54 chunks · 38 episodes
... on timescales larger than your professional experience. Anyone who entered the tech industry circa 2008 or later only knows the late-stage era of centralization and aggregations. This is a "winter". But a new disruptive technical paradigm ush...
...ransport than atoms. This one fundamental fact explains the majority of why the tech industry behaves so differently from other industries. For example, winner-take-all dynamics show up because the force of preferential attachment, a weak mino...
In the tech industry everything is always on fire. If it's not on fire, you're supposed to turn up the heat until it is. Then you step back and you realize if you would h...
...s not, you'll die. So you have to assume it's winner-take-all just in case. The tech industry acts like every domain is winner-take-all, just in case.
...ould possibly matter?" "Stopping to think about implications is for losers" The tech industry has been increasingly infected by this vibe.
...ntrinsically distrustful of aggregators, even if they don't know that word. The tech industry, in a nutshell, to them: a massive aggregation of power combined with a "go fast by not thinking through the implications of our actions" Having expe...
...The women have no recourse but to do clever strategies to get ahead. Why is the tech industry not particularly self-reflective about the implications of its actions? Because the tech industry has all of the money and power. The tech industry i...
There's a whole class of people who joined the tech industry not to use the internet to change the world for the better but because they would have gone into finance in a previous life. The optimizers, the peop...
The tech industry is in the boring hill-climbing phase. Hill-climbing takes grit, dependability, and efficiency. Mass-produced. Hill-finding takes taste, craft, and cl...
...m of different dystopias (with a few more subtle ones thrown in). People in the tech industry tend to be more optimistic about tech. Partially because we build it so we feel more control over it. But that means that tech sometimes is inspired ...
...alley originally, Silicon Valley has matured and become more traditional as the tech industry has matured, and Berkeley keeps alive more of that energy.
...l context it's in and becomes a particularly concentrated version of it. As the tech industry has gotten more mature and more boring (more about banal first-order optimization), the PM role has also gotten more boring too. It used to be more a...
The tech industry has a default ethos of "go fast and assume we're correct and everyone else is dummies". That leads to a lot of moves that look clever but are actuall...
...ect fidelity and ~infinite speed for ~free. A lot of things that make us in the tech industry feel like geniuses actually arise mostly from "the world of bits is way easier"