Books have the ability to condense and transfer information efficiently. While some things can’t be learned from reading, reading gives you the benefit of other peoples' experience. Even if it’s lossy, building familiarity can turn something that felt opaque and scary into something you feel prepared to encounter.

See also:

• Reading is the transformation of a linked list of ideas into a tree which explains why it can be lossy when not done well
• Flesch Reading Ease Test show that you probably need to get past an 8th grade reading level in order to unlock the power of books

A book about how to set up a cold calling sales funnel by Stephan Schiffman.

See also:

• Literary Notes

Good salespeople know that a third of their sales come from doing nothing at all. If you talk to enough people, some will buy it. Like the people who sell hats in Times Square, merely asking if you want to buy one results in sales.

See also:

• Just making calls (no zero days) will result in a third of sales
• From Cold Calling Techniques

In physics, calculating a predicted value for gravity at the particle level for a given event is difficult, but there appears to be a relationship between forces that enables a neat hack to simplify the calculation. By doubling the ‘kinematic term’ as if they were pairs of gravitons, you can make accurate predictions without calculating the strong force. When applied to Black Holes this also works—they act as if they were pairs of charged particles.

Could this be another type of symmetry in quantum forces?

Read How Gravity Is a Double Copy of Other Forces.

While the exact details are unknown, Godel claimed to have discovered a contradiction in the US Constitution that could allow the democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. There is much speculation about what the flaw could be and according to some accounts he told Einstein who had to calm him down.

See also:

• This is an example of Legal Informatics which attempts to formalize legal documents into data and math
• Gödel’s incompleteness theorem

In a recent study looking at the impact of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic found that perception of organizational support for remote work correlates with higher reported productivity and gains in productive working time. This is in contrast to those that perceive low support for remote work as having a negative impact on productive working time and indicating greater depression symptoms.

Study of Los Angeles-based participants by Duke University

See also:

• Two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely
• Zoom fatigue is real, but perhaps management support of remote work is a bigger issue
• Low psychosocial safety is associated with a threefold increase in risk of major depression

When a founder leads initial sales at a startup they can quickly respond to each scenario, position the product, and answer questions. If a salesperson is the only person doing initial sales they will need a script and training to do it well. If it’s not going well it’s difficult to tell if there is a problem with the product or a problem with the salesperson.

This is why founder-led sales are important in the early days—you don’t yet know if you have product market fit.

See also:

• The number one job of a startup CEO is finding product market fit
• A sales pitch is the opposite of a VC pitch
• Making founder-led sales a repeatable process

91% of companies offer 1-2 PPO medical plans to their employees and the majority contribute over 85% of the premium. PPOs are also the mostly likely to be covered 100% by the company—even for small companies with less than 50 employees, 40% contribute 100% for single coverage.

Companies also, on average, cover dependents in those PPO plans. 38% of small companies with 1-50 employees provided 65-80% contribution towards dependents.

As remote work ramps up, many people are looking for a higher quality webcam to use with video conferencing software. It turns out, the best webcam might just be an old iPhone. Apps like Camo turn an old iPhone into an HD webcam using the rear facing sensors which are already optimized for capturing faces well and having good color balance.

See also:

• Two-thirds of remote workers want to continue to work remotely which makes the webcam market relevant again and new products are likely coming.
• High quality audio makes you sound smarter and I suspect high quality video has a similar benefits.

The SQLite database can be compiled to webassembly and served using static website hosting. SQLite stores data using files so you can avoid downloading the whole thing by making clever use of HTTP range requests which accept a certain byte range as a 204 partial request. That means you can query large datasets and query it with kilobytes of overhead.

SQLite can also be used for full text search using the FTS5 plugin making it a portable static site search engine like stork-search for significantly larger datasets.

Read Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages

See also:

• static.wiki is a searchable 43gb wikipedia that is statically hosted
• An alternative might be a static search engine like Tantivity
• SQLite is adding support for wasm

When you are doing sales, the pitch needs to focus on the customer and helping them solve their problems. This the exact opposite of VC pitches which focus almost entirely on you (especially early on where investment decisions are focused on the team). Therefore it’s important to drop the VC approach when selling to real customers.

Some companies recently tried to separate business from politics so they can better focus on their mission. This has caused some understandable backlash because trying to be non-political is in-fact a political move, whether or not they intended it or not.

Everything is political. Actions and behaviors are deeply influenced by societal beliefs, norms, and biases. That’s why trying to avoid politics altogether is, it it’s own way, a political decision or a lack of understanding of culpability in, for example, social issues.

The best way to acknowledge this in a business context, is unclear, but policies that prohibit political discussions in the workplace probably aren’t it.

See also:

• Coinbase declaring being ‘mission focused’ does not include politics or activism.
• Basecamp made a policy about discussing politics and one third of Basecamp employees accepted a buyout offer and quit the company.
• This is also an example of in-group favoritism and (maybe) belief congruence theory which could lead to even more problems in the organization as employees seek to raise their standing with the in-group.

The “Untethered Class” are people with no school-aged children, renters with remote-friendly jobs that tend to skew younger and higher income. San Francisco and the Bay Area have a higher percentage population of untethere which may help to explain why permanent moves from SF increased 23% when the national average was only 3%.

Read More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus.

While the percentage of permanent moves from major metro areas increased an average 3%, permanent moves from San Francisco increased 23%. This is the highest increase in permanent moves nationally. Even when looking at temporary moves, the rate doubled for San Francisco while nationally it increased 17%.

Read More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus.

See also:

• 84% of moves during the pandemic were within the same metro area, in the case of the Bay Area, many moved to LA or less expensive cities like Sacremento

84% of moves in the top 50 metro areas during the pandemic were within the metro area. This is more of a reshuffling than a great migration as most moves are in 100 miles of their origin. Only 6% moved to another top metro area.

Read More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus.

Stork Search is a full text search engine written in Rust that compiles to WebAssembly. That makes it compatible with static websites like notes.alexkehayias.com. The file size is relatively small (less than 1MB) for an index with hundreds of notes and the search results are fast.

I added search for my public notes here.

Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) has special tax rules which can result in no taxes when sold. To qualify, a business needs to be an active C Corporation, less than $50MM in assets, not in an excluded category, acquired directly (not second-hand), and the stock must be held for 5 years or more and have documentation of the stock. The excluded (not taxed) gain is limited up to $10MM or 10 times the adjusted basis of the investment (after that it gets the normal capital gains treatment).

What about vesting schedules? Wouldn’t that make for the holding period starting on each vest?

According to this blog post, filing an 83(b) election would start the 5 year holding period at the time of grant rather than the time of vesting.

A Python dataclass simplifies the setup of a class with many attributes. By adding the `datacass` decorator to a `Class` you can any number of typed attributes and it will generate an `_init_` method for you with default values. This is convenient when you are modeling a data heavy application and using classes (rather than dicts) to get better type check errors.

See also:

• Python type hinting pairs well with data classes to get type errors early
• Python

Unlike Arabic or Roman numerals, a Cistercian numeral can represent any number between 1 and 9999 with a single glyph. This makes for a compact representation which were used for recording dates, indexes, numbering, and even used for labels on an Astrolabe.

See also:

• The low adoption of Cistercian numerals is a reminder to choose boring technology, rather than create your own new numbering system
• Beware of solutions disguised as problem statements (the problem is we don’t have our own numbering system)

A MaxDiff comparison helps reveal the ranking of pairs of features without directly asking users to stack rank them. People have an easier time saying the best or worst item in a set than to rank them so this technique is a way of getting a more accurate idea of the relative priority of a feature.

See also:

• This is one of the techniques described in Monetizing Innovation
• Willingness to pay should be at the core of product design

Próspera is a charter city run by the Honduras Próspera Inc (HPI) in conjuction with the Honduras government ZEDE laws which enable setting up economic zones (i.e. charter cities) governed by a non-Honduran entity (like a corporation). The group established the first zone in Roatan in an area of unused land the size of Central park.

Their planned government is libertarian, emphasizing property rights, low taxes, and small government. The ruling council is composed of 5 elected members and 4 appointed by HPI which keeps it small (although the 4 appointed members would likely vote as a group and elected member would likely not i.e. political parties). 3D property rights would solve air rights issues (e.g. building a tall building) and a property token will be used to finance the development of the land. A 10% tax rate would attract people and busineses and they would cut 1% to the Honduran government.

Read Prospectus On Próspera.

See also:

• Trust is an important factor to economic prosperity, residents would need to place a lot of trust in a corporation and the government not renegging on ZEDE.
• The significance of persistence in predicting economic outcomes, but in this case, the entire institution is imported.
• In April 2022, the ZEDE laws were repealed and constitutional reforms will abolish existing ZEDEs pending confirmation in 2023

Versioning is a pricing strategy for information products where you create different versions of the product for different users. The version the users pick reveals the value they place on the information and what they are willing to pay for it—without alienating users by charging different prices. This is especially important for digital information products that can drive prices and margins down due to competition.

Types of versioning include:

• Delays e.g. stock quotes delayed by 20 minutes vs real-time, movie vs rental
• Convenience e.g. amount of session time vs unlimited
• Comprehensiveness e.g. deeper coverage, historical information like archives
• Manipulation e.g. download or print, exports
• Community e.g. LinkedIn direct messaging for access to members
• Annoyance e.g. ad free
• Speed e.g. faster calculations
• Data processing e.g. filling out tax forms vs audit features to highlight risks
• User interface e.g. simple UI for casual users, more featureful UI for power users
• Image resolution e.g. higher resolution images
• Support e.g. email vs premium phone support

The number of versions depends on the number of distinct user segments. Even with a small number of segments, businesses can benefit from having three tiers for the same product to move users from the lowest price into the middle price tier (Goldilocks bias).

Read ‘Versioning is the smart way to sell information’

See also:

• MAP customer value framework
• Monetizing Innovation

A ‘back of the napkin’ estimate that can be quite accurate. By estimating multiple variables somewhat accurately and both underestimating and overestimating, the variables tend to balance out and result in accuracy within an order of magnitude. This is usually enough to get a general idea of the problem and solution which is useful, similar to dimensional analysis like Big O Notation.

See also:

• A famous Fermi estimation is of the Drake equation known as the Fermi paradox
• An estimation aids in understanding similar to projections onto different dimensions

An off speed high arching pitch in baseball that is meant to catch batters offguard.

Sometimes called a blooper pitch, or as it’s name derives from Yiddish, a nothing pitch.