Thinks 939

NYTimes: “For decades, Silicon Valley anticipated the moment when a new technology would come along and change everything. It would unite human and machine, probably for the better but possibly for the worse, and split history into before and after. The name for this milestone: the Singularity. It could happen in several ways. One possibility is that people would add a computer’s processing power to their own innate intelligence, becoming supercharged versions of themselves. Or maybe computers would grow so complex that they could truly think, creating a global brain. In either case, the resulting changes would be drastic, exponential and irreversible. A self-aware superhuman machine could design its own improvements faster than any group of scientists, setting off an explosion in intelligence. Centuries of progress could happen in years or even months. The Singularity is a slingshot into the future.”

Mises in 1944: “The essential feature of the advanced West was not its technique but its moral atmosphere which encouraged saving, capital formation, entrepreneurship, business, and peaceful competition.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux: “The people of countries that rely for their economic growth chiefly on copying industrial and commercial methods developed by, and market-tested in, more-entrepreneurial and innovative countries will never be as prosperous as are the people of entrepreneurial and innovative countries. Even less prosperous are the people of countries that rely largely for their economic ‘successes’ on stealing from entrepreneurial and innovative countries.”

Devina Sengupta: “How should pressure be applied when time is running out, targets are unmet and the boss knows (and may be right) that not everyone in the team is chasing the goal? The answer is not by screaming. Everyone in the team will never give their best, and all employees will at some point surely falter. But when chasing high targets, it is the leader’s job to know who among them will meet the expectations and who will give up the chase. We have had seniors who have pushed us harder without raising their voice. A one-on-one interaction meant the guillotine often. Swift, bloodless and not a squeak. A senior executive had once said that if managers treat the juniors as children, then they have created a kindergarten where there will be tantrums. If the message goes out, right from the time they join, that non-performers will be weeded out unless their productivity improves, some amount of tentativeness sets in. It can help the employee map his/her work better. But there too is a fine line because one doesn’t want employees buckling under the fear of retrenchment.”

Bloomberg: “LinkedIn Inc., the popular job-networking site, sees a future in which employers will be willing to look beyond long-established entry requirements such as college degrees and prior job titles to focus instead on an applicant’s proven skills whether that be data analysis, leadership or storytelling. LinkedIn is anticipating the direction companies themselves have indicated they’ve wanted to move in. While over 80% of employers believe they should hire based on skills rather than degrees, more than half say they are still hiring college grads because it feels less risky. That’s according to a survey conducted last summer by workforce development nonprofits American Student Assistance and Jobs for the Future. “Skills-based hiring is the great white whale, the holy grail of the labor market,” said Joseph Fuller, management professor at Harvard Business School.”

Jason Lemkin: “It seems like start-ups are all about innovation. And they are. But how innovative should you be as a founder? Should you do something brand new? Or just reinvent a huge, existing category? Zoom reinvented WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. Slack reinvented 100 versions of chat, including Hipchat, Basecamp’s product, etc. Salesforce reinvented CRM for the web, but the paradigm was as old as software can be. Datadog reinvented observability and more for the Cloud, but New Relic and others were already darlings here. We now have about 1,000 SaaS payroll apps, many of which are unicorns.  They are remixing things, but in one of the oldest categories there is. Now that there are 100+ public SaaS companies and unicorns, we can finally answer a question — is it better to start a company that remakes an existing category, or that creates a new one? Well, actually, maybe we can’t answer that question. But what we can say is that about 70% of public SaaS companies are applications that are new versions, new entrants, in well-established categories.”