innovation culture

By the time those ideas’ productivity was realized, they were relatively old ideas. As Perplexity concluded, “In conclusion, while the 1950s and 1960s saw remarkable TFP growth, this ‘golden age’ was largely built on technological innovations and research from earlier decades, particularly the 1930s and 1940s.” There was a two decade lag.

So given ... See more

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone wh

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Put through that process, reality usually hits like a truck. Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor... See more

Once front-running other participants in financial markets or cultural production becomes a common strategy, trends become inefficiencies – temporary blips of difference or spikes in value that are bound for correction. Being early as a meta is replaced by catching people offsides. Betting on the return to the mean.

Every young person (and plenty of non-young people), trying to strike gold and solve problems, is architecting themselves after a dominant personality of our field.

These archetypes equally modeled themselves off of someone else that inspired them. Steve was obsessed with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. He would even take the “intersection of t... See more

To these three, I’ll add my favorite new idea as a fourth: contraptionism. So that’s the 4Cs of the imperative: Courage, Clarity, Creativity, Contraptionism.

The aesthetic and ethos that we need to guide the construction of a new machine is contraptionism . Because any new societal machine will inevitably be a janky affair, not just at inception, bu... See more

When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To

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