Like a Civilization
Stripe, The Octopus Game, and Rituals for Growth
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization
If you were to meet Stripe’s founder in another context, unaware of his accomplishments, you get the sense his brilliance and humility would be instantly apparent, but the desire to build something massive, less so. That’s perhaps because he doesn’t appear driven by either money or power — employees note he is not someone with a flash car or boat — but simply by the challenge.
👼 Tech maturing and growing up—The Generalist
Business, The Octopus Game:
[M]ost of early business feels like this: it feels like you have multiple arms, and some of them are doing well and some of them are not, and you’re fixing one or two while you let the rest blow up. And it’s like this all the time, and how you get good at running a business is that you become comfortable with letting plates shatter, sometimes tragically, safe in the knowledge that everything will get better over the longer term if you’re focused on the right things in the here and now.
👾 Business as a systems game—Commonplace
Rituals for hypergrowth: An inside look at how YouTube scaled
Many of our meetings included a long “bullpen” period. The time was intentionally unstructured and without any agenda, where the only rule was that you had to stay present. [..] Many of these discussions would have naturally become ad-hoc meetings, and instead got handled in a timely manner. It also led to a much tighter leadership team since the list of interested parties in a topic was often different than might have been originally imagined.
⛔️ Ad-hoc meetings considered harmful—Coda
🎧 Listening
No Future of Work without Empathy:
The future of work, as I see it, is very proactive. It really requires us to make a lot of choices about how we work, when we work; understanding how we work best [..] One of the benefits of going through such extraordinary disruption, is it helping people look at work in a different way and not as something you just do because you need the cheque at the end of the week (and a lot more people, too).
Sophie Wade—Building Bridges (Apple, Spotify)
The Future of Search:
We are also facing a reckoning of what technology what technology means to all of us. This re-valuation is going to have a profound impact on the kinds of technologies and the kinds of businesses that develop. It is going to lead to a lot of disruption in how tech works [..] My critisism of technology for the last 20 years, is that somehow we managed to create models in which the creators of technology are the one that primarily benefit from the technology.
Sridhar Ramaswamy—The Prof G Show
The New Palo Alto:
Our core geography we describe as a 4-hour train ride from our home in Somers Town, and we call that geography new Palo Alto. And that geography [..] takes in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Manchester, Leeds, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, etc. There are 40M people who live in new Palo Alto, bout 120 unicorns, 120B of IT spent, 7 of the world's 30 best univeristies. And after the Bay Area and Bejing, this geofence is the 3rd most productive tech ecosystem in the world.
Saul Klein—European Straits (Apple, Spotify)
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
A platform design workshop that purposefully refrains from any platform or competition lingo. People, free format collaboration, and a spot of fun—LinkedIn
📬 Suggestions?
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