Ben Thompson:
]]>What Karp is driving at is the flip-side of the points I am making above: the challenge for enterprises when it comes to using the frontier models is not simply that tokens are expensive, but that they are potentially giving valuable data to the labs who, in the long run, have an economic imperative to move up the stack and own the customer directly.
Simon Willison:
]]>It’s become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language.
This has worrying implications for open source projects with commercial business models. Here’s an example of a response: tldraw, the outstanding collaborative drawing library, are moving their test suite to a private repository.
Andrew Chen:
The idea really matters.
- If you want a high retention product, you need to pick a category that is high retention already.
- You need to pick a product category where you already use an existing product every day.
- You’re going to build something that directly competes against that.
- If you win, then you’ll stop using that other product and use your product instead.
- That’s a high bar, but I think it’s a good start.
…
This is why I don’t blame folks who have a “Cursor for X” idea, or “Figma for X,” just like the “Uber for X” ideas of the past generation. They’re trying to piggy off some existing markets and behavior so that they don’t have to take crazy market risk.
Well worth a read for those in the tech product subscription business.
]]>Om Malik:
I bring up this recent history because it shows a pattern. Whenever there is a new competitor with a new online and social behavior, Meta management views it as a systemic risk to its attention-based economy. Instead of trying to reinvent, it simply copies and rolls out those features to its massive audience. Thanks to its large audience scale and massive infrastructure, it leaves the smaller rivals and original innovators as nothing more than mere footnotes.
↬ ∙ Tagged in Business, Technology.
]]>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.’”
Meta went for an engineer-heavy team composition and light weight process to build Threads.
↬ ∙ Tagged in Business, Product Development.
]]>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.
…
The ability to be more patient and take more risks is what sets midcaps apart.
…
]]>I see many companies move from an incentive structure that was based on growth and profit to one based exclusively on profit. That drives the wrong behavior because it forces managers to focus on cost instead of growth, short term instead of long term.
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.
Organizational effectiveness in decline or commodity / hygiene capabilities is reducing total cost of ownership.
↬ ∙ Tagged in Business, Product Development.
]]>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.
For me, it was no longer about growth at all costs, but “freedom at all costs.”
…
At some point, it clicked: Creators make money so they can make stuff, instead of the other way around. Why not adopt this framing at Gumroad, too?
This is what working in the creator economy should feel like.
A look at the unorthodox way Gumroad operates.
]]>Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn:
]]>Is online advertising working? We simply don’t know.