Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
— David Foster Wallace (via theatlantic)
Pareto’s principle (80/20) says that only a few of the products get the most attention
Which means, once people find a winner, they stick with it.
If you take Marc Andreessen’s 10x Principle seriously, your product [and by extension the business organization that your product should justify] needs to have a 10x improvement over the existing solution.
10x faster, 10x cheaper, 10x better
The Pale King: Monologues from the Unfinished Novel by David Foster Wallace
You don’t know how to start a company because you talk too much. You think being a founder is about networking vs. product. You convince some angels to invest who are your best friends in the early years but who you ignore the minute you find the real money. Once you’ve buried the angels under the preference of the venture money, you realize your financial plan was a joke and you don’t know how to translate the equity into anything. So you start vaporizing capital and creating distractions. Your company exists on the backs of investors vs. actually being a good business, and so you find a way to make money off of the smokescreen by selling secondary shares.
So we had webmasters invent themselves in effect, by learning from everybody else. And then propagating. That’s part of what triggered this avalanche. Anybody who wanted to could write their own HTML. So that exposure of mechanism allowed the general public to do whatever it wanted to do, and of course this is a reflection of the entire society. Internet is like a mirror. And it reflects back whatever the society is. And so people get all upset about pornography and hate speech, and they get upset about terrorism websites. I mean, all these bad things. Or fraud and abuse, stalking, all these bad things happen. It’s true, they happen without the Internet, and they happen on the Internet, because the general public is there. Well. So here we have this mirror showing us all these bad stuff. Then the question is, what happens when you see bad stuff in the mirror? Well you don’t fix the mirror. The Internet is a mirror. That doesn’t do any good. Fixing the Internet will not fix the problem. You gotta fix the people that are reflected in the mirror.
Monday Metal: DangerKids - Waking Up
There is much of Silicon Valley that warrants criticism: the mono-culture now threatening San Francisco’s storied diversity and general weirdness; the anonymous office park sprawl of its built spaces; the male-dominated engineering culture; its assumption that all disruptions are good ones by definition; its casual scorn for older institutions.
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@stevenbjohnson
yup
Learning From Los Gatos — The Peer Society — Medium
(via fred-wilson)
I never want to say anything unless it conveys a customer benefit.
—
Jeff Bezos was reviewing a press-release for the launch of Drugstore.com - he sat on their board. The press release included lots of chest thumping mentions of various venture capitalists who were backing them. He red-lined most of the press release and then said to the team - “I never want to say anything unless it conveys a customer benefit.”
If Jeff Bezos’ philosophy was widely adopted across Silicon Valley TechCrunch wouldn’t have much content on their site.
(via arielseidman)That last point.
