Less Heroes
Innovation, Bubbles, and Startups
👋 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 relentless like-bait drum. No fluff, and signal > noise⚡️
📚 Reading
🦸🏻♀️ A New Look For Innovation: Less Heroes, Fewer Processes
Innovation heroics are, indeed, a symptom of a lack of preparedness for surprise, and as surprise becomes more frequent, as the unfamiliar becomes more present, and as time to market continues to shorten, something needs to be added to organizational culture to reduce a reliance upon what would otherwise require an inexhaustible supply of candidate heroes.
6-minute read by Bill Fischer in Forbes
🌷 An NFT Bubble Is Taking Over the Gig Economy:
In some instances the artist is at the forefront of the project, but for the most part the art is irrelevant, and the value is in the white paper and the roadmap [..] The whole system was supposed to be decentralized to free up the economy from these centralized institutions like banks, but what it’s actually doing now is creating a new set of institutions that have almost the same function. They gate-keep and capitalize on people’s labor.
6-minute read by Chris Stokel-Walker in Wired
👩🏻💻 The Professionalization of Startups:
There is a growing population of people that have learned the lessons of the last few decades through their experience building the greatest generation of technology companies in the history of mankind. And as those lessons get distilled to a broader group of people we no longer have to spend so much time reinventing the wheel. Progress [..] comes more quickly when those lessons are effectively distributed.
11-minute read by Kyle Harrison in Investing 101
🎧 Listening
👩💼 Doing Business with Zuckerberg and Bezos:
Peter [Thiel] would tell Mark over and over again when he thought Mark was making a mistake, including on things that were absolutely central —almost religion— at Facebook [..] They would go round and round, but Mark did not discourage. In fact, by having people like Peter and Marc Andreessen on the board, he encouraged people with a different point of view.
67 minutes with Don Graham on Big Technology Podcast
🤓 Asking the Dumb Questions:
If you are doing a make-up brand, you don't own the plant, certainly don't the plant, you order it on a short batch. You don't do a national TV ad: you have your own content, your own story, you speak to a particular kind of consumer rather than speaking to all women aged 18 to 34 [..] So every step of that value chain gets broken apart [but] does that mean you're a tech company?
40 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
🍿 The Streaming Wars:
People always forget when they're comparing Netflix to HBO. Netflix is valued as a tech company, and their investors aren't looking at their earnings every quarter. They are not even supposed to be producing profits for that investor class [..] It's so ridiculous; they are too fundamentally different. Yes, they are in the content business, but it is not a level playing field.
62 minutes with James Andrew Miller on Prof G Pod
🎁 Our Work
A presentation for Vlerick Centre for EA & Digital Design on digital transformation. The need for a new perspective, the end of The Expert, and an updated toolbox.
📬 Suggestions?
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