The Coming Chip Wars
Go read Steve Blank’s write-up on the chip wars — these wars are 100% political, not competition between companies — but US/China for domination of the critical asset of the 21st century.
Notes:
Steve does a great job outlining the current state & the “problem” facing the US
The remaining chance for the US to maintain an edge is the design groups at Google, Amazon and Apple developing highly specialized and performant chips. Be it for devices (Apple - think on-device image processing, NLU etc), for Data Centers / energy efficiency (Amazon with their Graviton2) or for Machine Learning (Google with their TPUs).
Design alone isn’t the answer — it is about building fabs and having the full infrastructure (machines and people) that know how to produce incredibly small chips, at great volumes, with very small levels of breakage and of course due to volume insanely low cost. TMSC is the only company meeting all these requirements. Samsung and Intel are a distant 2nd & 3rd.
What are the ways out? The US cannot simply just spend $$ to increase local capabilities and capacity — time is the critical ingredient.
Bounties - New trend in funding open source software?
Over the past few months, I’ve seen two individuals offer sizable bounties for the development or improvement of open source software.
First it was Tobi, CEO of Shopify:
I love it. In the following thread and discussion, Tobi details what is needed, why and gives criteria for success and sets the impartial judge (the maintainer(s) of OBS). This stirred significant excitement, discussion and I’m hoping positive development as well (last I checked real progress was being made!).
Then 2 weeks ago:
A set of Twitter users saw this and agreed with the need (I presume for themselves) and increased the bounty — so here again it is at or above $10K.
And you can see the submissions here: https://github.com/balajis/twitter-export/issues/1
There are a bunch of promising results. Furthermore, I won’t be surprised to see a company, like Substack, that stands to seriously benefit from a tool like this — either take the best submission and hire the developer to improve it further, or git clone the repo and improve it themselves internally AND then promote it — so as to drive their business.
I fully expect to see more of this approach to kickstarting solutions via a $10k bounty around a real problem that many agree needs a solution.
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
Notes:
Do the simple thing first - This is my main takeaway from the entire Instagram approach — as publicized in their blog posts, talks and to some degree this book. Instagram really seems to have thrived at building the simple thing first — then making it fancy and complex when needed. I’m impressed with their repeated ability to not over complicate the product!
Kris Jenner is a powerhouse. She identified the influencer movement before it was a movement, and developed a playbook for her kids to exploit the opportunity to build a massive audience and take being famous for being famous to the extreme. I love that she and her kids every night get a spreadsheet of who needs to post what on what platform and at what time the next day. Kris deserves a serious business book to be written about her as while she is known as the “Momager” the success of her family must make her one of the best talent managers out there. I would love to read the book about her and or her team — they seem to have had their finger on the pulse of the intersection of social media + business from the start. Remember when Kim K. had a subscription shoe start-up? Of course it makes sense that the Kardashian/Jenner clan would eventually discover the killer product + distribution -> Kylie Jenner’s lip kits on Instagram.
As for the book — not that good. It is a story of their success, growth and struggles inside FaceBook — more drama than real insight into the creation process. I’m looking for/forward to a book that highlights the creation process used inside Instagram.
I’m in awe of the power of building a near perfect product. Well done Instagram.
“On any given day in America, about one-third of adults will eat fast food, according to the C.D.C.” - NYTimes
I’d love to understand more about why — what is the job to be done that fast food is solving.
Is it convenience?
Low cost?
???
I’m reminded of the original Clayton Christensen study of why people were buying milkshakes on the way to work — I think we might be surprised by the root cause.
Watching the movie Inception with your friends in Fortnite…
Looks like an odd experience (2hrs+ watching and audio chatting with friends — why not full screen)?
Still love the experiment!
Two types of fireworks: Consumer and Commercial (which requires a special license)
In San Francisco, we’ve been hearing a lot of fireworks — they seem like they are consumer fireworks. This is what a Commercial firework looks like /sounds like when set off in a neighborhood: