Financial Review: “Mark Leonard is hardly a household name. He’s not even particularly well known in the world of finance. But the long-bearded reclusive founder of Toronto-listed Constellation Software – known to his admirers as Software Santa – is arguably one of the greatest capital allocators of this generation. A dollar invested in Constellation Software’s initial public offering in 2006 is worth 25 times more today as the firm’s earnings have expanded by gobbling up smaller firms. Constellation has acquired more than 1000 businesses, and now owns software platforms that do everything from weather forecasting to sales and commodity trading. Roll-ups – in which companies increase profits through serial acquisitions – tend to fail in most industries. But Constellation and others show they can work well in software.”
Semafor: “To avoid fizzling the way competitors like Medium have, Substack is trying to become less a journalism platform and more a payment system for creators. In recent months, the company has been reaching out to influencers, video creators and podcasters to convince them to join the platform. It doesn’t need beauty influencers, say, to all of a sudden become bloggers. But it does want to be the primary vehicle for paying creators regardless of medium. The pitch is simple: YouTube and other platforms do not generate meaningful revenue for the vast majority of creators, and other ways of making money like brand deals can be inconsistent and subject to volatile ad market trends.”
FT: “Although The Genetic Book of the Dead covers familiar ground, [Richard] Dawkins explains — and celebrates — evolution so joyfully that devotees will forgive some repetition of ideas. His clear prose is enhanced further by Jana Lenzová’s gorgeous illustrations which run through the book, supplementing photos of the wonderful animals (and a few plants) chosen to exemplify evolutionary science. As the title implies, Dawkins frames his story this time by looking backward, exploring the way every living creature’s genes can be read as an archive of its ancestral history and the environments that gradually shaped the development of millions of previous generations. He uses the analogy of palimpsests — the way scribes used to erase previous writing so that they could reuse the parchment for their own manuscript. Just as new imaging techniques are beginning to show scholars traces of older scripts beneath the surface of ancient documents, genomic analysis can reveal the evolutionary history of living organisms.”
WSJ reviews “The Extinction of Experience”: “Being human has traditionally involved being a kinetic, tactile mortal who has evolved to read the faces and gestures of other mortals and to perform complex physical actions. In our embrace of streamlining technologies, we have adopted screen-based virtual realities that require little motion and that eliminate points of human contact. To open a letter, set an alarm, take a picture, make a date—any of these minor tasks would once have summoned different movements but can now be accomplished with the touch of a finger to a screen. And increasingly, of course, we needn’t deal with other people in the flesh. To Ms. Rosen, each embodied activity that disappears takes with it some small element of experience that may, when it’s gone, leave us depleted—while habituating us to engineered, homogenized behaviors. Throughout the book, she remarks the ways that, in adjusting to the algorithmic demands of our machines, we are in danger of developing machinelike responses ourselves: “It is the subtle but important difference between putting something you like on Instagram and doing something specifically for Instagram because you want to be liked.””
