Catch and Release

As we grow older, I think a lot of us struggle to keep up with reading books. I can think of a few a reasons: Adult life obligations keep piling up (working, maintaining relationships, just generally surviving) Other forms of entertainement or leisure are more readiliy available and generally provide a quicker (if not better) return on investment - think Netflix, etc.. Social media seems to have shortened everyone's attention span, as shorter content is much more prevalent everywhere I've ...

Having worked in small, startup environment in the last 3 years, I fee like I've learned a lot about the basics of successful communication and information flow in a company. Here are some guiding principles that I've found useful:1. Communicate early and oftenThis one seems obvious, but I've experienced people only communicating when a problem has already happened. I suggest following up with your team/colleagues/supervisors weekly on what you've achieved, what you're working on, what you need ...

I have a few ideas for my next post, but non of them have matured enough in my mind, so I'll keep you updated with the laziest type of post - a collection of what I'm reading, watching, listening, etc. You know the drill. Reading: Meditations on Moloch This is a cult essay on incentives and feedback systems from a few years ago. I'm late to the party in reading it, but it's really good and has cemented my belief that designing incentives is possibly the most important problem to work on. It...

Let's say you wanted to build a product that disrupts an existing market. What do you need to do? It might sound complex, but the way I see it there are also a few cookie-cutter answers to this question. Just complete the following sentence with one or more options below: "My product should be ____________________________ compared to market incumbents." Significantly cheaper Much easier to use Of much higher quality Technologically novel If you get one of these right, you might have a chan...

Tsundoku (n) : Japanse word for the constant act of buying books, but never reading them. Specifically, it is letting books pile up in one’s room so much that the owner never gets a chance to read all of them. In addition to this classic definition of tsundoku, there are many forms of digital tsundoku on the web, and I'm victim to quite a few of them. Here are a few ways I collect too much digital stuff: My Pocket list is full of articles from throughout the web. I've probably saved 30+ jus...

Like many of you, I'm on Medium. I enjoy the occasional honesty I can see there from people in tech, and a few publications have good long-form stuff as well. But like most social apps out there, it's also full of toxic content I find both obnoxious and hilarious. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite types of articles I like to get annoyed about: I get up at 3.30 AM and so should YOU! I've founded 27 companies before I turned 12 and you're garbage Here are 42 apps you should ...

I've just finished reading the design proposal of Eco, a new idea for a digital currency powered by a network of verified organization which would run the network nodes. The design paper is relatively short compared to the usual technical white papers I've seen flying around, but it's actually full of good ideas. First off, I'm glad that a digital currency is finally not stubbornly insisting on a hard limit of coins in distribution. I wrote briefly about this before, but the essence is that to...

I've recently noticed a group of people on Twitter who are able to hold the following convictions at the same time: You shouldn't watch or read news Uninformed people should be discouraged from voting or participating in a democracy Free speech is under some sort of massive attack New and innovative thinking is necessarily "challenging" and is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable Here's to the cognitive dissonance of the modern "independent thinker". 🥂 ...

I've been following the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies with excitement over the last few months. Trying to understand the building blocks of blockchain has proved challenging, but at this point I feel like I have a decent, though still fairly abstract understanding of it. However, there is an issue I have with most major cryptocurrencies, and I can't seem to find a satisfying answer to it from the blockchain community. Here's my question: What exactly is the benefit of having a hard l...