Continuations

We are once again at a transition moment in history. Where our journey goes from here could be exceptionally good or absurdly bad. This mirrors past moments, such as the transition into the Agrarian Age, which gave us early high cultures but also various dark ages. Or more recently the transition into the Industrial Age, with democracies flourishing, but also fascism and communism killing tens of millions. In the past few years we have had incredible unlocks across many fields. To name just a...

I had lunch the other day with a friend. He has a has a reasonably high paying job in consulting which he sort of enjoys but would rather be an artist. So the question he posed was “How much is enough?” – meaning how much money does he need to become an artist. We spent the rest of the lunch talking about different options for approaching this. Here’s a recap of what we have come up with so far: 1. Don’t wait, just start trying to sell some art right now on the side while going full steam wit...

We spend a lot of time in tech inventing and building new things. Some people are perfectly happy doing so without needing a deeper reason — some simply want success, others wealth, and many are excited about the potential to make the world a better place. Still I am struck by an undercurrent of dissatisfaction even among people who have accomplished a lot. I attribute that to the lack of a deeper purpose. Few people in tech seem to accept an easy religious answer to the question of why we ar...

In case you come here only on Wednesdays when I write about homeschooling, you might also want to check out Tech Tuesdays (a series that goes back several years). In yesterday’s Tech Tuesday I wrote about computational complexity and gave an example of a program that would take hundreds of thousands of years to run. It turns out to have been an example of exponential growth which happens to, well, grow a lot! That reminded me that I have been meaning to write about rates of change more genera...

As soon as your new startup has some actual endusers a fear of changes sets in. What if people don’t like it? What if they start to protest? I sometimes meet startups with only thousands of users that are firmly in the grip of this fear. That’s why it is so awesome to see companies such as Facebook and Twitter with hundreds of millions of users still make big changes to their services. As of today I have “New New Twitter” – while it doesn’t represent some fundamental change in how Twitter fun...

At MIT one of my statistics classes was taught by Prof. Jerry Hausman (of the Hausman test). In every class Prof. Hausman would at some point reach a result and then exclaim “and this proves that life is unfair” (usually it was that your statistical test had less power than you would have hoped for). Reading Nick Bilton’s Twitter story in the NY Times Sunday magazine reminded of that. I read it not because I expected to find something new but because it is always fun to see an event described...

About once a week I meet someone who is looking for advice on what to do next. This ranges from recent college graduates (and even the occasional high school graduate) to experienced entrepreneurs thinking about their next startup. Often people come with relatively tactical questions, like how to best get a job at a startup or how to transition into a new field. I used to engage on just that level but now I start by asking people about their purpose. “What is your purpose?” tends to throw off...