1/ Reading and re-reading The Brief History of Time when I was young, I grew up into adolescence with an unshakeable faith in science to reveal truths about reality. At school, we were taught scientific laws as if they’re the gospel of reality, never to be changed and never to be questioned. Once you understood magnetism, for example, you could seal that part of reality forever as being understood and then move onto the next thing.
2/ Except that’s not how things happen. Our scientific understanding gets revised all the time. Once the western civilization believed that Earth was created 4000 years ago. Today, most know that it can’t be true. ...Read the entire post →
Can an app built on top of Facebook become bigger than Facebook itself?
It’s easy to believe that you will get limited by how big is the businesses on which your business is built. But that’s not true. An app built on top of Facebook can become bigger than Facebook because the customers and desires that Facebook serves are very different than customers and desires that the business that’s built on Facebook is trying to serve. Facebook, in this case, is simply an enabling platform while the real value to the customer is being created by the app. ...Read the entire post →
No business delivers value to the end customer all by itself. In reality, a business does very few things within its boundaries. Everything else must come from other businesses: from renting servers on AWS to leasing offices, and from advertising on Google to buying laptops from Dell. Most of the time, such dependencies emerge naturally and evolve without any conscious effort. However, sometimes some business dependencies can (and should) be deepened explicitly through partnerships.
To grow your business, first help grow a partner’s business
If nurtured well, business partnerships create positive feedback loops that help rapidly grow a business. Consider the case of Apple, a famously vertically integrated company that makes its own OS, processor, and many other phone components that other companies typically purchase from vendors. However, their iPhone App Store is proof that even Apple realizes that it can’t thrive without partners. Apple supports many thousands of 3rd party software developers who create millions of amazing app for the iPhone. These apps wouldn’t have been possible without the underlying technology supplied by the iPhone. Similarly, the iPhone wouldn’t have been as successful as it, if it didn’t provide the multitude of functionality that its users have now come to expect because of all the 3rd party apps available on the platform. So, the iPhone helped the developer community build a business on top of it, and with that, iPhone benefitted massively. ...Read the entire post →
Lately, I’ve been feeling a lack of a well-deliberated, explicit moral code. The world is changing really fast – we have Elon Musk trying to set up a human colony on Mars while Earth’s bio-ecosystem is degrading by the day. So, should I support the investment of resources into making Mars habitable while Earth is gradually becoming unhabitable?
This, obviously, isn’t the only question. Every day, I feel like I need to decide which way to swing on controversial topics. People have strong opinions about things like genetically engineered babies, bitcoin, nuclear power and other new technologies. I know enough about cognitive biases to know that I shouldn’t trust my gut fully on these questions. My gut simply doesn’t know enough to have a good opinion on complex societal issues. Instead of relying on my gut, I need to rely on deliberate thinking to make moral choices. ...Read the entire post →
Balaji is a deep thinker on crypto and its implications. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he's seen how technologies evolve over time, which ones change the world and which ones fizzle out as a fad.
He believes crypto technologies such as bitcoin represent the former. To him, crypto will emerge as something that's as important as the Internet and influence our society for decades to come.
All startups live in an ecosystem where different businesses directly or indirectly support one another. For example, in the case of the automotive industry, the ecosystem consists of car manufacturers, car parts manufacturers, petrol stations, car service centers, car insurance companies, and government regulators.
All of them mutually support the entire ecosystem, which means the growth or decline of one business will directly impact all other businesses.
You can’t fight the ecosystem
Ecosystems are not always as easy to spot as the automotive industry. Often they are hidden and only apparent in retrospect. ...Read the entire post →
Entrepreneurs are irrationally attached to innovation. In some cases, fresh ideas are absolutely required but an attachment to originality and the corresponding aversion to exploring ideas pioneered by others can often lead to a significant delay in success (or even failure).
This desire to innovate everything in-house even has a Wikipedia page: not invented here.
Copying ideas is highly underrated
Startups can fail for many reasons. Even if an entrepreneur gets everything right but errs on a specific aspect (say distribution, pricing, onboarding, or even the choice of technology), it’s possible that her entire project fails. ...Read the entire post →
Entrepreneurs are always in a hurry. They want the product to be out so that they can get customer feedback sooner.
This hurry is understandable yet misguided because it prioritizes getting the idea out in front of customers over everything else. The initial excitement about an idea can easily lead to months of wasted development effort. Imagine discovering major flaws in pricing, distribution, design, or market after all that effort.
Isn’t it much better to flesh out ideas with a few weeks of research than to spend months developing them? ...Read the entire post →
1/ Imagine an economy that keeps on growing indefinitely. It’s essentially a non-zero-sum economy – as the pie becomes bigger, everyone becomes better as even a small percentage of a really large number is substantial.
2/ A capitalistic economy is a fantastic invention – entrepreneurs compete to give consumers more value cheaply. Markets create incentives for innovation, and innovation helps the world become richer as over time more and more human desires are satisfied.
3/ Economic wealth as measured by GDP is nothing but products and services available for purchase. Capitalism suggests these things will be up for purchase because people want them and we can make it. Hence, GDP approximates the total useful stuff available for humans. ...Read the entire post →
People have busy lives and they usually don’t think much about the products and services they use in their lives. It’s a myth that people are on a constant lookout to (marginally) improve their lives. The reality is that unless the value delivered by a new product or service is substantially higher, most people will not change how they live their life and by virtue of that, they won’t change what they buy or use.
Habit Breaking Threshold
It doesn’t mean that people don’t want to improve their lives at all. New products arrive in the market and replace the old ones all the time. But displacement of existing solutions happens only if people expect that the new product will have a material difference in their quality of life (at work or at home). The important keyword here is material. Slight improvements over existing solutions are usually not worth it for people to overcome inertia, change their habits and start using your solution. ...Read the entire post →
