Topic
analysis
- How to Blow Up a Timeline
I miss Eugene Wei's epic tech analyses. His latest serves as a sort of eulogy for Twitter. He's of the opinion that "peak Twitter" is in the rear view, and the platform seems to be on a continuous decline over the pas…
- BuzzFeed's Analysis of Xinjiang Camps
This is a wild story and an incredible piece of investigative journalism from the folks at BuzzFeed. The CCP reportedly operates hundreds of camps across the Xinjiang autonomous region for re-education of Uyghur musli…
- Matthew Ball on Nintendo
Matthew Ball dives into Nintendo's potential and what differentiates its culture from the rest of its media and gaming comparisons, like Disney. The section on their mobile performance is particularly shocking. I knew…
- Weekend Reading: Children of Men, Google Earth at 15, and Slate Star Codex is Gone
📽 How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and…
- Why Figma Wins
The more I use Figma, the more convinced I become that their approach to design tooling is unique. The first impression I got slotted it mentally in with tools like Sketch, Moqups, and in some ways even Adobe Illustra…
- SSC Coronavirus Update
A great post on various things coronavirus from Scott Alexander. The utility and tradeoffs of lockdowns, virus transmission, country by country differences, and more.
- Weekend Reading: The Anti Portfolio, Downlink 2, and nucoll
📂 The Anti-Portfolio Bessemer maintains this page of companies they passed investing on. I like the idea of publicly acknowledging your big misses or errors as an organizational accountability tool. Some big names he…
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
✍🏼 The Enemies of Writing A great piece from the Atlantic's George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from o…
- Underutilized Fixed Assets
An interesting analysis from Kevin Kwok looking at how to think about marketplace business models, and retail versus professional supply.
- How to Lose a Monopoly
"Tech domination", monopolies, regulation — lots of concepts, fears, and proposed remedies are all getting confused these days in tech. Benedict Evans had this piece of sober analysis to peel apart the differences bet…
- Weekend Reading: The Worst Year to Be Alive, Chinese Sci-Fi, and Slack Networks
🌋 Why 536 Was the Worst Year To Be Alive You may have thought the entire 14th century was pretty bad, or maybe 1918 with its flu pandemic and millions of war casualties, but how about the 6th: A mysterious fog plunge…
- Why Don't We Know More About the Subway Cost Disease?
Alex Tabarrok linked to this detailed deck from Alon Levy picking apart the possible reasoning for why NYC subway construction is so much more than other urban centers around the world. Levy is to be lauded for his pi…
- What Gets Expensive, and Why?
Patrick Collison poses and tracks possible responses to broad questions on his website. In one, he asks: Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? Spending on healthcare in the US is up 9X in real terms s…
- What is a Tech Company?
Ben Thompson had an interesting piece recently thinking through what ingredients make up a "tech" company in today's market. The term has been used for a long time somewhat interchangeably with "startup" since the 200…
- On Retention
Earlier this year at SaaStr Annual, we spent 3 days with 20,000 people in the SaaS market, hearing about best practices from the best in the business, from all over the world. If I had to take away a single overarchin…
- Weekend Reading: Rays on a Run, Apple's Pivot, and Mapping Grids
⚾️ The Rays are a Surrealist's Delight Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They've put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well a…
- Exploring Cycling Data with Python, Strava and PostgreSQL
This is an interesting project on GitHub for syncing data from the Strava API for analysis from a local database. I've had my eye out for some way to do this cleanly — to use the Strava Activities API to sync each tra…