No, no, it’s not schizophrenia. It’s just a voice inside my head.
We accepted the idea that what was good for financial markets was good for everyone and structured our economy to drive stock prices ever higher, convincing ourselves that "the market" of stocks, bonds, and derivatives was the same as Adam Smith’s market of real goods and services exchanged by ordinary people.
How many tech startups in 2019 could be built with Airtable and Zapier alone? Spoiler: a lot.
Sure, you may need one or two others. Or you may prefer any of the great alternatives. (Hi Quip, IFTTT, Transposit!) Regardless, these kinds of prosumer, automation-friendly tools are truly great now, especially for building service oriented products. You can ship MVPs on them that comfortably serve your first 10k+ users, and likely more, with little to no actual code. That’s stunning.
Early cloud computing was a big shift that dramatically reduced the cost of bootstrapping a tech application. App stores on phones were another. This may be the third. Add in the largest pool of available capital ever, and there’s never been a better time to start a tech company.
(Having said that, founding a startup is still brutal, unforgiving, and all-consuming. That way lie dragons, as always. Entrepreneur beware.)
Latency lags bandwidth. Not just by a constant factor, either. Over time, bandwidth increases with the square of latency.
Powerful computer engineering maxim. It’s held true for at least the last 35-40 years, across network, disk, memory, CPU. Patterson’s 2004 article is a classic. It’s had a deep impact on me; I still think about it regularly.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”
Credit card companies charge merchant fees of 1.5-3%. They transfer much of that directly to card holders as 1-4% cash back. Merchants generally charge the same prices for credit card vs cash. The result seems to be a small but universal penalty on people who pay with cash. 😢