+ signups * 8500+ new brews * 5000+ site visitors Most of what we planned for it succeeded: we got good press coverag...

What Cognitive Flexibility Theory tells us about the acceleration of expertise in ill-structured domains.

Everything I know about learning in novel, ill-structured domains, summarised in one piece.

Some brief observations on the cases so far. Use this as a starting point, not an authoritative take.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory: the caveats. Also: a look at kind vs wicked learning domains, and what this tells us about building expertise in messy, real world domains.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory: the caveats. Also: a look at kind vs wicked learning domains, and what this tells us about building expertise in messy, real world domains.

Bell Labs is dead. It remains dead. And we have killed it. In fact, even the concept seems to be dead. The top result in Google for Industrial Research Lab is a retrospective history. Pluralize the qu

For a time in recent history, R&D labs seemed to exist in a golden age of innovation and productivity. But this period vanished as swiftly as it came to be. How did it happen, and why did it fade away?

Have you ever had the feeling you know a thing inside out, but then as soon as it comes time to talk about that thing in a meeting, the words come out all wrong? I have. In those moments it can be hard to tell whether the gap in clarity

The case for thinking smaller, while achieving more.

Last week I was talking to an accomplished entrepreneur and I asked what trait he saw in another entrepreneur that made her successful. Without missing a beat, he said she was a probabilistic think…

Talk a little bit about what industries you should think about working in. What kind of job you should have? And who you might want to work with? So, you said, “One should pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.” Why? Yeah, this is an insight into what makes Silicon Valley work, and what makes high trust societies work. More

UPDATE Several years ago on my 68th birthday I wrote up 68 bits of advice for my adult children, and posted them here. The bits were extremely popular, and they were widely shared by others. I was encouraged to write … Continue reading →

“Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss As a young man, I thought my success was solely a function of my being awesome. My character, my grit, my talent. What a fucking child. […]

There's a scene at the beginning of The LEGO Movie where the main character Emmet is faced with the brutal assessment of his bland ordinariness by the people he works with. A few quotes: "Look at Randy here, he likes sausage. That's something. Gail is perky, that's something... I mean, all [Emmet] does is say yes to everything everybod...

The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...

Your ancestors pet snakes and drank foul-smelling water. You (likely) do not, as you have learned from their mistakes via the ultimate streaming network of life lessons, always on in your head, called instinct+. In sum, our instincts help us predict the future. If you get close to a lion it will eat you, etc. […]

In World War II, the US Military examined damaged aircraft and concluded that they should add armor in the most-hit areas of the plane. Abraham Wald at Columbia University proved this was the wrong conclusion, that instead, adding armor to the least hit areas of the aircraft is more effective. Wald reasoned that the military was only considering aircraft that had survived the missions; any shot-down or destroyed aircraft wasn't available to be studied. Survivorship bias is where we only conside

The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...

Why we love consuming stories about other people's failure

If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important.

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple.