Be passionate about the territory, not the map
Do we see reality as it is?
I discuss this question with Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. He studies consciousness and perception from an evolutionary point of view. His research has led him to make a bold claim that while we do not yet know what the underlying reality could be like. Rather, reality as we know it now - including space, time, and objects - is a useful fiction that evolution invented for us.
There’s an inherent tension between how an engineer sees the product under development and how a potential user sees it. Engineers get excited by the technological advances and the number of options exposed in the gadget. A user sees all such complexity as overwhelming and off-putting.
It’s easy for a creator to forget that the user has a life to live and using their product isn’t a highlight of her life. Rather, it’s likely a chore.
People want their desires to be fulfilled in the most convenient manner. So, if someone wants to go from point A to point B, the most perfect solution would be instant teleportation and not starting the car and driving on the road. People care about their problems, and your solution is only an incidental means to solving those problems. ...
Do surgeries work? Most of us assume they do, but is there any scientific evidence that they do?
In this episode, I talk to Dr Ian Harris who is a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He is a practicing orthopedic surgeon specializing in trauma surgery. Outside his practice, his research interests broadly cover the topic of surgical effectiveness and clinical research.
It’s common for entrepreneurs to cast a wide net early on and imagine their market to be huge. The logic goes something like this: if the market is worth a hundred billion dollars, then even if 1% of it is captured, the company will be making a billion dollars.
All this sounds good in theory but in practice, it never works this way.
Why would the market leader – the big fish in the ocean – let you take even 1% of the market? In fact, as soon as your startup shows first signs of success, the big fish will do whatever it can to crush you and snatch whatever market share you may have won by that time. ...
In the first episode of Bold Conjectures podcast, I talk to Dr Anders Sandberg who is a Senior Research Fellow at Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University. His academic collaborators include nanotechnology pioneer Eric Dexler and the philosopher Nick Bostrom.
(a massive, 100-part essay)
I recently finished this excellent short book titled What Has Government Done To Our Money. It’s available on the Internet for free and I highly recommend reading it. But in case you want the key insights, here are my notes.
1/ In an economy, there’s a variety of people. Different folks specialize in producing different things and each one of them desires different things.
2/ If there are only two people, they can barter (i.e. directly exchange) what each one of them has with what the other one needs. Even with two people, an exchange rate emerges (e.g. how many loaves of bread you both agree on for a pair of shoes?) ...
The most beautiful aspect of a SaaS business is that your monthly revenue is more or less stable. Unlike buying a soap, an automatic monthly or a yearly subscription means that customers aren’t frequently re-evaluating their decision for what to purchase.
However, when times are hard, people do think deeply about where their money is going. This year’s pandemic forced everyone to do such introspecting, including customers of VWO – a product that my company builds.
Even though the impact of economic slowdown due to coronavirus pandemic was not existential for our business, we did get impacted. ...
There are two ways an entrepreneur can fail: a) launch a product that nobody desires; b) launch a product that people desire but with no significant advantage over established competitors (hence give no strong reason for a customer to switch away).
These two failure modes have their analogous success modes: a) culture-led startup success where a new desire is discovered and fulfilled; b) technology-led startup success where new technology is used to fulfill an existing desire.
They are the ones in which the entrepreneur is able to observe a pattern of new derivative desires that didn’t exist before. Such trends are very hard to spot because initially they can be mistaken either as fads or insignificant. ...
Any one person or one company cannot create a new market. Markets are usually co-created by multiple competitors offering to satisfy a particular customer desire. Even the markets that seem to be dominated by one company usually have multiple credible competitors – Google has Bing and DuckDuckGo and Facebook has Twitter, TikTok and Snapchat.
Oligopolies exist because the first company to launch a product is rarely a home-run in terms of getting the market-product fit right. In fact, the innovative company ends up producing evidence for demand in the market for fast followers. ...
It’s near impossible for a product to create a new desire in customers all by itself. No single product creates a market. What usually happens is that multiple environmental, political, economic, social, and technological factors come together to delicately and gradually shape what customers desire, which then creates an opening for new products to address such evolved expectations.
The million dollar question is: how do you discover these evolving trends?
The best way to discover these unambiguous market trends is to look for instances where customers are innovating by themselves by modifying or re-imagining existing products. ...