You create value when you fulfill the unmet desires of people better than the alternatives they have (from competitors).
However, a fatal but common mistake that entrepreneurs make is misjudging what makes something valuable.
How to be a Bayesian
Statistics is all about calculating probabilities, and there are two camps who interpret probability differently.
Frequentists = frequency of events over multiple trials
Bayesians = subjective belief of outcome of events
How to think about risk
The most common mistake with risk is NOT differentiating: personal, unique risk
FROM
collective, average risk.
On the strangeness of giving advice
1/ Giving advice is a strange thing.
2/ First of all, let's get this right off the bat: the advice-giver accrues MORE benefit from giving advice than the one who's receiving it.
3/ When we give advice, our half-formed thoughts crystallize and tell us clearly and reinforce what we believe in.
Perils of binary thinking
We recently ran an A/B test and here were the results.
In the test results we still don't have 95% statistical confidence (probability to be the best) but we're going ahead and implementing the variation on homepage.
Why?
Twyman’s law
Twyman’s law states that any data or figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong.
Sounds unbelievable, isn’t it?
But, it’s true. I saw this in action recently and wanted to share that story with you.
In June, we ran a test on our homepage and while I was looking at conversion rate by segments, I noticed that users from Windows had a 400% higher signup rate for VWO free trial as compared to users using Mac OS X.
Now, that’s baffling and our team spent a good deal of time trying to understand why was that happening. Someone in marketing hypothesized that perhaps Mac OS X users have a better design aesthetic and our homepage wasn’t appealing to them. Was it true? ...
Horizon based thinking
Whenever you’re at a crossroads and are wondering what to do next, here’s how to think.
1/ The first thing to ensure is that you acknowledge that a lot of your decision-making will be driven by how you’re feeling *right now* and not how you’ll feel once you choose a path.
The need to escape can make us choose things that we won’t like long term.
2/ The way to keep emotion-driven decision at bay is to *force* yourself to think in three horizons:
1. Short term goals
2. Long term goals
3. The path between the two
3/ Yes, I know this sounds trivial but far too often:
– We’re either hyper-focused on short term and optimize our way to getting stuck into a local-optima
– Or, we’re hyper-focused on the long term and forget that present actions is how we get to the future ...
The three levels of Hindu philosophy
1/ The first level related to the metaphysical and spiritual domain.
It says that Brahman is all that exists and our material world (Maya) comes from ignorance.
The Brahman is not a God. It is beyond any quality – it isn’t intelligent, good or bad. It just is.
2/ It also suggests that if we strip away all ignorance, we will discover that the self – the atman – is one and the same thing as the Brahman.
At its core, this level denies the duality of subject and object and says they both are the same. ...
Money, entropy and climate change
If you follow me on Twitter, you’d know that I’ve been working on a trilogy of short films on climate change. Funded by Wingify, these films are a collaboration between me (writer) and Robert Grieves (animator). We’re calling this initiative Wingify.earth.
The first short film is out now and it’s about relationship between money, climate change and entropy (a concept which I elaborated on in a previous essay on this blog). Watch the 3 minute film below and leave your comments on its Youtube page. ...
My intellectual progress in the last decade (2010s)
A decade is a long time, about 1/8th of an average life span if you happen to live a long life. I came across Scott Alexander’s post where he wrote about his intellectual progress in 2010s and thought it’ll be a good idea to do the same for myself. When I had turned 30 two years back, I had looked back at the goals that the 20 year old me had. If you read that post, you’ll see that overall I feel that my 20s (and correspondingly, most of the 2010s) were very fulfilling. I started a company, fell in love and made myself financially independent. ...