Nassim Taleb uses the Florence example to make the argument that Europe has more economic inequality compared to the US. He makes an interesting point that static measures of inequality like 'top 1% of population have xx% of the wealth' aren't that useful, a better indicator would be a dynamic measure that shows economic mobility, people going both up (new money) and down the ladder (bankruptcy). It looks like in Florence, families that climbed the ladder centuries ago never came down.
Macro stats about install/uninstall rates of mobile apps are meaningless distractions when you're building a startup. Focus on what your audience needs and build that, whether it's a mobile app or a website.
I built a funny videos android app and website, android users discovered the app more easily and were more engaged with the app because they wanted to share videos from my app to whatsapp.
My more recent app is a web app because my audience are people doing work on their computer.
The best way to make your talk memorable is to focus on substance over style. Work hard on giving something new for the audience to chew on. Without interesting content the audience will tune out no matter how well you structure the talk.
Managers have to communicate both up and down while developers only need to communicate up. When I made the jump from a developer to a manager I had to learn how to properly communicate issues and risks to upper management. If there's an issue related to your team, you should be the first to escalate it. If management hears about your team's issues from a different source, you'll look bad. As manager, my number one job was staying on top of risks and issues, which meant getting up to date information from my reports and communicating the exact magnitude and priority of the risk/issue. If you develop a reputation as someone who can communicate and handle risks and issues well, that'll set you on good footing.
- Right before the talk: get to the room well ahead of time and make sure there are no setup issues with the laptop, audio, projector, etc. I've seen a number of speakers fail to do this basic thing and it dampens their flow, confidence, etc. The audience might even get distracted and the whole show goes awry.
- Prepare and practice the intro speech, don't wing it: if you have a good opening, you'll feel confident and the momentum will carry you through the rest of the talk.
"Dr. Baumol’s insight in the 1960s was that costs inevitably rise fastest for things that are difficult to automate, including medical care, garbage collection and the live performance of a Mozart string quartet.
It came to him in the middle of the night.
“It was 4 in the morning,” he recalled in an oral history. “I suddenly woke up and said I know why those costs are going up! I got up, wrote down a few notes, and went to sleep again.” His theory became known as Baumol’s Cost Disease."
My cofounder and I took this course last year. About the format of the course and efficacy:
- assigned mentor: we were assigned a former yc startup founder as mentor. the mentor had 30 minute 1-1s with us once a month and gave us useful advice on a wide range of matters.
- weekly homework: choose a single metric you'll measure through the duration of the course and report the metric and growth weekly. The metric could be DAUs, number of customers you've talked to, whatever. It's for you to figure the most important thing to focus on. We were running the startup in a bit of an ad hoc manner until startup school; weekly metric reporting helped focus our efforts in service of a single meaningful metric.
- group calls: we were lucky to be in a good peer group comprising about 30 startups of all kinds -- medical device to SaaS to consumer apps. There were weekly 1-2 hr calls chaired by the mentor. Before the meeting, the mentor sent out a questionnaire to fill out -- what's your product's value prop, what setbacks have you faced, etc. -- and startups would be randomly chosen to talk about their response to the questionnaire. Lot of time for Q&A. Our peer group is still in touch through a facebook group, where we occasionally share progress.
- Demo day: record a 2 minute video talking about our startup. This forced us come up with a concise statement to describe our startup and gave us a platform to showcase it.
If I had to summarize the benefit of startup school, it would be three things:
- quality mentorship
- diverse peer group
- forcing function for startup to hit goals
I'll venture to say it's probably one of the most valuable things an early stage startup could invest time on.
We had mandatory N to 1 meetings. Those weren't that useful for us (it felt like we were a bit further ahead than other companies) but a few companies got a lot of value out of it.
Our optional 1-1 were insanely useful. Our mentor was a yc alum saas cofounder. He was took notes and saw our homework every week. His perspective was priceless and there weren't many problems we were facing that he hadn't already seen. Like other people mentioned, you come with a problem and they help you understand how to tackle it.
Create systems by which people come to know about your site and want to visit it to solve a problem they have.
For example, SEO content marketing targets problems people search Google for and create content that helps solve that problem while advertising the product/service in some way. A good example of this is Digital Ocean's "how to set up software X on operating system Y" articles - good SEO, solves people's problems, and advertises directly to their customers/users.
There are other implementations, like more traditional display advertising and product reviews, but they all follow the same formula: create awareness and gives people solid reasons to come to your product/site/app.
It was useful for us. What we got out of the 1-1s depended on our effort preparing for it -- how we communicated our value prop, how succinctly we described the problems we're having, etc.
We've built a tool for this use case. It's called Outclip -- https://checkoutclip.com. You'll need to install the Outclip chrome extension (click on 'get chrome extension' on the above webpage) and after that it's a couple of clicks to start a screen recording. After you stop recording, within a few moments you'll have a link (e.g. https://video.checkoutclip.com/-LDQ5TtL_yywYCgUNb6K) you can share with others or use in a bug report. People can click the link to view the video.
We don't support gif creation, to do that you can download the video file (.mp4) from Outclip and use a service like
https:///cloudconvert.com to convert to gif.
I'm really into taking notes -- both written and typed. The tactile part of taking notes helps me register things better and the notes themselves greatly help with recall. For written notes, I use Peter Pauper notebooks (https://www.peterpauper.com/) and Staedtler pens (https://www.staedtler.com/intl/en/products/products-for-colo...). I'm a sucker for good stationery. For typed notes, I use Google Keep on my phone and the Notes app on my Mac.
Lately I've been using screen recording to create video notes. I developed an app called Outclip (https://checkoutclip.com) with my buddy. Although the app is meant for a different purpose (bug reporting) I use it to screen record as I'm doing things (like configuring an AWS service for instance) in case I have to repeat the steps later.
Taleb's essay on inequality: https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...