Pass-through

The partner passes along the cost of the service to their customers, sometimes taking a cut of the revenue as a fee.

Picking-up

The partner pays for the cost of the service on behalf of their customers. This eats into margin so they will want to negotiate the lowest possible price. The upshot is they are the customer and be more invested in the partnership.

Wholesale

The partner packages the product, collects payment, and you bill for usage. The partner gets complete control over pricing so they can tailor it to their customers.

Tools are something that a business finds familiar. There is a category and a known list of things it should do. There are good tools and bad tools to buy and it’s usually obvious which ones are the good ones.

Transformations require the business buyer to do something different. They need to adopt a new idea and change how they do things. These transformations need to be sold (as in, with a sales team) to them. If successful, they define an entire category with the largest market share.

Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder of Hubspot, talks about the difference between tools and transformations in this video.

See also:

• Similarly, consumers buy products, enterprises buy platforms. Platforms are a common idea to businesses (think of the number of times you’ve heard the ‘Operating system for X’ pitch)
• Passion for ones tools is part of what makes product-led growth successful. Would this work for grass root transformations?

Objective knowledge is possible and it comes from within. Communication is lossy so even precise books and teaching can not transfer objective knowledge. It starts with conjecture and then in repeated cycles of criticism it is corrected. Through this process objective knowledge can be found, but also shared.

See also:

• Epistemology
• From The Beginning of Infinity psuedo play with Socrates, Plato, and Hermes
• Reading is the transformation of a linked list of ideas into a tree

Once a hex screw is stripped it can be difficult to remove. Before resorting to drilling it, try using a Torx wrench. The star pattern fits into a hex screw head and gradually tapers to the tip giving it a little extra grip to turn a stripped hex screw.

I had a stripped hex screw on a watch bracelet and a Torx wrench easily removed it. A set of wrenches costs ~$10, much cheaper than sending it for repair.

Building tooling for transactional emails takes time and in the early days of building a product you’re still figuring out what to build. Google Groups can be used as a psuedo transactional email tool to fake it til you make it.

How to send email as a Google Group from Gmail:

1. In Google Groups, create a new email group with `Who can post` set to ‘Anyone on the web’ (e.g. info@mydomain.com)
2. In Gmail, go to Settings -> Accounts
3. In the ‘Send email as’ section, click ‘Add another email address’
4. In the prompt, add the group email address
5. Confirm the request by clicking the verification email sent to the group
6. To send an email as the group, select it from the drop down in the `From` field of the email composer

Now you can send emails as if you were info@ or support@ right from your Gmail account without setting up any other tools.

If you want messages sent to also appear in the group so other people can see it, compose the message in Google Groups by clicking ‘New conversation’ and select the group’s address in the ‘From’ field. Slightly less convenient than sending from within Gmail, but with the added benefit that your teammates have full visibility.

After a large uptick in notifications, I’m experimenting with turning off notifications on all devices except one. This change helps me maintain focus and feel less overwhelmed.

I realized this was important when sitting at my desk working and receiving four notifications for the exact same thing—desktop, phone, watch, and tablet. What was more maddening was when a notification triggered an app notification and an email, effectively doubling the noise. This created a cacophony that was maddening.

Having one location with notifications, either the desktop while I’m working or phone (I also stopped wearing the Apple Watch) when I’m outside the house, squelches the noise. I don’t worry about missing something important (I’m not completely on do-not-disturb) and my attention isn’t constantly thrashed between my phone, watch, and desktop.

See also:

• Work-related notifications might contribute to the Ringelmann effect as companies grow (more notifications because there are more people gives the illusion more is happening and more likely to let others do the work)

Some startups are changing the exercise window for stock options from 90 days to something longer. This helps employees who can’t afford to exercise their options if they leave (golden handcuffs). However there is a downside to existing employees: moving from a 90-day to a 10-year window costs the average remaining employee as much as 80% in incremental dilution.

Increasing the dilution of existing employees who are the ones increasing the value of the company creates a further imbalance between early employees who have a much greater equity stakes and current employees.

Read The Lack of Options for (Startup Employees’) Options from a16z.

Hot iron and cold iron When in opposition, cold iron wins every time. Cold iron is not so much cold as unyielding.

Convergence of power Power draws together in crucial moments. However, it’s difficult to tell whether the cause of a crucial moment caused the convergence or the convergence caused the crucial moment.

WebUtils is a browser-only way of converting images between various formats and compressing them using WebAssembly. Most services like this require a request to a backend server which you can’t inspect what’s going on. Doing all the processing client side is more private and (maybe) somewhat safer.

A fence is a man made object that takes cost and effort to construct. They tend to be placed with some forethought as to what they are building a barrier from or to. To remove the fence without understanding why it’s there can have unintended consequences.

See also:

• An example in software development is load-bearing quirks

With so much emphasis on productivity these days, an underappreciated problem is work avoidance—not doing what you should be doing because you are doing something else. This is particularly sinister because there is often too much work to do in any given day and we reduce anxiety with activity.

For manager, that means avoiding the right problems because it’s difficult. They are seduced by doing something that’s more immediate, or they are good at, or praised for doing (like the work of an individual contributor when time is tight).

Over time, work avoidance severely harms a teams ability to do ambitious things.

See also:

• For tech debt, closing the gap between previous technical decisions and the current quality bar, this might look like putting off the refactoring even though the whole team is slowing down
• For product, strategy bugs might be difficult to resolve, but not working on it makes failure certain (maybe not immediately though)

We tend to think of money as something tangible and, once you have it, it can be used interchangeably anywhere it’s used for procuring goods and services. But this is not really true.

From Matt Levine in Money Stuff:

But the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and to its later European aftershocks, made it clear that something else was going on. Who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by the actions of central banks and national treasuries; banks can be bailed out; costs can be socialized. The fiscal response to Covid-19 reinforced this point: Money is a tool of social decision-making, not an objective thing that you get through abstract merit.

Besides the value of money being ascribed by people (e.g. one day we collectively decided Bitcoin was worth something) it behaves more like an instrument that can be used and tuned dynamically. This has some potentially powerful effects like deterring war with sanctions (as is being attempted on a massive scale on Russia’s war with Ukraine).

An easy way to display a PDF preview in the browser is to use an iframe and set the src to a link to the file. However, there is no way to set additional headers on requests from an iframe so you can’t use this method if the request requires authentication or any other special headers.

To workaround this issue, fetch the PDF in the browser then use URL.createObjectURL on the response blob to generate a src link for the iframe. This will render the PDF preview and provides control over the request for things like setting authentication headers.

Here’s an example React component that fetches a PDF with custom headers and renders a preview without any other external dependencies. As long as the server sends a mimetype of application/pdf, the PDF will render properly.

export const PreviewPDF: FunctionComponent = (props) => {
  const [previewUrl, setPreviewUrl] = useState<string | null>(null);

  useEffect(() => {
    // Set up headers, cookies, or other settings needed here
    const request: RequestInit = {
      method: 'GET',
      mode: 'cors',
      headers: {
        Authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
      },
    };
    fetch(props.url, request)
      .then((resp) => resp.blob())
      .then((blob) => {
        const objectURL = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
        setPreviewUrl(objectURL);
      });
  }, []);

  if (!previewUrl) {
    return <span>Loading...</span>;
  }

  return (
    <iframe
      src={`${previewUrl}#toolbar=0`}
      title={url}
      frameBorder="0"
    />
  );
};

See also:

• This is naive implementation, fetching using React usually needs to handle more edge cases: gracefully fetch API data with React and TypeScript

A clock is base 12 (a 12 hour clock) and base 60 (an hour contains 60 minutes). Since they are divisible by each other you can use minute markers only to tell the hour by looking at the position of the hour in minutes and dividing by 5. For example, at the 15 minute position the hour is 3. At the 30 minute position the hour is 6 and so on.

See also:

• Antikythera Mechanism models the sun, moon, and planets of ancient Greece

Meeting an investor for the first time and trying to get them to invest immediately is difficult. They have little information about you or the company. They have no understanding of your trajectory or the company’s. There’s no relationship that’s been built over time.

Investors invest in lines, multiple data points collected over time, rather than a single dot or period in time because it gives them some advantages. They can lower their risk by your idea play out—if the next time they talk to you there is no progress or you fail then that saves them from making a bad investment. If there is progress it gives a brief window into how quickly it will grow.

Read this Twitter thread from from Peter Reinhardt, founder of Segment.

See also:

• Information asymmetry during fund raising is a big advantage for investors

For new knowledge to be created, there needs to be an error correcting mechanism. This makes it the most important knowledge for progress and innovation.

Traditions of criticism provide the environment needed to find the knowledge to detect and eliminate errors. Without it justificationism stifles new ideas and no progress can be made.

See also:

• From The Beginning of Infinity
• Outdated scientific studies can perpetuate for years despite the scientific community’s tradition of criticism
• If learning is surprise plus memory, maybe the key is learning to be surprised

Founders that are willing to take on problem areas that are unappealing because it seems like a lot of work is a moat. Schlep blindness, as Paul Graham calls it, is mostly subconscious and causes hackers to choose easier, but more competitive areas. This explains why you see thousands of todo list apps, but not a thousand employment compliance companies.

See also:

• The most effective people care a lot and if they are obsessed with something others think is a schlep, their effectiveness goes up due to lack of competition
• The combination of schlep blindness and using time horizons as a competitive advantage is even more powerful (people don’t want to do things that seem like a lot of work for a long time)

A Pew Research Center Survey found that 61% of remote workers who have a company office say it’s their choice not to work from there. This is significant because the prior reason for working remotely was 38% of people said it was because their workplace was closed.

60% of remote workers say that when the COVID-19 pandemic is over, if they have the choice, would like to work from home all or most of the time.

See also:

• These are strong indicators that remote work will persist in the coming years and are inline with a previous survey which showed two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely
• The survey also found 9% of those surveyed feel pressure from their supervisor or co-workers to be in the office which correlates with reported productivity

When joining a new team, a common piece of advice is to “gain credibility” by doing undesirable tasks others don’t want to do. The problem with proof-of-worth is that, after a certain point, it has the opposite effect—proving no worth. Being in the habit of doing proof-of-worth tasks takes away the time needed to do high leverage work that no one else can which is likely the primary responsibility of the role anyway.

Read the Twitter thread from Shreyas Doshi.

See also:

• Resolving bugs is proof-of-worth but resolving strategy bugs isn’t
• The smart programmer fallacy contributes to this issue if you outsource your thinking to others

Visionaries pushing some form of utopia are defined by their pessimism. Their belief that utopia can be achieved means they don’t believe things could ever get better, nor their idea of what is best. Unless new knowledge stops being created and all relevant knowledge is known, utopians exhibit the same parochial error as someone who believes the sun revolves around the Earth.

See also:

• From The Beginning of Infinity
• Utopians are also cynics because they assume nothing will change when they achieve their vision

We do not yet know what we have not discovered and trying to know the unknowable (prophesy) leads to pessimism. A Malthusian catastrophe ends up being wrong because it does not predict knowledge that resulted in efficiency of food production. Similarly the pessimism of energy economics is error laden because it can not predict what new discoveries we will make in social and political systems or new defenses.

Why does prophesy lead to pessimism? Trying to make a prediction based on knowledge bounded by what is currently known, then extrapolating, will result in plenty of examples to be pessimistic about. The problem with these kinds of predictions is that it’s based on unknown knowledge which can change the course of things entirely.

See also:

• Trends are not explanations and trends are prophecies if they involve the prediction of knowledge
• Techno-optimism is rational
• The Beginning of Infinity
• Artificial intelligence garners intense fear and pessimism

A good churn rate for a B2B company serving small and medium businesses (SMB) and mid-market businesses (< 1000 employees) is 2.5% - 5.0% per month. A great churn rate is less than 1.5% per month.

A good churn rate for B2B company serving enterprise customers (1000+ employees) is 1-2% per month. A great churn rate is less than 0.5% per month.

Read What is good monthly churn from Lenny Rachitsky.

You can spot bad explanations similar to the way you can spot bad arguments using the Münchhausen trilemma.

For example:

• An argument such as “we are in a simulation” which requires proof of “who wrote the simulation” infinitely regresses making it a bad explanation
• An argument like “everything was designed by god in 7 days” is a bad explanation because it’s dogmatic and easy to vary. “Intelligent design” can be varied to match any prediction or evidence without further proof other than “because”

The essence of problems is when two ideas come into conflict with each other. Sometimes that’s the conflict between an explanation and a better explanation. Other times it’s the conflict between the current state of being and what you want. Without conflict, there is no problem.

See also:

• From The Beginning of Infinity
• Problems are soluble