Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I wrote about how sample correlations are not meaningful under fat tails. Today I want to continue this line of argument in the specific context of the claimed relationship between country IQ and GDP. There is strong evidence that the distribution of GDP growth rates is in fact fat tailed. Why look at growth rates instead of absolute numbers? Because the whole argument has to be a dynamic one and not a static one. We can best see this from the following illustratio...

We first invested in Skillshare almost five years ago. At the time the company was focused on in person classes. While many of those were as engaging as I had hoped, it was difficult to grow. Coming to an in person class is a big commitment, teachers didn’t have an audience and many had a hard time finding a place to teach and the model only has local network effects. Michael decided that starting with online classes was a better way to go and we supported that change. The first foray into on...

Over vacation I read “How Much is Enough?” by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. I highly recommend the book as it goes after a central question that we should all be asking both individually and collectively. The book starts with an excellent chapter on Keynes’s now frequently cited essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Their basic diagnosis of where Keynes went wrong is that he assumed a separation of needs and wants, expecting our economy to grow rapidly enough to provide for ...

About once a year there is a headline like this one from Forbes “The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From” that points to a study showing that most job creation is in startups. Now the only thing that is in fact surprising is that this would be considered a surprise. Why? Because this should be our baseline statistical expectation in any economy that has been around for a while. Any collection of “things” that has a cycle of starting small, then growing and eventually declining and...

I have written before on Tech Tuesday on how to grow engineering teams but wanted to tackle this issue again from a slightly different perspective: what is the role of experience? Startup engineering teams often start out skewing very young as young founders tend to hire more young people. The overall bias tends to be to hire “bright young people who will figure it out” (whatever the relevant it may be). Many companies will go so far as having what they consider tests for brightness. The prob...

Last Tech Tuesday, I wrote about growing your engineering organization and the week before that about evolving your technology. Today here are three more best practices for successful engineering growth: APIs - I will have a lot more to say about how APIs relate to strategy in a separate post, but they are also a key internal tool as you grow even if not exposed to third parties. Having clearly defined APIs is what lets different parts of the engineering organization work with different techn...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I wrote about how sample correlations are not meaningful under fat tails. Today I want to continue this line of argument in the specific context of the claimed relationship between country IQ and GDP. There is strong evidence that the distribution of GDP growth rates is in fact fat tailed. Why look at growth rates instead of absolute numbers? Because the whole argument has to be a dynamic one and not a static one. We can best see this from the following illustratio...

We first invested in Skillshare almost five years ago. At the time the company was focused on in person classes. While many of those were as engaging as I had hoped, it was difficult to grow. Coming to an in person class is a big commitment, teachers didn’t have an audience and many had a hard time finding a place to teach and the model only has local network effects. Michael decided that starting with online classes was a better way to go and we supported that change. The first foray into on...

Over vacation I read “How Much is Enough?” by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. I highly recommend the book as it goes after a central question that we should all be asking both individually and collectively. The book starts with an excellent chapter on Keynes’s now frequently cited essay on “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” Their basic diagnosis of where Keynes went wrong is that he assumed a separation of needs and wants, expecting our economy to grow rapidly enough to provide for ...

About once a year there is a headline like this one from Forbes “The Surprising Truth About Where New Jobs Come From” that points to a study showing that most job creation is in startups. Now the only thing that is in fact surprising is that this would be considered a surprise. Why? Because this should be our baseline statistical expectation in any economy that has been around for a while. Any collection of “things” that has a cycle of starting small, then growing and eventually declining and...

I have written before on Tech Tuesday on how to grow engineering teams but wanted to tackle this issue again from a slightly different perspective: what is the role of experience? Startup engineering teams often start out skewing very young as young founders tend to hire more young people. The overall bias tends to be to hire “bright young people who will figure it out” (whatever the relevant it may be). Many companies will go so far as having what they consider tests for brightness. The prob...

Last Tech Tuesday, I wrote about growing your engineering organization and the week before that about evolving your technology. Today here are three more best practices for successful engineering growth: APIs - I will have a lot more to say about how APIs relate to strategy in a separate post, but they are also a key internal tool as you grow even if not exposed to third parties. Having clearly defined APIs is what lets different parts of the engineering organization work with different techn...

The word “growth” has become one of the focal points of the climate crisis debate. There are those who are worried that pricing carbon will slow down economic growth. And there are those who believe that the only way we can overcome the climate crisis is through degrowth. I fear that most of those debates will be people shouting past each other as the word growth has come to capture entire philosophies of thought. And so instead of having meaningful in-depth arguments about what kind of socie...

The word “growth” has become one of the focal points of the climate crisis debate. There are those who are worried that pricing carbon will slow down economic growth. And there are those who believe that the only way we can overcome the climate crisis is through degrowth. I fear that most of those debates will be people shouting past each other as the word growth has come to capture entire philosophies of thought. And so instead of having meaningful in-depth arguments about what kind of socie...