Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. I appreciate you starting with context and the sections about innovation and data had me laughing.
FWIW, I love posts like this. They combine tech, a dash of prognostication, an overview about career trajectory and how you think about it, and a bit about the space you're entering and how you see the competition. It's a fun read, and I appreciate you taking the time to pen it!
I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your article. I wish you the best and keep up the good work. I especially appreciated the viewpoint of a non-american (as a non-silicon valleyian, which arguably has similar learning curves).
Glad you enjoyed it! We're eager to write more transparent content like this, so let us know if there's anything specific that'd be interesting (eg. recruiting, finance, etc).
"...and the other was like "get lost, I don't care". It was quite an eye opener. You really don't know what this is like until you've tried it."
Mirrors my experience in policy work and legislation. My current 3 takeaways:
Attention economy rules all. I now see everyone, every org as information processors struggling with infoglut. So it's just very hard to even get noticed. Necessary triage makes course corrections very expensive.
Long term, focus on improving feedback loops, reducing transaction costs. Applying those Deming and Drucker style organizational learning ideas to new domains. (I've had very limited success. See point #1.)
Pace yourself, stay focused. Improvement is prohibitively expensive. Mark Twain, Brandolini, and many others, have marveled how silliness defeats truth. Frankly, I burned out. As David I sprinted whereas Goliath was running a marathon. And Goliath has mastered distraction, flooding the zone, provoking a response, patience.
Author here. Thanks for the stylistic comments, folks. I purposefully did this in about 30 minutes in stream-of-consciousness format. It should be off-putting and odd. It's not like most of the polished (and admittedly marketing) material you see elsewhere on HN. I hope I didn't waste anybody's time.
My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.
I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.
If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.
Hey thanks for reading, I'm the author of the piece. The original went through a couple rounds of edits since it's on the company page but PM if you want the original :)
mad perspectives. being a tech frontliner you saw so much. in fame, in lives of excess. amazing hearing from your perspective how the wealthy think and live. one of the best articles i've read on the web in a long time, thank you for writing it.
It’s always amazing to me how many developers don’t understand marginal cost and opportunity cost and therefore misunderstand the true economic power and forces behind software.
I like how Microsoft, Google, and Facebook were framed and it was essential for the author’s point on how Amazon is trying to do for reality and real stuff what others did for digital.
These kind of one-shot examples are exactly where this hit for me. I was in the middle of some research when I saw him post this and it completely changed my approach to gathering the ad-hoc data I needed.
Funny thing is that I was a consultant before, and was brought into a company to look at their procurement decisions. And lo and behold, they actually had a helicopter. Needless to say, we said to get rid of it.
Other than that, the first two paragraphs made me think of my own startup, and how we can get users to engage more often and get more users. Immediately transported me into the head of our main users, and I had to message the developers on the team for thoughts.
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