Win and Help Win
Taste vectors, Invention as a career, and a trip with Marc Andreessen.
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen:
I think it's clear the Internet is both an engine and a camera. To some extent it does drive behavior, but it also shows us ourselves in vivid detail. That is bound to make us uncomfortable, but is also very useful. The Internet can reinforce existing beliefs and misconceptions, but it also reveals underlying truths that otherwise would remain hidden. For example, the Internet makes it far easier to discover when an authority figure is lying to us, which is an overwhelming good.
🤯 Not an interview, but a trip more like—Niccolo Soldo
From Winner Take All to Win and Help Win: the Original Vision of the Internet is Making a Comeback
For the creator middle class to rise, we need to see higher resolutions of taste preference and a breakup with singular, discriminatory platform algorithms and the opinion of the ‘few’ that arbitrate taste and force today’s dominant aesthetic. With that, individuals can decide on “what’s best” for themselves, allowing for the talent power law to play out across more taste vectors and spreading the opportunity to be perceived as “the best”
🧐 The Internet transmitting vectors of taste—Sari Azout, Jad Esber
We need a career path for invention:
The bottom line is that if a young person wants to focus their career on invention—as distinct from scientific research, corporate engineering, or entrepreneurship—the support structure doesn’t exist. There isn’t a straightforward way to get started, there isn’t an institution of any kind that will hire you into this role, and there isn’t a community that values what you are focused on and will reward you with prestige and further opportunities based on your success. In short, there is no career path.
🤭 No career path? Now they tell me—Roots of Progress
🎧 Listening
Frontiers for Productivity:
[The gravity model of trade] is the idea that trade between two cities or two places is a lot like gravity. It's a function of, how big is city one? And how big is city two? The size, the mass of the two economic centers, and what is the distance between them? Which is, what is the cost of going between them, counting both money and time and risk and whatever else you want to count as a cost of moving between them? .. [I]f you can cut the cost by 50%, you should be able to get twice the amount of trade between those two cities.
Eli Dourado—Invest Like the Best (and transcript)
The Insider Story of Waze:
I run into a lot of companies that try to do all kinds of really fancy machine learning stuff. And I keep telling: machine learning is really a call centre in India. That's what it is in most cases .. and that's a good thing! If you start out manually, with humans looking at and building the right experience, later on you optimize the machine learning, and the algorithms, and that kind of stuff. But, humans will do a much better job if you don't have all that much data…
Noam Bardin—NfX (and transcript)
Supply Chain & Logistics:
Warehouses are not really tied that much to the manufacturing side of the business, but to the consumption side of the business. So the locations where your warehouses are located becomes important all of a sudden, as you're not optimising for cost but you're really optimising for service levels by being near to consumers. The locations of manufacturing move all the time (based on tax policy, trade policy, labour costs), but the thing that doesn't really change is where the consumers are.
Hamid Moghadam—The Prof G Show
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️Our Work
Adriana sharing how to beat the Innovator’s Dilemma in the Passion Economy— R&D Innovation Conference.
📬 Suggestions?
Please, feel free to send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏