Topic
business
- Modes Of Control
An interesting idea from Andy Grove’s High Output Management.
- The CUA Factor
From the latest issue of Res Extensa: thoughts on Andy Grove's idea of "modes of control", from High Output Management: Thinking about this in the context of my own work, I can map past hardships and bad business deci…
- How Cultures Accumulate
- Coordination Headwinds
Transaction costs are unavoidable, and with a scaling team, these drags of coordination slow every team down. It's a law of business physics. Here's Venkatesh Rao, commenting on this excellent slide deck from Alex Kom…
- Big Firms Need to Be Sluggish
Arnold Kling raises interesting points here about the nature of big companies. The incentives and physics of large company dynamics essentially demand that they move slowly. Sometimes this slowness looks like indecisi…
- Management Consultants as Soviet Apparatchiks
I love everything about this article: While the technical oriented consultancies may do some good, it’s obvious at this point that the management consultancies do not serve any socially useful purpose in modern societ…
- How to Think About Your Competitors
For any company, keeping track of your position in the competitive landscape is an important element of making the right decisions. When I think about competitors, I think about them separately as "direct" vs. "indire…
- On Markets, TAMs, and Agency
If you've been involved in investing or fundraising activities in the past, you've likely heard about "TAMs" (total addressable market), as in "So what's your TAM look like?" The general idea is to determine a metric…
- Maxis 1996 Annual Report
Sam Arbesman shared this post in his newsletter — highlights from Maxis's annual letter (the makers of SimCity, the Sims, SimEarth, SimTower, etc.). As much as it seems like the simulation tech Maxis developed over th…
- Economies of Scale in Construction
In his newsletter, Brian Potter started a new series looking at why the construction industry seems to lack economies of scale, like you find in IT, media, and nearly every manufacturing business. When you look at the…
- Product-led Growth Isn't Incompatible with Sales
Product-led growth has been booming in the B2B software universe, becoming the fashionable way to approach go-to-market in SaaS. I'm a believer in the philosophy, as we've seen companies grow to immense scales and val…
- Visa: The Original Protocols Business
This was the first episode I've listened to of Patrick O'Shaughnessy's new podcast "Business Breakdowns". He and Alex Rampell dive deep on the history of Visa and its unique business model. Alex saw Visa's business fi…
- Stripe's Content Strategy
Morgan Mahlock wrote recently about the promise of Stripe Press, Stripe's book publishing outfit: Within the legacy publishing industry, Stripe’s young publishing press is refreshing - it is Sutherland’s electric cove…
- Neumann on Schumpeter on Strategy
There's a myth in popular culture that associates "being an entrepreneur" with "making a lot of money." But do they, if compared to a world where an entrepreneur did the same job in the employ of someone else? In this…
- Patrick McKenzie on Working at Stripe
Great insights here to some of the workings of Stripe from Patrick. Though I've never been on that ride, the hypergrowth company (even with its flaws and stumbles) is an absolute marvel that it can be made functional…
- Weekend Reading: Collaborative Enterprise, Algorithms, and Fifth-Gen Management
💼 Collaborative Enterprise Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software. 🤖 Seeing Like an Algorithm Part 2 in Eugene Wei's series on TikTok. See part 1. 🏫 Fifth Generation Manag…
- 2020 Bundles
Ben Thompson follows up his 2017 piece with an update on the state of bundling strategies from some of the big tech and media companies. I liked this description of where Disney+ fits into Disney's overall strategy wi…
- The Network Effects Manual
Seems like every company claims to be harnessing some type of network effect in their business model. This post goes in-depth at defining and comparing different forms of network effects, diagramming them in a radial…
- Fourth-Wave Consulting
Venkatesh Rao compares the evolutions of the coffee and consulting markets: Both coffee and consulting are products for minds. Psychoactive products that link to producer and consumer personalities. You should expect…
- Strategy for Startups
In his article "Strategy Under Uncertainty," Jerry Neumann contrasts the traditional Porter model of business strategy with one more suited to startups, the former being modeled around mature organizations operating i…
- Weekend Reading: Timeful Texts, Sumo Startups, and Canva Backlinks
🕰 Timeful Texts A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas…
- Slack and the Intercompany Communication Layer
Ben Thompson published this piece a few weeks back on the state of Slack up against its competitive market for chat and collaboration, namely Microsoft's Teams product. It covers the history well, dating back to Micro…
- A Blog that Changes Your Life
I enjoyed this deep, transparent history from Nat Eliason on how he built up his website over the past several years. He covers basic technology, content, habits, promotion, and monetization. The precis: Tech stack do…
- Will COVID Kill the Office?
Rory Sutherland's latest column for The Spectator: Covid-19 will change how humanity works. Lockdown has revealed that a large part of the busyness of business is driven by the need to signal commitment (presenteeism)…
- Strategy Writing
Some excellent works here from Eugene Wei, Joel Spolsky, Steven Sinofsky, and more.
- 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…
- Advantage Flywheels
A helpful resource here for understanding flywheels, the "causal loops" of different types of businesses. The reference examples show how the most successful companies ramp up the gear ratio by combining multiple flyw…
- Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect
🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely's descriptions of three groups of people you need to "attack a market": Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see batt…
- Lower the Degree of Difficulty
Fred Wilson with advice to startups on keeping things simple: I have sat through numerous pitches where I am listening to the founder explain their technology and go to market plan and I think “this is going to be a r…
- Weekend Reading: COVID Edition
⚗️ COVID and Forced Experiments Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening. "Every time we get a new kind of tool, we…
- Building in World 2.0
Daniel Gross has a good list of things that will change post-coronavirus lockdown — patterns of lifesytle, businesses, real estate, and others: A few notable ones: The (temporary) end of cities. We might see a tempora…
- Things That Will Change
This is a weird time. The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest global event that's happened in my lifetime. It hasn't impacted me personally that much (yet), but the financial and public health implications are clearly al…
- Innovator's Dilemma in Video
I was looking around for a summary of Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma and ran across this neat YouTube channel that does book summaries in visual form, with drawings representing the concepts in the book. It…
- Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complements
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately on our strategic objectives — where we are today, where we want to be in a few years, and the tactics in between to navigate us to a long-term maximum (and hopefully avoid comp…
- Tech in 2020: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Benedict Evans does a talk each year assessing the state of the tech industry, macro trends, and where we are the technology adoption lifecycle for big, trendy technologies like VR and AI. This year’s deck from the Na…
- Underutilized Fixed Assets
An interesting analysis from Kevin Kwok looking at how to think about marketplace business models, and retail versus professional supply.
- Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
🥩 The Internet of Beefs Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works: The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs betwe…
- 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…
- How To Build a Service-Based Business
Some good tips on service-based businesses: As a poker player, the biggest determinant of your success is game selection, i.e. the quality of the games you choose to play in. The key is your skill level relative to yo…
- Weekend Reading: Tradeoffs, the Margins, and PR FAQs
⚖️ Tradeoffs: The Currency of Decision Making Farnam Street: Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems…
- On Atlassian's Unique Sales Model
I enjoyed a couple of notes from this interview with Atlassian President Jay Simons. They've famously built a business with bottom-up adoption dynamics, allowing them to hit the $1bn revenue milestone without a tradit…
- Weekend Reading: Neutrinos and Math, Waymo Progress, and Freemium in SaaS
🧮 Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math As long as you consider linear algebra and eigenvectors "basic math": They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case,…
- Continuous Discovery
It's common practice now in software development to do "continuous integration" — a constant reintegration of newly-written code with the master application to continuously run regression and unit tests, making the pr…
- Getting Paid to Change Your Mind
There’s a really strange phenomenon in certain arenas (particularly politics) where it’s considered a virtue to strongly hold a viewpoint and never change your position. This is strange because, as Rory Sutherland poi…
- Why Hasn’t Open Source Software Disrupted Esri?
This is a great post from my friend Joe Morrison assessing the state of the open source software movement in GIS against the biggest corporate competitive friction point, Esri. Even as QGIS and comparable open source…
- Memos
A neat collection of corporate memos from momentous points in their history. Bill Gates, Howard Schultz, Mark Zuckerberg, Nathan Mhyrvold, and more.
- Second-Order Revenue
In SaaS there are dozens of common metrics to measure on performance, like a pulse check on your company. Because of the often-high customer-to-revenue ratio with SaaS products, recurring revenue itself becomes a wate…
- Weekend Reading: Attention, Hill Climbing, and Enforcing Culture
🧠To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight For a long time, because attention seemed so intricately tied up with consciousness and other complex functions, scientists assumed that it was first and fo…
- A Taxonomy of Moats
A deep, thoughtful analysis of competitive advantages, walking through and differentiating each type: An innovation is a type of competitive advantage (though not all competitive advantages are innovations) and the st…
- The Full Reset
On the power of starting with no baggage, sunk costs, or past poor decisions: Part of the reason the economy recovered slowly after the financial crisis was that businesses, spooked by the recession, relentlessly revi…