An englightening read.

I always enjoy a peek behind the curtain of places like Google.

Aswath Damodaran is a hell of a speaker. This talk on the lifecycle of businesses feels like a masterclass.

Naomi Nix:

Initially, the team carried just two product managers and one or two designers alongside dozens of engineers — a flatter and more coder-dominated group than most Meta product teams, Mosseri said. (At launch, it had grown to three product managers, three designers and 50 coders.) Instead of 30-minute presentations on a single design decision, typical at Facebook and Instagram, “It would be like, ‘Here are six things we need to go through this week.’”

From a leaked internal Google document:

While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months.

Eric Melloul:

Another important capability is assembling an ecosystem of partners and suppliers that do the work for you. Because of limited resources, you cannot do it all.

Jason Yip:

Organizational effectiveness in market development is efficiently running a lot of experiments to find promising opportunities.

Organizational effectiveness in growth and maturity is efficiently building, scaling, iterating, and exploiting capabilities in order to maximize business value.

Roger Martin:

First, PfP is an extremely blunt instrument. Roy’s machine shop illustrates it well. The incentive doesn’t skew behavior a bit: it skews behavior immensely. Almost half of the total observations are in a narrow band around the rerate line. And it isn’t even a management-defined line. It is the guesstimate of workers as to at what point management might take deleterious action. Management isn’t even in control of the impacts of its own system.

Marina Hyde:

Anyway, Zuckerberg is in the news along with News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, in a heartwarming generational fight between billionaires for who gets to say: “Bitch, I’m not IN the news, I OWN the news.”

Sahil Lavingia:

Because I was burned out and didn’t want to think about working any more than I needed to, I instituted a no-meeting, no-deadline culture.

Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn:

Is online advertising working? We simply don’t know.

Jason Cohen:

Startup strategy is like Kung Fu. There are many styles that work. But in a bar fight, you’re going to get punched in the face regardless.

Tomasz Tunguz:

There are three types of product features, a seasoned head of product told me recently. MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. MMRs are minimum market requirements; basic features that every customer expects and demands. Neutralizers mitigate competitive threat. Differentiators are your startup’s competitive advantage.

Covers the challenges of employing people around the world.

John Lanchester:

The researchers found quite simply that the more people use Facebook, the more unhappy they are.

…

His idea was that if the price is falling that means the market is working, and no questions of monopoly need be addressed. This philosophy still shapes regulatory attitudes in the US and it’s the reason Amazon, for instance, has been left alone by regulators despite the manifestly monopolistic position it holds in the world of online retail, books especially.

Evadne Wu:

I still firmly hold the belief that iOS applications are either loss leaders or loss generators, that iOS devices themselves are thick terminals, and that a proper iOS execution strategy must be backed with a useful service either involving real world consequences (i.e. get a ride or get groceries delivered), or a wider cross-platform strategy (i.e. build your document on one platform, revise on another).

Good to see this kind of information shared.

Asymco:

This implies that the problem with enterprises is not the stupidity of its buyers. They are no less smart than the average person–in fact, they are as smart with their personal choices for computing as anybody. The problem is that enterprises have a capital use and allocation model which is obsolete. This capital decision process assumes that capital goods are expensive, needing depreciation, and therefore should be regulated, governed and carefully chosen. The processes built for capital goods are extended to ephemera like devices, software and networking.