I have always preferred the system of retirement where you can’t quite tell, observing from the outside, whether the man is working or retired. A problem in many businesses, particularly the bureaucratic ones, is your employees retire, but they don’t tell you.
Category: Notes
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Retired But Working
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The Product Behind The Products
Making a product is hard, but making a team that can continually make products is even harder. The product I’m most proud of is Apple — and the team I built at Apple.
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Keep Trying
A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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Distribution Before Innovation
The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation.
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Fragmentation Without Ideas
Reform this time will be more brutal. China presses; Pakistan threatens; non-alignment collapses and America drives hard bargains. The new world cannot be denied. Incapable of lasting reform, or of a correct interpretation of the new world, India is, profoundly, dependent. She depends on others now both for questions and answers; foreign journalists are more important in India than in any other country. And India is fragmented; it is part of her dependence. This is not the fragmentation of region, religion or caste. It is the fragmentation of a country held together by no intellectual current, no developing inner life of its own. It is the fragmentation of a country without even an idea of a graded but linked society.
– V.S. Naipaul, writing in 1967 (India Essays)
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Functionality In Failure Mode
Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode. What the system is supposed to be doing when everything is working well is really beside the point, because that happy state is rarely achieved in real life. The truly pertinent question is: How does it work when its components aren’t working well? How does it fail? How well does it work in failure mode?
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Newness Matters
The more successful someone is in backing one generation of companies, the more they’ll have access to a cohort of executives from that era who are credible, well-informed, persuasive, and about to get blindsided by industry shifts.
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How Do Bubbles Form?
Bubbles form when the momentum of short-term returns attracts enough money that the makeup of investors shifts from mostly long term to mostly short term. That process feeds on itself.
– Morgan Housel
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Generating Ideas
The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.