My thoughts on time-dependent work-related topics.
(Based on a Twitter exchange I had recently with Emmett Shear.)
VCs should have methods of reducing their risk other than limiting the amount of money they give, and the Hollywood studio system shows ways to do this.
Continue reading “VCs should adopt features of the Hollywood studio system”A friend on Facebook asked:
I responded:
Continue reading “How I think about morality (having the benefit of my undergraduate degree in psychology and philosophy)”I wrote up the explanation below a few months ago when someone sent me an email thanking me for my LSAT guide and asking me why I didn’t go to law school. I ended up sending the guy a one-sentence explanation instead, but I figured the full explanation would make a good blog post, and I’m just now getting around to posting it:
Below is an email I sent out to everyone at Infer in August of 2016. I’ve made some changes to clarify terms that the general public might not understand. Read only the bold sentences if you want a summary.
A little over a year ago Yang [one of the cofounders at Infer] asked me my opinion on the hiring process for the Data Analyst position, and I didn’t have a thorough answer at the time, but I said I would think about it. I have a tendency to take a long time to think something through, but when I’m done I usually feel like I have a crystal-clear answer. And I think that is what has happened in this case: I feel like I have a crystal-clear answer on how to think about hiring.
Continue reading “Some thinking I’ve done on how to do hiring”
A few months ago an acquaintance of mine (Cornell / Harvard Law School, so a smart guy) emailed me and asked if I had any advice for how to explore mathematics further:
Wanted to see if you’d recommend any online math courses (available free) lots of MIT stuff available and the like but wasn’t sure which one was good.
My response (edited for clarity):
Continue reading “Advice for those interested in learning more about mathematics”
Recently I had a serial-entrepreneur acquaintance send me a form email for a new company he’d started with six others that aims to automate all routine tasks that white-collar workers have:
I have a quick question: When you hear the phrase: “Annoying business processes”, what comes to mind for you?
My company automates these processes. We can handle anything (anything!) that can be turned into a set of instructions. Even if the instructions contain complex logic — we’re totally custom. Even if the labor required would normally take hundreds of hours — it’s the same price.
I responded:
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Here’s an email I recently sent to a Stanford/HLS-grad friend of mine who started a delivery company that sells to individuals and businesses. He’s currently trying to figure out a repeatable sales/growth process. Because his product involves physical delivery, he’s aiming to target groups of businesses that are within close proximity of each other (eg in a strip mall / office park). As with Box/Dropbox, he can sign up one person at a company and then try to get that person to sign up others. I’ve made some clarifying edits and removed some identifying information.
Update 2017.08.15: I’ve added an image of the webpage where I placed the bet, which obviously doesn’t perfectly reflect the way it looked when I wrote this post.
In 2012 I wrote a post in which I suggested betting against people who believed that the world was coming to an end. Unfortunately I didn’t know how to find such people.
I recently discovered that you can currently go onto betting sites and get ~3:1 odds on a bet that Trump will be the Republican nominee (so if he’s the nominee, you get $3; if he isn’t, you lose $1). I bet some money on PredictIt.org on December 16 (about a week ago) at 3:1 odds that he’d do it, not because I’m totally convinced that he will, but because: Continue reading “I have made a bet that Trump will win the Republican nomination for President”
On Sunday I had my first-ever alcoholic drink on my own initiative, without being prompted by someone to drink (it was a Stella Artois in the fridge at work).
I decided to try it as an experiment to see if it would take away this anxious feeling I’ve been getting for years when I’m trying to program and I’m running into one error after another; the feeling ends up making me procrastinate really heavily, to the point where I’ll go an entire day without getting anything done.
I got the idea from reading Mark Zuckerberg’s blog posts from when he was creating Face Mash, in which he seems to describe drinking to take away the anxiety of not having your code working: “It’s taking a few tries to compile the script…another Beck’s is in order.“.
Well, it seemed to work. I’m not sure if it was just the placebo effect or not. I didn’t finish the beer. I’ll probably keep experimenting with it. Obviously it’s something to be careful with.
Update 2023: I’ve discovered that stimulants in general seem capable of dulling that feeling of anxiety that comes from having things not working. I’ve recently been experimenting with caffeine (tea, coffee) and found it to have a similar effect. It’s not clear to me yet if it’s something that subsides as you develop a tolerance for the stimulant. Based on the number of successful indie hackers I see drinking coffee every day, my guess is that the effect stays strong enough to make it worth continuing to consume caffeine for that benefit, even after developing a tolerance for it.
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