Notes

My Reading List:

1. Stratechery: Perhaps the best analyses and takes on tech and business models, written by the incomparable Ben Thompson.
2. Axios Pro Rata: Current happenings in the world of VC, PE and M&A. And great GIFs by Dan Primack.
3. Morning Brew and The Hustle : Daily pulse on business and tech news
4. Hacker News and : Techmeme What's trending in tech, code, startups, business, and world

I read through two decks which are filled with insights and great analysis.

1. Shopify's State of Commerce Report
2. Mary Meeker's Internet Trends Report 2019

In Shopify's report, the buyer personas (Trend Trackers, Engaged Explorers, Savvy Searchers, Pragmatic Planners) are fantastically captured and summarized.

Mary Meeker's deck is yet another trove of knowledge. It is also a great reminder of how you can
- Build something that adds value
- Make it your thing, not dependent on a company
- Continue to iterate, improve & gain momentum

I finally got around to reading Jeff Bezos' annual letter to shareholders
A couple of quotes that I really enjoyed —

On wandering:

Wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

On failure:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

Such a fantastic read.

Paul Graham is one of the most interesting people to follow on Twitter. His tweet today drawing a parallel between source code and Legos really struck a chord with me.

Hypothesis: If you keep your source code as short as possible, you will in the process reduce it to the "Legos" your idea is comprised of, and when you need to add something, you will usually be able to using those Legos plus at most a few new ones.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) March 17, 2019

I listened to a fascinating conversation that Patrick O’Shaughnessy had with Eugene Wei Podcast link. The conversation is about the intersection of technology, media, culture.

Most interesting part of it was Eugene talking more about his "Invisible asymptotes" post. Every business and every person follows the S curve: a period of slow discovery, rapid growth and then plateau. The upper shoulder of the S-curve, the plateau, is an invisible asymptote. It is very difficult to anticipate, but it is the key to continued growth for both people and businesses.

I had read his original post Eugene Wei - Invisible Asymptotes earlier, but re-reading it now gave me a much better understanding of the concept, and I re-marveled at Jeff Bezos’ anticipation of Amazon’s invisible asymptote.

A visual proof why 1+3+5+...+(2n-1)=n²