53 chunks · 43 episodes
For anything novel, getting real world feedback as quickly as possible should always be urgent. When doing something new it's important to get in contact with the real world as soon as possible. That's true even if you have a very long runway. The risk is that the longer you haven't touched ground t
Stowe Boyd used to write about "Me First" collaboration. The action of doing something for yourself that can then be summarized for the entire community. People don't do it primarily for the community; they do it for themselves and the fact it helps the community emergently is a bonus. These kinds o
Individuals care about reality. As soon as you get more than two people, the emergent social imaginary enters the picture. The importance of the social imaginary grows at a compounding rate. Even at relatively small team sizes, the importance of the social imaginary often dominates the reality.
...t it a lot think is an obvious improvement. If a company has a product that has compounding value, then if engineers self report "I'm doing the best work of my career" then the company is thriving. The more you overthink it, the more you'll interf...
... immediate huge results. To have bold results requires a consistent vision with compounding value.
With network effects, even if you're 3% better than alternatives, over time those compound into aggregation effects. The compounding effect is more important than the rate. It doesn't matter what the rate of improvement is, compounding rates pull away from all alternatives. This is true as long as i
You keep leaning into what works at a compounding rate until it captures you. At each point it's easier to go with the flow in terms of who to hire, who to promote, features to build. Over time it becomes a structure that's bigger than you and you can't steer.
...cipation, creation, identity, and understanding. Synergistic satisfiers produce compounding value in indirect and illegible ways. Beancounting will never identify synergistic satisfiers, and yet society having a rich, flourishing requires them.
Incentives dominate intentions. We focus on intentions because we can see them more and our brains are tuned to people, not systems. But what matters is the outcome and the incentives influence that much more. Over time everything falls down the gravity well of its incentives. Each incremental move
Trying to think too many steps ahead gets you stuck in compounding loops of uncertainty. Just execute: guess and check. Take an action and see how the universe responds. Not simulation, action. Thinking too many steps ahead decoheres you from reality, only good for research, not a product.
Three types of innovation: informative, transformative, and formative. This frame comes from The Heart of Innovation. Informative: incrementally extend what's already there. Transformative: change the game of what's already there. Formative: create something new.[nc] Informative innovation assumes t
Filter bubbles are auto-intensifying. Even if it starts out with a small random bias, that compounds as you focus more and more on signals that fit within what you already think, which is tied to what you've already been exposed to. How much do the companies control the algorithm and how much does t
...nt implementations) and how many other actors already implement it (which gives compounding value). The easier it is to implement thus is the primary driver[vz][wa] of the ultimate compounding benefit.
It's better to start with a bottom-up mess[xo] that you can then rank than to have only clean, top-down constructed use cases. A big box of random legos. Overwhelming, but in an inspiring way. If there's not enough stuff, then you're out of luck if your use case doesn't work. If you have a big bag o
Search engines should coevolve with their ecosystem.[abc][abd][abe] Search engines in a late stage ecosystem are massive, complex beasts. But at the very beginning of the ecosystem, they can be simple and small. Then, as the ecosystem grows, you iteratively increase the complexity of the search engi
Complexity catalyzes complexity. If you're competing over resources you have to be at least as complex as your competitor otherwise you're outside of their OODA loop. The competitor with the fastest OODA loop will win, all else equal. So evolution in an ecosystem goes at a compounding rate. As preda
Regulations cap downside. Benchmarks set the terms of how to measure upside and inspire competition by making it measurable. Benchmarks are an emergent schelling point. Someone sets rules and a way to measure quality. No one has to use their rules if they don't find them valuable, but if people do,
In a chaotic environment, it can be hard to find a toehold everyone can agree to coordinate around. Ideally, that toehold will then be a stable point to pull yourself up into ever larger and more established things. Without that toehold as a schelling point, nothing coheres. A tactic I've found robu
Command and control techniques are logarithmic. Emergent techniques are exponential. Command and control: effective at achieving the ends, quickly. Cuts through coordination costs: "simply do the thing the boss says". But can never rise higher than what the boss planned. If the boss is wrong, or did
OpenAI apparently has 10m paying subscribers. An impressive number! Convincing consumers to pay for something, especially a new kind of thing, is extraordinarily hard. But in the future most consumers will have to have an LLM subscription of some kind. The applications of LLMs will continue to grow,