Bits and Bobs 11/6/23

An API has a clear boundary; as a user you interact with it in a single, clean, self-contained interface.

A platform has much less clear boundaries between it and your use case.

A platform is a messy thing that can absorb the complexity of your use case and model it.

A platform that is not possible to be used in messy ways won't be used widely, because real world use cases are inherently messy.

The things you optimize for when building an API vs a platform are different.

API: do your one task well with minimal fuss.

Platform: never say no to any use case (though they aren't necessarily easy to accomplish).

Platforms are extremely valuable because they empower users to solve classes of problems they couldn't otherwise... and every bit of incremental usage the customer does with the platform makes them stick to it slightly tighter.

That means I'm intuitively aware of its pros and cons.

But the twice-yearly release cadence has a few benefits.

It forces a big-rig style of execution: high momentum, minimal pivots.

It makes it easier to have a coordinated sales moment, a discontinuous excuse for sales to reengage with customers.

It also makes internal coordination significantly easier; everyone coordinates to the date and works backwards instead of needing to coordinate pairwise with other teams.

Another benefit: there's a clear time to stop and do bug-bashes to improve quality in the run-up to release... work that is easy to punt endlessly in a continuous delivery paradigm.

This style of execution is also significantly easier to coordinate with partners on.

In general, the cost of coordination with an entity inside your org is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than the cost of coordinating with an entity outside your org.

This is a good rule of thumb for living in harmony with the systems and people around you.

The net value you create is not just the direct outcomes, but the indirect ripple effects--the externalities.

A cynical money making play that goes against this advice: profit from a given direct dynamic and externalize the downsides.

The secret to Apple's deep product quality is patience.

If you bake a cake for 60% of the time the box says, you won't get a cake that 60% of people want to eat, you'll get a cake that no one will want to eat!

Things that grow based on intrinsic motivation are typically significantly stronger and more resilient.

But you can't force a seedling to grow. The best you can do is nurture it.

It can be hard to do in practice; the benefit of patience is indirect and hard to quantify while the benefit of speed is obvious.

A tsunami has a massive amount of momentum that can wreak destruction... and yet might not be more than 5 feet tall.

"Oh we can ignore that, that wave is only like 5 feet tall."

What matters is not how visible the threat is, but how much power/momentum it has.

Turbulent flow is chaotic, it's many orders of magnitude less efficient than laminar flow.

The threshold between the two states is discontinuous and easy to miss until you've crossed it.

Once a system is in turbulent flow, adding more energy to it just makes it more turbulent, which might even decrease the output.

Adding more investment to a swirly thing will often just make it more swirly.

When turbulence is lower, the sediment can settle out of suspension and accrete along the bottom, lifting up the stable region.

If you scale something too early, you cross the threshold from laminar to turbulent flow and you get chaos.

This is why it makes sense to develop a strong base and then incrementally extend it, never going faster than it can absorb at any one time.

The secret to scaling things effectively is not even a secret. It's just to be patient.

Do the steps in the right order: walk, crawl, run.

The work doesn't drag you down, it lifts you up.

Unfortunately, the work necessary to bring an idea to fruition in the real world is a mix of creative and banal.

The banal parts are the parts that must be done, but that you don't find creatively energizing.

The banal parts are a slog that can feel soul-crushingly dull.

The 1x parts often include crank-turning work to execute on something to a good-enough bar.

The 10x parts are trying to convince another person to do a given task you can't do yourself (either you don't have the skill or the time).

The 100x parts are overhead trying to convince multiple other people to simultaneously coordinate.

As a context gets more mature, or an organization scales, the proportion of creative part to banal part changes significantly.

This is one of the reasons that it's good to find the creative core that motivates you and emphasize that.

You might distract yourself a bit from the banal parts in the short term, but you'll gain more energy to then invest in the banal parts more sustainably.

The original software-based spackle for toil is spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are absurdly, generically useful, in just about every domain.

They are many orders of magnitude better than doing the calculations by hand or on paper.

This immediately changed a huge class of problems from "infeasible" to "possible".

Spreadsheets are a platform for calculation; they are inherently messy because they are so general purpose.

They can absorb any given domain in a slapdash, jury-rigged way.

Once a given use case becomes particularly common, it makes sense to lift the use case out of a spreadsheet and into a bespoke tool with use-case specific rails.

But you can think of spreadsheets as the messy / good-enough fabric for a lot of use cases to have their MVP.

Spreadsheets set the level of motivation necessary to build the MVP much lower, enabling many more good ideas to be tried.

Spreadsheets will never go away; they will remain forever in that part of the funnel of creation.

From Wikipedia: "Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported both by groups that want the ostensible purpose of the regulation, and by groups that profit from undermining that purpose"

I'll note that in this frame, no one ever think they're the Baptists.

It's the advice least likely to be actively bad in the majority of situations.

But when you're seeking advice, you're not looking for one-size-fits-all advice, you're looking for advice that is best for your specific situation.

What is the best advice for you?

"In deciding which future to prepare for, you need two things: (a) an opinion about what's likely to happen and (b) a view on the probability that your opinion is right. Everyone knows about the former, but I think relatively few think about the latter. In short, most people believe in their opinions. "Of course they do," you might say. "If they didn't have faith in their opinions, they wouldn't hold them." And that's the point. Everyone's entitled to his or her opinion. But one of our favorite sayings around Oaktree states that "it's one thing to have an opinion, and something very different to act as if it's right."

A tighter distillation in a recent podcast: "it's ok to have an opinion, but it's not ok to act as if it's correct"

The slightly more junior peer gets an un-intimidating teacher who will empathize with their current situation because they were recently in it.

The slightly more senior peer gets immense value of abducting their intuition into verbal guidance for the junior peer.

The best way to understand your intuition is to teach it.

That is, it's often about a mindset changing.

External forces will get a instrumentalist approach: "do this thing to get this outcome"

A mindset has to be grown, intrinsically. It takes patience and nurturing.

Someone trying to shortcut the path of development might say "Just tell me what to say.", to which the teacher might respond "No, I want you to think differently."

The unenlightened form of this is the "oreo" (aka the "s--t sandwich").

You give two random positive bits of feedback with the actual meat of the message in between.

The meat of the message is often nuanced and subtle to not come across too strong--making it more likely the receiver misses it.

Feedback by default can feel like an extrinsic shove, especially when it's coming from someone who has an instrumentalist interest in the person improving.

You're far more likely to be met with a defensive crouch response.

The receiver might think: "What that person doesn't get about me is X, Y, Z. That's why that advice is bad advice."

The first step is to embrace the person.

Show them that you see them similar to how they see themselves, and understand and support their value and goals.

Importantly, make sure to embrace them on the specific thing you'll be giving feedback on.

"I can see how much you value helping the team get to the right answer, even when it's not obvious. I love how you're constantly scanning the room to see people who aren't following and helping bring them along."

Then suggest a new way that might help them achieve those goals more effectively.

"I've observed that some members of the team seem to disengage from your advice when they don't think you're seeing the importance of a imperfect but quick answer to an existential risk. I think if you acknowledged the need for those quick fixes in some cases, the rest of the team would be more open to hearing your argument about the right long-term answers."

That leaves it up to them to intrinsically decide to adopt the feedback as opposed to feeling like it's forced upon them.

Of course, in many situations you have no choice but to give more direct feedback.

Early stage startups get this basically for free--everyone needs to participate, and the reward is the company living another day.

This means that at early stage startups, you don't have to be shy about leaning into sprints; they are intense experiences that create deep bonds.

But this pattern gets harder as companies scale, because more of the effort goes into fighting the swirl, or in achieving ends that are mainly about optics.

In those situations, everyone will get tired and not feel like they accomplished anything: a recipe for burnout.

It takes time to absorb nuance -- to see that it's not black and white but actually a shade of gray.

It takes time to be convinced by information that goes against your current beliefs, in proportion to how different they are.

To appreciate the shades of gray in a topic takes time and study, otherwise you get posterized extremities.

If you have a limited amount of time, you'll get the superficial take that is cast into sharper relief than it should be.

"That looks superficially like the thing that is opposite what I believe, which I know to be wrongheaded and I can thus reject out of hand"

In an increasing cacophony of signals, there's less time to attend carefully to any particular input.

This means that all else equal, we'll see increasingly self-strengthening beliefs.

That bond brings them together... but might also put them in a deeper intellectual rut together.

An intellectual rut is where you might not notice disconfirming evidence because you're too deeply tied to a given view.

Unless it's a highly relevant topic that they care about deeply or affects their day to day, a subordinate would all else equal rather bond with their management chain.

This slight edge to sharing confirming evidence can self-strengthen the more that it happens.

The one person who cuts against the grain to share disconfirming evidence will have to stick their neck out even further.

This can lead to emergently-manufactured confirmation bias that decoheres from ground truth... even if everyone is well-intentioned!

This is part of the intuition of Chesterton's fence.

If someone went to extreme effort to make a thing, you should assume there is a motivating reason.

Making a durable thing requires going to extreme effort.

Don't allow yourself to tear down the fence until you understand the reason why it was built.