Opportunity comes in many shapes and sizes but a consistent limiting factor compliance—the set of rules (written or unwritten) that one must follow to participate in a prosperous endeavor.

Examples of products that make compliance easier:

• Mosey automating employment and tax compliance to simplify hiring remote and staying compliant
• Stripe Atlas start a company and get access to financial infrastructure from anywhere in the world
• Legalpad solving immigration and work visas
• Gusto payroll and benefits without having to figure out tax filings
• Vanta navigate security certifications to sell to regulated customers

Startups don’t have information about them needed for techniques you would typically use to value an investment. There is little history, cash flows, and even assets to do a discounted cash flow. As a result, public market investors are confused at how early-stage startups carry the valuations they do. That’s because these companies are like investing in options.

Being successful is mostly luck but working smartly (skill plus hard work) increases your luck. The trick is to balance intellectual honesty (it’s mostly luck) with controlled self-deception (success is due to skill and hard work). If you are too honest, you become pessimistic and if you’re too self-deceptive you get a false sense that everyone less successful is lazy or dumb.

Watch the video Is Success Luck or Hard Work?.

See also:

• Emotional intelligence is more important for entrepreneurial success than general mental ability
• It’s easier to blame others for lack of success but it is more correct to blame bad luck
• The easiest person to fool is yourself especially when it’s about your contributions towards your own success

The Three Body Problem captures your imagination and uses science as a plot point that I haven’t seen before. Some spoilers ahead.

I loved that the book is framed around the Cultural Revolution in China and told in unforgiving detail. It was a unique experience for me to have science fiction told through the lens of Chinese politics and history.

The dimension of time becomes a mind bending consideration for the decisions Earth and Trisolaris make. It’s interesting to think about how things might play out when the incoming danger is 400 years away and the advancement of technology in the intervening time between launching an invasion fleet and arriving at the destination. (Although, this does presume that no advancement can be made along the journey when matter, energy, and evidence are all that’s needed for knowledge creation).

Some of it is admittedly far fetched. The proton computer is super cool, but it’s stretched to the absolute limit—AI + multi-dimensional transformation + quantum sensing, and so on.

Remote work can save employers and estimated $200B per year and help reduce inflation. Workers are willing to accept smaller pay for increased work from home options. A recent paper found that this would reduce wage growth by 2 percentage points over two years.

Read Remote Work Could Save Firms $206 Billion and Ease Pressure on the Fed from Bloomberg.

See also:

• American workers are willing to take a pay cut to work remote
• Google employees could face pay cuts due to working remote
• But there might be perks too, places that will pay you to move and work remotely
• Could inflation make remote work part of monetary policy?

Prospective customers will want to review an order form and master software agreement. Their lawyers will want to propose changes. This causes a few issues: it increases the cost of the deal because now you need to pay lawyers to resolve the feedback and it makes it difficult to understand contractual obligations if every customer is slightly different.

To reduce this complication, set a contract value minimum before you will make revisions to your agreement. If someone asks about it you can tell them the rule that you’ve set for sales. If they push back, you can give a clear reason why—the expense of making revisions and maintaining your obligations.

See also:

• Founder led sales helps identify product problems, but also sales problems where you’re spending a lot in legal fees on every deal regardless of size

People tend to think of objects and living things as having a soul or not having a soul when really it’s a continuous scale of souledness. For example, people reject the idea of eating certain animals like cats but not chickens, we remark about how, after a major cognitive decline due to old age, that person “isn’t all there”. There is a continuous assignment we make as to the degree of souledness in everything we see and interact with.

This isn’t to say this is correct (a souledness scale points out a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions) but it provides a good explanation for the moral issues we face today—a binary view of souledness (the predominant view) requires consensus and is therefore indeterminable.

From I Am a Strange Loop.

See also:

• Soul shards bring to life fragments of someone’s interiority

Music is a soul shard, little fragments of experience from the composer recreated in your head. They bring to life something ineffable inside us like little pieces of someone’s soul.

Pictures, writing, or even memories are all similar in this regard. A rare glimpse into the interiority of someone else.

From I Am a Strange Loop.

Written by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

A recent survey from The Partnership for New York City found 38% of Manhattan office workers are in the workplace as of April 2022. Office employees that are fully remote dropped from 54% in late October 2021 to 28%.

While NYC is one city and it’s industries are not reflective of all jobs, it is the largest city in the U.S. and a pretty good indicator of where we are with remote work.

See also:

• NYC office real estate value declined due to remote work

Contingency recruiting is not very effective for early-stage hiring. Since contingency recruiters get paid only if they are able to fill a job opening and charge 20-25% of the new hire’s first year salary, they tend to share candidate profiles with larger companies that pay higher salaries which make them more money.

Early-stage startups tend to get candidate profiles that the larger companies passed on. This results is less desirable candidates and a lower volume than if a startup were to do recruiting in-house.

There is so much writing that goes into running modern organizations but very little of it is ever seen. Every email, chat, document, slides, spreadsheets that gets produced is limited in distribution to a handful of people or teams. What you can observe from the outside is only the most polished published content.

So what?

A common complaint about writing is that it’s too hard to do. Yet, everyone seems to create prolific amounts of writing every day. There is more capability than people give themselves credit for.

How might this vast trove of content be utilized? Is writing primarily for communication so disposable that it ought to never be looked at again? Perhaps there is something there, maybe that’s how we can train a minto linter.

See also:

• An easy piece of advice to give about how to write more is to do it every day, but everyone already is

An algorithm for working on hard problems is to shake and pull. Complex systems and problems are like a tangled up wire that by shaking (introducing randomness to open new paths) and pulling (stretching the system so there are no tangles) you can solve the problem quickly. If you were to pull without shaking you would tighten the knots which is like going depth first. If you were to only shake you wouldn’t actually try any new solutions.

Read The Only Algorithm for Hard Problems: Shake and Pull Gently.

See also:

• The author also likens this algorithm to “simulated annealing” where you are heating (shaking) and cooling slowly (pulling) which is also like product development: the path from concept to product is an annealing process

While you can use Emacs in the browser using Codespaces, it involves getting all of your emacs config set up on Codespaces. By using the GitHub CLI you can also use emacs TRAMP over SSH to work in the Codespace instance from your local emacs.

To do that, update your init.el to create a new tramp method. (Copied this from the emacs-codeql readme).

(let ((ghcs (assoc "ghcs" tramp-methods))
      (ghcs-methods '((tramp-login-program "gh")
                      (tramp-login-args (("codespace") ("ssh") ("-c") ("%h")))
                      (tramp-remote-shell "/bin/sh")
                      (tramp-remote-shell-login ("-l"))
                      (tramp-remote-shell-args ("-c")))))
  ;; just for debugging the methods
  (if ghcs (setcdr ghcs ghcs-methods)
    (push (cons "ghcs" ghcs-methods) tramp-methods)))

;; provide codespace name completion for ghcs tramp method
;; use C-j if you use ivy to kick in host completion
(defun my/tramp-parse-codespaces (&optional nop)
  (let ((results '())
        (codespaces
         (split-string
          (shell-command-to-string
           "gh codespace list --json name -q '.[].name'"))))
    (dolist (name codespaces)
      ;; tramp completion expects a list of (user host)
      (add-to-list 'results (list nil name)))
    results))

(tramp-set-completion-function "ghcs" '((my/tramp-parse-codespaces "")))

Install the GitHub CLI, authenticate your machine, and create a codespace.

brew install gh
gh auth login
gh cs create

Now you can use TRAMP to open files directly in your Codespace! C-x C-f then type ghcs:/ and use autocomplete to choose your codespace.

Everything that works with TRAMP should work including eglot and magit.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed said that workers are not returning to the office which has resulted a loss of $400MM in tax revenue. Some of the reasons for this is fewer people in the city (while not an exodus, the office vacancy rate is more than 24%) but I suspect this is also due companies moving out of SF for tax reasons (Stripe moved to Oyster Point).

Read San Francisco Mayor Breed says city faces remote work challenge as tech workers leave town or stay home.

See also:

• NYC office real estate value declined 32%
• Other cities are competing for tax revenue from remote work
• With declining tax revenue, it’s more apparent that remote work will become a political issue

Up to this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has been a buoy keeping many parts of the economy afloat. We’ve seen that working from home was so successful and fears of loss of productivity were unfounded. Now we are starting to see a reactionary movement that will find it’s way into political agendas—how to get workers back in the office.

It’s easy to dismiss this problem as a non-problem. Remote work is just work. The economy likes growing businesses because it creates jobs.

Who loses out when the number of people working from home increases? Commercial real estate is seeing their value decline considerably, cities are losing tax revenue. Millions of people without access to high speed internet and a home environment conducive to work creates inequality in remote work.

It’s a matter of time before a political party includes remote work into their platform or scapegoats it.

According to a recent survey from McKinsey & Company, American workers say they have the option to work part time or full time from home (58% and 35% respectively). That’s roughly 55 million people in the US.

87% of people offered to work from home, take up the offer (either 5 days a week or some days per week).

Flexible work arrangement is the 3rd most important motivator of finding a new job—just behind “better career opportunities” and “greater pay or hours”. It also ranks ahead of “better health insurance”.

See also:

• The motivators for finding a new job seems to line up with this: half of Millennials and Gen Z would consider quitting if employers don’t allow remote work
• 25% of all job postings are premanently remote
• The survey found greater work challenges for those in partially remote and fully remote setups which doesn’t square with this survey’s result that remote work is correlated with happiness
• According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 45% of jobs can be done remotely which is far lower than what this study suggests (so take both reports with a bit more than a grain of salt)

I’m currently reading and taking notes on Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta.

ISBN: 9781422160596

What is competition

Strategy explains how an organization faced with competition will achieve superior performance.

If there were no competition there there would be no need for strategy or anything to outperform.

Thinking about competition as being the best is wrong and leads to competitive convergence. Over time, everyone looks alike and the only distinguishing difference is price (e.g. airline tickets, PCs). This erodes value for customers and companies.

War as a metaphor for competition is wrong. In business, there can be multiple winners so competition is more about serving customer needs than demolishing rivals.

Sports as a metaphor for competition is wrong. In sports there is one set of rules to be the best in. Companies can choose to make their own game.

Strategic competition is competing to be unique. Unique in value you create and how you create it. The focus is on creating superior value for the chosen customers, not imitating or matching rivals.

Competition is more like the performing arts than sports or warfare. It’s positive sum and innovative not zero sum and imitative.

Five forces

Most people think competition is a direct contest between rivals. Competition is about earning profits not winning a sale.

The industry’s structure is defined by:

• Intensity of rivalry among existing competitors
• Bargaining power of suppliers
• Threat of substitutes
• Threat of new entrants

The structure explains the industry’s profitability.

The strength of each force varies but are present in every industry.

Industry structure tends to be stable over time. Things change but structure takes a long time to change.

Profits is more complex with producers, suppliers, customers, and even future entrants.

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One of the biggest challenge with distributed content networks and the fediverse is discovery. Platforms like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Medium, have a distribution network built in that help users find your content. Commoditization increases the importance of distribution.

If we are to have an alternative to these networks, one where the content creator has more controls over the content they create, then there needs to be a way to consume content by discovering creators.

What might that look like?

Like many financial services hedge-fund crossover investing makes money by charging fees for assets under management. They bring in more investors by showing gains in the market. In late stage startup investing, this creates the incentive to inflate valuations. By deploying larger amounts of money faster than traditional venture capital, hedge-fund crossover investors can win deals and push the valuation higher in subsequent rounds showing higher and higher paper gains.

As long as there is never a write-downs—which neither investors nor CEOs would want to do—it’s a great way of monetizing inflated startup valuations.

Unfortunately, this seems to be one of those investment strategies that only works in a bull market. Tiger Global lost $25 billion (and counting) as of June 2022 ($5 billion of that in their VC fund) making it the biggest loss in hedge fund history.

Read Late Stage Prisoners Dilema by Ranjan Roy.

See also:

• Write-downs are coming as inflation causes downward pressure on startup valuations
• Zero interest rate policy (ZIRP)

There is a builtin emacs web browser (eww) but it’s text-based. There are a few options for getting an actual browser in emacs.

Using xwidget-webkit

Update: Emacs 29 has vastly improved support for webkit, including multiple instances in buffers and it seems more stable

You can compile emacs to include xwidget and use xwidget-webkit-browse-url.

I found this to be significantly better than EAF. It works with buffers the way you expect. You can even get to the console by right clicking and selecting ‘Inspect element’.

The railwaycat homebrew formula for emacs is the best way to get xwidget support on a Mac.

brew install emacs-mac --with-natural-title-bar --with-native-comp --with-xwidgets

So far the only downside I can find is that you can’t open more than one browser and it crashes somewhat regularly.

Setting up eaf using straight

The EAF (emacs-application-framework) package integrates a number of apps into emacs. The browser is a full webkit browser that is overlayed onto a buffer.

It works but it’s really janky. If you move the emacs window around the browser window might not move. It doesn’t work in fullscreen.

Installing using straight.el and use-package:

(use-package eaf :straight (eaf :type git :host github :repo “emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework” :files (".el" “.py” “core” “app” “*.json”) :includes (eaf-browser) ; Straight won’t try to search for these packages when we make further use-package invocations for them :pre-build ((“python3” “install-eaf.py” “–install” “browser” “–ignore-sys-deps”) (“npm” “i” “-g” “mac-app-frontmost”))))

(use-package eaf-browser :custom (eaf-browser-continue-where-left-off t) (eaf-browser-enable-adblocker t))

Now that I’ve used a CRM from scratch for startup sales and support, I’m coming around to the idea that you should start a personal CRM as early as possible in your career.

Seeing who you’ve talked to from which company over time can be incredibly useful for making connections. Those connections are useless if you don’t engage with them (meeting, hang outs, events, or social media). A CRM helps you keep track of these connections and offload some of the mental overhead of engaging with them.

I’m not quite sure about separating personal/professional, but it is certainly important that your CRM is portable. You should not lose all of your connections when you change jobs.

Twitter is no longer viable. Use LinkedIn.

Old version:

Kinds of content to build your audience

• Share stories: How others are solving an import problem or answering a key question
• Threads that rollup interviews
• DM people that match your target audience
• Reply to older threads you created to give them new life