Topic
strategy
- The Gradient of User Value
Saw this from John Carmack today on X: Feedback beats planning. My plea at Meta was “No grand plans, follow the gradient of user value”. I love this. If you just keep persistently pushing up the gradient toward more v…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Strategy Writing
Some excellent works here from Eugene Wei, Joel Spolsky, Steven Sinofsky, and more.
- 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…