👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🦄 Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse:
It is obviously unsurprising that Facebook, or Meta, would struggle to foster healthy communities. It makes total sense that the company would be so monomaniacally focused on growth that they would fall down [on] or take for granted the difficult work of cultivating community. And yet I’m still taken aback at just how little they seem to have learned from past platform iterations.
21-minute read by Charlie Warzel, Wagner James Au in The Atlantic
🤓 Gays, Jews, and Geniuses:
During the 20th Century and up until five minutes ago, it was necessary for humanity to channel people into standardized fields based on standardized tests and then force them to spend their time focusing on narrow and specific problems repetitively. The predominant industrial technology of the day demanded that we organize society along these lines [..] From now on, individual people can allocate skills on a much more fluid basis.
5-minute read by Dror Poleg
🔮 What Makes a Company “Future Ready”?
Becoming future ready means scaling up capabilities relevant to future competition [..] We found that a company must make regular shifts in its know-how in order to stay ahead of competitors over the long run. If a company’s know-how stagnates, it will face competition from copycats, fall behind in advancements, and eventually fail.
12-minute read by IMD in HBR
🎧 Listening
🔥 The original PayPal Mafia:
One thing we better understood than many companies in '99, 2000, 2001 was that the whole context was incredibly crazy [..] One dynamic was that it was virtually impossible for a new company to hire moderately competent people with lots of experience. If you wanted experienced people, you got generally very bad people [..] by the time of the IPO in 2002, the medium age was 29 of the executive team.
65 minutes with Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Luke Nosek on The Pull Request
🧠 Getting Better at Decision Making:
Your brain is always trying to figure out what's the next thing that's going to happen, how does that compare to the sensory input that's coming in, and how do I minimize the difference between that? How do I get less surprises? Now, what technology can help us with that is [..] we have no real sense of intuition around nonlinearity. That's what makes it really hard for us as a species to only just use our wet work here. We need help. We need tools
57 minutes with Jake Taylor on Infinite Loops
🏴☠️ 'Thought Crime' Is Essential to Progress:
All the interesting things in the world throughout history started that way. If you're not living in a culture that has room for 'thought crime,' then you're not living in a culture that is growing. You're not living in a culture that has the potential to progress in an exciting and—I don't want to say utopian—a positive direction. If you want growth and you want new things, you have to be open to ideas that make you uncomfortable.
57 minutes with Mike Solana on Reason Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
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