Rajesh Jain

Sridhar Ramaswami: “Now we are in this environment that everything is about grabbing our attention. And, this is where things like the free model that you, like, give that really nice vignette about sort of come into play. We are now in a world where we think we’re getting a bunch of free products; but in effect we have given away all of our attention–and attention equals dollars. And, I think economists sometimes have trouble understanding that. All of us are eminently manipulatable. The brands you’re going to remember are the ones that showed you ads, whether you cared for them or not. We have run studies, for example, where we ask people about remarketing ads. Every single person, if you talk to them, individually is 100% convinced that they can never be, like, persuaded to buy anything. But, if you ask in anonymous surveys whether they bought stuff that they didn’t really need because of remarketing ads, 50% of people will say, ‘Absolutely. I ended up spending money on junk.’ So, this stuff works, and free isn’t really free.”

Dev Lewis: “In my view the Modi government’s reactions— the app bans, military strategy, rejection of Chinese investment exemplified head in the sand behaviour that did very little to benefit Indian citizens (let alone India’s physical sovereignty for that matter). The PRC’s military actions and rhetoric reflected the CCP’s own sense of power in the world and disregard for Chinese business or citizen’s interests. People on both sides of the border lose while the States play their own game of nationalist narratives of victimhood, morality, and superiority, drawing power and legitimacy domestically from bilateral hostility. I see very few incentives for this status-quo to change.”

The Milk Road summarises Stanley Druckenmiller’s advice to young investors: “He encourages them to learn all the asset categories and how they integrate. Not easy… but fundamentals are fundamental…His number one advice to young people? Do not invest in the present. The present is not what moves stock prices. Change over time is what moves them. He says to try and envision a different world a year and a half from now.”

Sam Gerstenzang on his learnings from Stripe. Among them: “Turn up the heat in every interaction and ask uncomfortable questions. Some of the questions I repeatedly ask: Can we re-frame this in terms of the customer’s problem? What’s the soonest we could get this done? What would you need to get this done tomorrow instead of next week? What would we need to do to get twice as many customers? Ten times as many customers? How does this relate to our goal? Is this the most important thing we can do for our goal? What’s most important? What do we really need to get right? What could we cut, even if it’s painful?”

NYTimes on Nike@50: “Nike, named for the Greek goddess of victory, has become not just the most valuable apparel brand in the world (worth more than twice as much as Adidas, its closest sportswear rival, and ahead of Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Chanel). It is part of the movies we watch, the songs we hear, the museums we frequent, the business we do; part of how we think about who we are and how we got to here. It is, said Robert Goldman, the co-author of “Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh” and professor emeritus at Lewis & Clark College, “an emblem of individuality, in an age where individuality has become rampant” that also happens to be one that can be read by the masses.” Forbes on how it’s using the metaverse, Web3 and NFTs.

Bloomberg: “Some people are naturally more decisive. These charge-ahead types make choices assuredly, from the trivial to the life-changing, stick to them and don’t look back. But do they make better decisions?  It turns out that indecisive people don’t make worse decisions. In fact, the art of making good choices is as much about how we make them, and whether we actually put our decisions into action, as it is the choices themselves…“Action-oriented” people — those who find it easier to initiate and follow through on decisions — more easily adjust to time pressure or stress and are more likely to follow through on their decisions. “State-oriented” people, on the other hand, find decisions more difficult, are less flexible, more likely to question the choices they’ve made and more prone to abandoning efforts later.”

David Sax: “Engagement with strangers is at the core of our social contract. Most religious faiths instruct us to welcome the strangers we encounter, and there’s good reason for this. If we engaged only with the people we knew, our world would be small. That leap of faith toward the unknown other is what allows us to grow beyond the family unit, tribe or nation. Everyone you converse with who is not a biological relative — your best friend, neighbor, lover, spouse or even that chatty taxi driver from last weekend — was a stranger before you spoke to that person. Anytime we ignore strangers in our vicinity, whether because of fear, bigotry or the everyday convenience and efficiency of digital technology, we weaken that contract. Far from random human inconveniences, strangers are actually one of the richest and most important resources we have. They connect us to the community, teach us empathy, build civility and are full of surprise and potentially wonder.”

Matthew Hennessey: “Life is not determined by what you want. Life is determined by the choices you make.” [via CafeHayek]

Sangeet Paul Choudary on ecosystem business models: “In an ecosystem, we typically see three types of horizontal business models emerge – Aggregators, Integrators, and Infrastructures – which may be distinguished based on their position in the value chain. Additionally, firms may specialise and act as capability providers.”

Matthew Green: “Legacy industry and regulators have smothered two generations of technological improvement, largely (I suspect) by building a (mostly) closed and permissioned financial system. And this is a big deal: payments are too important to our economy to entrust them to 1970s-era technology and an extractive industry. We don’t even know what novel applications — Googles, Facebooks, Wikipedias, Instagrams — we’re missing out on because the industry simply won’t allow them to exist. I don’t know if blockchains are the solution to this problem. I see indications that the technology is finally starting to grow up in ways that seem like a harbinger of major positive changes on the horizon. Progress here is slow, though in some cases because the regulatory apparatus is throwing sand in the gears of cooperative products, and/or utterly failing to move expeditiously to uncover possible fraud. And maybe the result won’t even be a success for blockchain solutions: perhaps we’ll simply get more and better offerings from “traditional finance” industry as they start to wake up to the fact that more open systems can compete with their closed offerings. So while I don’t know if cryptocurrency will be the answer, I’m just hopeful that something will be.”

Shane Parish: “There is a constant battle in all of us between our today-self and our tomorrow-self. Today-self is like our inner child. Today-self cares only about today. It wants to focus on things that offer an immediate payoff. Whether that’s kicking back with a few too many glasses of wine, spending money on status symbols, or avoiding doing things that can be done tomorrow. Tomorrow-self is like our inner adult. Tomorrow-self cares about things that take time to get results — like working on your relationship, saving money, or consistently moving the project forward one inch at a time.,,The wisdom of tomorrow-self is this: Focus on one thing you can do today to make tomorrow easier. Repeat.”

David Perell: “Philosophers are the most rigorous thinkers I know. Like intellectual boxers; they come to understand ideas by making them fight with each other. Their style of analysis is effective because it’s so bloody. One friend calls his style “violent thinking.” He talks about thinking like a soldier talks about interrogation. He subjects ideas to ruthless torture, shaking them and grabbing them by the throat until they can no longer breathe and, eventually, reveal their true nature…Good philosophers are like my friend from middle school. But instead of playing with computers, they play with ideas. Writing takes them a long time not because they’re finger-happy keyboard warriors, but because they rip ideas apart until they’re left with only the atomic elements. Once the idea has been sufficiently deconstructed, they put it back together. Usually, in new ways.”

Shruti Rajagopalan in conversation with Lant Pritchett. “PRITCHETT: I think this is maybe the deep problem about state capability in India is that—and Arvind Subramanian just had an interesting interview in which he was pointing out that what the government’s done is not try and fix the hard-implementation things like health and education. They’ve improved the direct targetable here. You’re getting gas here. You’re getting concrete benefits of cash or in-kind transfers that are logistically simple. That, again, it’s not going to re-create a coalition about fixing the core problems of the Indian state. RAJAGOPALAN: I call it the upside-down Indian state. They don’t provide public goods and quasi-public goods. But what they provide is private transfers and private entitlements, which could be done very well by the private sector, except now it’s the government in the business of—it’s a little bit upside down if we think of it from a development point of view. It might still be better than nothing. PRITCHETT: Yes, it is worrisome if you’re providing subsidized gas but you don’t have a police force that’s reliable.”

Jack Dorsey’s tdb’s presentation on Web5. “Web5 brings decentralized identity and data storage to your applications. It lets devs focus on creating delightful user experiences, while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals.” Namcios: “Web5 is based on the assumption that Web3, the idea of building a decentralized web with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, has the right intentions but is using the wrong tools. Web5 leverages Bitcoin, the decentralized monetary network, and a plethora of sound computer science technologies to create a new ecosystem of decentralized identities, data storage and applications in which the users are in control of their personal information. Fairly decentralized developments in the internet over the past couple of decades such as BitTorrent and Tor have shown that blockchain technology is not a necessary component for decentralization. Rather, the blockchain has only proven to be needed for a very specific purpose – mitigate the double-spend problem to successfully bring peer-to-peer money to the digital realm with Bitcoin. TBD’s Web5 is made up of software components and services such as decentralized identifiers (DIDs), decentralized web node (DWNs), self-sovereign identity service (SSIS) and a self-sovereign identity software development kit (ssi-sdk). These components let developers focus on building user experiences while more easily enabling decentralized identity and data storage in applications.”

Dan Shipper and Casey Rosengren: “Peer coaching is a structured way to learn, grow, and share with a close friend. It’s a deep commitment to creating a supportive environment where you and a friend can develop as individuals. The bare bones structure of it is to meet weekly for an hour, with one person as the “coach” and the other as the “focus person,” and to alternate each week who is in each role. The focus person shares whatever questions or challenges they’re sitting with, and the coach’s job is to listen, and at times, reflect or share their own experience.”