Often overlooked while staffing: Most people excel in very specific situations, some prefer to make, some to maintain. But projects/products require different skillsets througout their lifecycle.
“[At the start] it needs builders, pioneers who come up with clever ideas and execute upon them fast. They improvise … are opinionated [and] make their own decisions.”
“[Later] it needs a lot of incremental improvements, nitty-gritty […] details […] and a developer team which […] only needs some fine-tuning.”
Classic presentation created by Sequoia Capital created in 2008 on How to survive a crisis. In essence: Get real or go home. I think I can get behind that, no matter the times.
Super apps may enjoy a distinct advantage in markets with the following characteristics: cost-conscious consumers with low but growing purchasing power, high relative costs of internet data, relatively recent adoption of smartphones, and ‘mobile-first’ leapfrogging of the PC era.
Interesting analysis into how and why, after first appearing in Chinas and India with WeChat and Gojek, the Super App pattern - with one app as an ecosystem, instead of an ecosystem of apps like in “the West” - seems to repeat in other emerging markets across Asia and Africa.
How long since you have been in a bad meeting? A week? A day? An hour? Unfortunately it is really, really easy to botch a meeting, to make it the worst part of any given day for a whole group of people. Fortunately it is also not that hard to make it a positive and productive experience.
What a gem! The reasoning and mechanics behind building an authentication system (Kerberos) in this case.
Athena: Well I’ve figured out how to secure an open network environment so that unscrupulous folks like you cannot use network services in other people’s names.
Best quote and Twitter thread on “artificial intelligence” so far:
Our field isn’t quite “artificial intelligence” – it’s “cognitive automation”: the encoding and operationalization of human-generated abstractions / behaviors / skills. The “intelligence” label is a category error
I greatly enjoyed reading “Craftsmanship—The Alternative to the Four Hour Work Week Mindset” and while disagree with the dychotomie of hacker and craftsman it supposes I think this is a pretty good distinction between and entrepreuneur and somebody that just dreams:
‘I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.’ This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas ‘I couldn’t find someone to do X, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all’ is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders.
In many agile adopting orgs I encountered there is a glaring fap between the theory of the self-organizing and directing team and the practice of someone (as in one person) doing all the organizing and directing. Nice to see Prahlad Yeri made a similar experience
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Inspired by Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ Demos, Prototypes and MVPs here comes my take: A demo shows a vision. A prototype demonstrates a capability. A Minimum Viable Product fuses the minimal core of vision and capability in order to deliver customer value.
