Silicon Valley’s tribal boosterism has been bad for tech and bad for the world. I recently criticized Reddit for clamping down on third party clients. I pointed out that having raised a lot of money at a high valuation required the company to become more extractive in an attempt to produce a return for investors. Twitter had gone down the exact same path years earlier with bad results, where undermining the third party ecosystem ultimately resulted in lower growth and engagement for the netwo...

I spent much of yesterday morning at the NASDAQ for the IPO of our portfolio company MongoDB (now trading as MDB). This is a big milestone for technology companies in New York. We have had New York IPOs before, including Etsy in our portfolio, but MongoDB is the first core technology (as opposed to applied technology) company that’s based in New York city to reach this milestone. As someone who came to New York in 1999 at the height of the dotcom bubble, when it first felt like the city could...

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Those of us who have been around computers for a long time have lived through many letdowns when it comes to AI. The promise was frequently grand (cf various Herbert Simon quotes) but the actual results were disappointing to say the least. But a funny thing has happened over the last decade on the web. The grand promises have (mostly) disappeared and yet the results are beginning to show up! We might not be noticing them because they are not even la...

This is of course one of the all time great (geek) topics: who will rule in the future – humans or machines? I was reminded of it by discussion of Techmeme’s story selection. It should not be surprising that a single algorithm – in Gabe’s case link analysis – is not always successful at picking out the important stories. One of the things that makes our human brains so powerful is that they can more or less in parallel apply many different algorithms and synthesize the results. When we look a...

Another key Kaizen technique is the customization of tools or even the creation of entirely custom tools. In one of the early posts I wrote about how a Japanese automotive supplier was able to switch parts in injection molding in minutes whereas a similar German supplier needed almost 12 hours. The basic setup they were using was quite similar, but the Japanese supplier had made extensive modifications to the basic injection molding machine. For instance, the die (mold) has to have a certain ...

In manufacturing, when stuff goes wrong, there tends to be physical evidence, such as a part with holes in the wrong place. It is therefore often easy to find the immediate cause of the problem, which might be to say that the wholes were drilled in the wrong place and go yell at the person who does the drilling. But in Kaizen, the immediate cause of a problem is only the beginning of the analysis, not the end. The team is supposed to start with the problem and ask “Why?” seven times to determ...

One of my favorite Kaizen techniques is visualization. On the shopfloor this takes the form of large signs that graphically display key quality metrics. The charts show overall trendlines but also break out individual teams. This is a powerful motivator. When there are large gains in quality, the credit can go to the team(s) that produced the progress. Conversely, when the overall chart shows a dip or a slow down in improvement, it is often readily apparent which team is responsible. Some peo...

Another basic tenet of Kaizen is that inventory is evil. Inventory is what folks use to cover up the problems and inefficiencies in their production process. In traditional analyses of inventory, the cost of inventory is generally determined based on the cost of the capital that is tied up and the space for the inventory. Kaizen considers a significant additional cost that is much harder to quantify – the cost of allowing problems and inefficiencies in production to persist. Kaizen thinks of ...

A great Kaizen technique is to drive towards lot size one. In manufacturing this means that each part goes through the process separately. It usually also means that you can interpserse different parts in the production process. For instance, in the case of the injection molding supplier for Porsche that I mentioned previously, it meant figuring out how to paint each part separately instead of in batches of twenty parts. Some of the advantages of lot size one are immediately apparent. Say you...

The most fundamental priniciple of Kaizen is the centrality of quality. This expresses itself in three ways. First, quality is seen as central to reducing time and cost: By avoiding defects, you save rework cost and time. Second, quality is not the responsibility of a separate QA department. It is everyone’s responsibility from the CEO to the frontline assembly person. Third, quality is not an outcome but an ongoing process of improvement. To capture this last idea, the quality goals in Kaize...