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Day: May 14, 2021

Luck, bias, and dumb mental shortcuts

by Giff Constable
This post is by Giff Constable from giffconstable.com

A sentence stood out to me yesterday in a doc Randy Silver shared on Twitter: “One of the most jealously guarded secrets of TV is the reality that those who get their pilots made and show picked up on any given year are usually no more gifted, visionary, or prodigious, than the ones who did not.”

The document Randy shared had 11 leadership tips for TV showrunners, and that list serves equally well as advice for founders. But that particular sentence brought me back to when I lived in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Here’s what I saw: you could look to the person to your right (Sarah) and the person to your left (Sarafina). Both were equally smart, creative, ambitious, and hard-working. Yet Sarah was rich and Sarafina was still living paycheck to paycheck. The difference was that Sarah took a job at a winner and Sarafina didn’t. And by “didn’t”, I don’t mean that Sarafina necessarily picked a company that failed, but merely one that didn’t exit at the extreme-enough end of the spectrum to make those stock options “change your life” worthy.

But the way the world looked at Sarah versus Sarafina was very different. Sarah would be viewed as a bit of an oracle, as if she was personally responsible for the success of her company, rather than the excellent contributor she was. Sarafina was equally excellent, but didn’t have that glow. And if Sarafina’s company actually failed, as most startups do, she might even (Read more...)

Luck, bias, and dumb mental shortcuts

by Giff Constable
This post is by Giff Constable from giffconstable.com

A sentence stood out to me yesterday in a doc Randy Silver shared on Twitter: “One of the most jealously guarded secrets of TV is the reality that those who get their pilots made and show picked up on any given year are usually no more gifted, visionary, or prodigious, than the ones who did not.”

The document Randy shared had 11 leadership tips for TV showrunners, and that list serves equally well as advice for founders. But that particular sentence brought me back to when I lived in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Here’s what I saw: you could look to the person to your right (Sarah) and the person to your left (Sarafina). Both were equally smart, creative, ambitious, and hard-working. Yet Sarah was rich and Sarafina was still living paycheck to paycheck. The difference was that Sarah took a job at a winner and Sarafina didn’t. And by “didn’t”, I don’t mean that Sarafina necessarily picked a company that failed, but merely one that didn’t exit at the extreme-enough end of the spectrum to make those stock options “change your life” worthy.

But the way the world looked at Sarah versus Sarafina was very different. Sarah would be viewed as a bit of an oracle, as if she was personally responsible for the success of her company, rather than the excellent contributor she was. Sarafina was equally excellent, but didn’t have that glow. And if Sarafina’s company actually failed, as most startups do, she might even (Read more...)

Safe Spaces: Why Indoor Air Quality Has Never Mattered More

by Sponsored Content

The following content is sponsored by mCloud.

Why Indoor Air Quality Has Never Mattered More

Indoor air quality affects everyone, but many of us take it for granted.

From workplaces and retail spaces to restaurants and long-term care facilities, any air-conditioned or heated space needs good ventilation. Proper airflow in indoor spaces is also critical for curbing the spread of airborne viruses such as COVID-19, especially as more and more of these communal places open back up.

This visualization from mCloud looks at why indoor air quality matters, and unearths potential technical solutions that can help keep people safe and ensure businesses run smoothly.

Silent Threats: The Viral Potential of Airborne Viruses

Most respiratory diseases, including the flu virus and COVID-19 are transmitted through three typical methods.

  1. Contact Transmission
    Through direct contact
  2. Droplet Transmission
    Through close-proximity, large respiratory droplets
  3. Airborne Transmission
    Through small droplets suspended in air

It’s this last factor in particular to keep an eye out for. In a study, over half (53%) of flu patients produced aerosol particles of the virus while coughing—and viral droplets can travel more than 10 meters when exhaled by an infected person. In addition, pollutants and other small particles are 2-5x more concentrated indoors.

While most respiratory diseases are preventable, it’s clear that handwashing and social distancing are not enough. Alongside other measures, experts recommend improved ventilation to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in indoor spaces.

Avoid Sick Building Syndrome with Good Indoor Air Quality

Prior to the pandemic, (Read more...)

Eat Your Frogs First Thing In The Morning

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Feld Thoughts

Each morning during the week, after morning coffee together, Amy says, “Ok, time to go eat my frogs.” She’s usually told me about the one or two or three frogs she has for the day, and her statement is a rhythmic part of our morning.

Yesterday, I asked her where that phrase came from. She pointed me at Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, a productivity book by Brian Tracey that she read a few years ago.

While I haven’t read the book, we are using the phrase a little differently than the motivating language on the Amazon book website.

It’s time to stop procrastinating and get more of the important things done! After all, successful people don’t try to do everything. They focus on their most important tasks and get those done. They eat their frogs.
 
There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. For Tracy, eating a frog is a metaphor for tackling your most challenging task—but also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life.

Stop procrastinating is correct, but it’s mostly aimed at a task that is difficult for some reason. And, what is difficult for Amy is different than what is difficult for me, and vice versa.

If you recall my post, (Read more...)

It’s Easy to Extrapolate How Things Will Get Worse

by naval
This post is by naval from Naval

It’s harder to guess how life might improve

Naval: A lot of the theories as to why we’re imminently going to create an AGI are based in a naïve extrapolation of computational power.

It’s almost an induction of more and more computational power. They say, “AI has already gotten good at vision and beating humans at chess and at video games; therefore, it’s going to start thinking soon.”

Another offshoot is this idea that humans are eating up all the Earth’s resources, so having more humans on Earth is a bad idea.

But if you believe that knowledge comes through creativity, then any child born tomorrow could be the next Einstein or Feynman. They could discover something that will change the world forever with creativity that has nonlinear outputs and effects.

Brett: At the moment we’re very concerned about the pollution and the loss of certain species, and these are legitimate concerns for some people. But it should never be at the expense of the long-term vision that we can solve all of those problems—and far more—if we could progress at a faster rate by using the resources that we have available to us.

Naval: Why does the world always seem to be full of more pessimists than optimists, especially when we still live with mostly Enlightenment Era values and such tremendous innovation?

There are probably multiple reasons for that. It’s easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. It’s hard to guess how life is going to improve; it’s (Read more...)

Stripe acquires Bouncer, will integrate its card authentication into the Radar fraud detection tool

by Ingrid Lunden

On the heels of a $600 million fundraise earlier this year, payments giant Stripe has been on an acquisition march to continue building out its business. In the latest development, the company has acquired Bouncer, a startup based in Oakland that has built a platform to automatically run card authentications and detect fraud in card-based online transactions. Its technology is tailored for mobile transactions and includes a flow to help users authenticate themselves if they are mistakenly flagged, to come back into an app legitimately (hence the name).

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Stripe is acquiring both Bouncer’s technology and the team, which will be integrated into Stripe Radar. Started in 2018, Radar is Stripe’s AI-based anti-fraud technology toolset, and most of the tech — which is focused around preventing fraudulent transactions on the Stripe platform — has been built in-house up to now. Stripe says that Radar already prevents “hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud for businesses” each year.

“Bouncer is a great tool for modern internet businesses. It allows them to quickly identify stolen cards, while also ensuring legitimate customers can transact without being blocked,” said Simon Arscott, business lead for Stripe Radar, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to welcome the Bouncer team, and their years of experience building payment authentication software for businesses, to Stripe and to enable their technology for Radar users. With the addition of advanced card scanning capabilities, Stripe Radar will be able block more fraud (Read more...)

Looking for (more of) a new kind of startup…

by Roy Bahat

[Credit where due: this is James Cham’s spark. I’m just the typist.]

There’s a new and important kind of startup that’s become wildly successful the last few years. These startups, for which we still lack a good name, look to their customers like a direct replacement to some large, familiar incumbent, but uses technology to provide a strictly superior offering.

Bonus points if you get the reference.

Think of, as examples of this kind of startup: Compass (a real estate broker), Flexport (a freight forwarder), Doma (a real estate title company), Newfront (an insurance brokerage), Campuswire (a soon-to-come community college), Clover Health (a Medicare provider), Periscope and Empathy (home builders), etc.

What makes these startups different? Like the more general “full-stack” startup, they don’t sell software — they sell some product or service that their customers are used to buying. That said, many full-stack startups force their customers to adapt to some new way of doing things (think Warby Parker before they had stores or even Tesla).

This new kind of startup:
> Competes directly with a valuable incumbent in an industry
> Offers a “strictly superior” product to the incumbent’s (i.e., it is at least as good on every important dimension to the customer and better at least at one very important dimension) — the main reason for customers not to buy from them is fear that a startup might not deliver
> Avoids asking its customers to change their behaviors much, if at all (e.g., doesn’t ask customers to switch to buying in (Read more...)