👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Finance as culture:
Financialization is a byproduct of the narrowing of the visions: there are more engineers working at Dropbox today than at Apple when they released the Apple II. The explosion of tech wealth and headcount translates into many smart ambitious people doing tech with the expectation of transitioning from labor to capital. [..] When reality is an S-curve but expectations are exponential, the gap between the two curves drives financialization [..]
🤭 Isn’t time to build again?—luttig's learnings
Betting the Firm (Part I):
Google didn’t know that asking Paul Buchheit to tinker with email would end up producing Gmail or that hiring Krishna Bharat would ultimately lead to the invention and development of Google News [..] The world of Ford is the world of interchangeable employees working on clearly defined tasks. The world of Google is a world of specific employees working on loosely or undefined tasks.
🧐 Fordism versus… Googlism?—Dror Poleg
The Most Precious Resource is Agency:
The world until recently was overflowing with onramps of opportunity, even for children, and we seem to do poorly at producing new ones. Modern complexity may have erased some avenues for agency, but I suspect how we have oriented the world, not technology, is the main problem. 13-year-old Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett and received a summer job at HP, which [..] was certainly surprising for 1968, and is obviously verboten today.
👊 It is time to build again!—The Map is Mostly Water
🎧 Listening
The Future of Work:
A period of greater velocity of change is good for people who want to make change. And there are times in the world where the institutional setup in the world is very stable, and the primary way that people make change is by advancing within those institutions. And then there are times in the world when everything is changing. In those moments the people whose occupation is to drive change (as opposed to seek power within institutions), they become more powerful.
Roy Bahat—European Straits (Apple, Spotify)
Tech in China, from inside and outside:
With Chinese Tech, precisely because there is so many barriers of engagement, it feels very distinct, very different, and therefore very other. And I think often, because what gets amplified on social media tends to be slight caricatures, and so everything that you do get becomes incredibly distorted of what is actually happening, and so that even more creates a sense of distance.
Lillian Li—Another Podcast
Banking the Unbanked:
Over fifty percent of adults in Latin America don't have access to a bank account; they haven't paid for anything with any means that is not cash. And therefore they are completly left out of the digital economy. So we started Ualá with the simple premise of having one account that is inclusive so everyone can have it, it is completly free, and it's universal so we don't turn you away. And then we give you a debit card, and with that debit card you then start building a credit history.
Pierpaolo Barbieri—The Prof G Pod
📬 Suggestions?
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