Recency Bias

Listen: What you do is Who you are by Ben Horowitz was a great and timely read. I first encountered Horowitz's first book as a new leader. This conversation with Tim Ferris is a great intro to the book. The book really resonated with me as we were undertaking a project on corporate culture. You can't put up a values poster a slide deck and change your culture. As leaders we can influence but we can't dictate culture.  From some unique examples of strong cultures Horowitz provides some great guidelines on how to influence culture. Listen: The End of the Beginning - Stratechery. Another great episode to around the state of the internet. Looking back at the history of the internet and computing in general there is disruption and paradigm shifts. Mainframe to desktop, desktop to phone, each time new players prospered. However Google, Amazon and Microsoft have successfully implanted themselves as core infrastructure upon which all new innovation on the internet is buil...

I am interested in our institutions and how at this point in time society is clearly very anti-institution. Neo-liberalism, Reagan-omics, globalism, capitalism is the reigning doctrine and at it's core is a seeming hatred for public institutions. Whether it's government or unions or even the press. Organizations whose primary purpose was to improve the lives of the many are now scorned and ridiculed. We're better off leaving city building to Google and everything else to Amazon. Eliza Anyangwe writes a great piece about Collective Agency . In our love affair with capitalism, billionaires and unicorns we marvel and idolize the personal agency of people like Jeff Bezon, and Elon Musk,  we go buy that fair trade coffee or Toms loafers. We sign that online petition, share that meme. However Eliza argues that in dialogue in working with people side by side we can accomplish more. Eliza references Anand Giradharas as a fellow advocate for collective agency as well as he wants t...

It's common practice for companies to identify who is their target market. Niche down to a sector with a good total addressable market you can win enough of to be profitable. Sounds simple enough... but if we just did X we could definitely win this customer. AND I was just talking to so and so and if we just did Y then we would Definitely take over that market. The discipline to declare who is our customer also means we are drawing a line to declare who is outside the circle. Then we need the conviction to stand firm and say no to certain prospects. When you're chasing revenue one can often talk themselves into almost any deal. The problem then can become many. How much do you have to bend or splinter the roadmap once the assumed features are missing,  how you handle an implementation going off the rails. Once live, if you've sold customers that aren't really in your wheelhouse it will show in terms of their support or feature requests how they need to be supported....