Ben Thompson: “What is notable, though, is that the chief task for Netflix going forward is not necessarily execution, at least in terms of product or technology. While Hastings has left Netflix in a very good spot relative to its competitors, the long-term success of the company will ultimately be about creativity…It’s impossible to not dive into the history of Netflix and not come away with a deep appreciation for everything Hastings accomplished. I’m not sure there is any company of Netflix’s size that has ever been so frequently doubted and written off. To have built it to a state where simply having the best content is paramount is a massive triumph.”
Vitalik Buterin writes about stealth addresses: “Suppose that Alice wants to send Bob an asset. This could be some quantity of cryptocurrency (eg. 1 ETH, 500 RAI), or it could be an NFT. When Bob receives the asset, he does not want the entire world to know that it was he who got it. Hiding the fact that a transfer happened is impossible, especially if it’s an NFT of which there is only one copy on-chain, but hiding who is the recipient may be much more viable. Alice and Bob are also lazy: they want a system where the payment workflow is exactly the same as it is today. Bob sends Alice (or registers on ENS) some kind of “address” encoding how someone can pay him, and that information alone is enough for Alice (or anyone else) to send him the asset…A stealth address is an address that can be generated by either Alice or Bob, but which can only be controlled by Bob. Bob generates and keeps secret a spending key, and uses this key to generate a stealth meta-address. He passes this meta-address to Alice (or registers it on ENS). Alice can perform a computation on this meta-address to generate a stealth address belonging to Bob. She can then send any assets she wants to send to this address, and Bob will have full control over them. Along with the transfer, she publishes some extra cryptographic data (an ephemeral pubkey) on-chain that helps Bob discover that this address belongs to him.”
Peter Coy: “[Recently] Uri Levine, one of the three founders of Waze, came out with a book, “Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs,” which describes how the navigation app came together, along with advice on how to be an entrepreneur…I’ll tell you what Levine told me about Waze in a series of Zoom interviews and email exchanges, but I’ll preface it with my biggest takeaway: Being an entrepreneur is nothing like driving a car with Waze on. There are no turn-by-turn instructions. There is no certainty that you’ll get where you want to go. In fact, you probably won’t. Another takeaway: Having a great idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for entrepreneurial success. “The importance of the idea is about 1 percent to 5 percent of the journey,” Levine wrote to me. “The rest is a long roller coaster journey of failures — hard work over a long time.”…To him, loving the problem means remaining focused on customers’ needs — the problem — rather than getting overly attached to your latest, maybe-not-so-good idea for serving those needs.” Levine: “Go and speak with…people to understand their perception of the problem. Only then start thinking about the solution. Speak with as many potential users as you can. The outcome will be: 1. It will qualify and help you to fall in love with the problem, or even better, it will disqualify the problem. 2. It will provide you with the right perception of the problem 3. It will provide anecdotal stories for you to use on your journey.” More, more and more.
Michael Turner: “Science is all about big dreams. Sometimes the dreams are beyond your immediate reach. But science has allowed humankind to do big things — Covid vaccines, the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, the Webb telescope. — that extend our vision and our power to shape our future. When we do these big things nowadays, we do them together. If we continue to dream big and work together, even more amazing things lie ahead.”
Top of the lyne: “Word of mouth, viral loops and referral mechanisms can get you far and wide and deep within accounts, but there comes a time in every PLG company’s life when it’s time to send in the cavalry. Sales…For enterprise-wide adoption, your product has to reach new users (even those who aren’t natural adopters), new teams where it solves new use-cases, then enable new features that may not be compelling to individual users, but are to the collective – improved security, support, SSO – and all the other squiggly lines on the bottom right corners of pricing pages.,,That you’ve hit PMF and have hit the double/triple digit ARR through a pure self-serve model are perhaps good indicators that it’s time. But a more subtle tell, and where top-down sales becomes a true force multiplier is when the organic expansion levers are working and you have penetration within accounts.”
Rita McGrath: “For far too many companies, the people in their call centers and manning their front lines are looked at just as units of cost. Indeed, as Wharton’s Peter Cappelli points out in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, the way we account for people expenses only encourages skimping on investing in your human talent. We don’t treat it as an investment, we treat it as an expense, even though many CEO’s will tell you “our people are our most important asset.” In extreme cases, companies take human beings out of the service equation entirely (looking at you, Frontier Airlines!). There is an alternative. Imagine if you saw, as Zeynep Ton writes about, all those people as sources of potential customer delight and loyalty – indeed, as sources of revenue growth?”
