The Internet has removed scarcity, meaning business models based on controlling distribution are no longer viable. Instead, the key to success is controlling access to the best customers — and that means being the best.
Read all of Ben Thompson’s Funnel Framework.
From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet — and in real-life American communities.
This story of Adrian Chen in Russian definitely turns weird at the end.
Someone asked me the other day who my favorite rappers were, here they are in no particular order:
Pre-2000: Big Pun, Jay Z, Nas, Ludacris, Method Man.
Post-2000: Kendrick Lamar, Kanye, Childish Gambino, J Cole, Drake.
Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.
― Douglas Adams
In the great balancing act of our social lives, between the gratification of self-interest and a concern for others, fleeting experiences of awe redefine the self in terms of the collective, and orient our actions toward the needs of those around us.
The New York Times answers Why Do We Experience Awe?
Andrew Bosworth, one of the early engineers and leaders at Facebook tells the story about how he almost got fired in the early days despite being a top engineer. “If I was a good engineer, why would it be hard to work with me? Of course that question was the very foundation of my problem.”
Talent is leaving Silicon Valley because of high real estate costs. Today, the median price for a home just exceeded $1 million.
Why one in four Silicon Valley homebuyers wants to leave. Yep.
The John Biggs article on Why I’m Still Wearing My Apple Watch almost perfectly describes how I’m feeling about the watch right now. It is a very personal device, I’ve gotten attached to the little fellow, and I should probably start selling all my mechanical watches.
Emily Guendelsberger went undercover as an UberX driver in Philadelphia and wrote about the experience, particularly the economics of it. It’s a pretty fascinating and gripping longread, both in its content and it’s just well-written.
Mr. Zinsser was a prolific author, editor and teacher, but it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply.
The New York Times obituary of William Zinsser is touching and fascinating. Clear writing and clear thinking go hand in hand, and Zinnsser’s work On Writing Well did more than any other to help me hone my mind.
Sometimes, you just want 2 chocolate chip cookies. This happens to me all of the time. I want a super indulgent, rich and buttery chocolate chip cookie, but don’t want to make the whole 36 of them which I’d inevitably inhale over about the same amount of hours.
Ever wondered a good recipe to make just 2 chocolate chip cookies? Now you know.
As promised a few weeks ago, a new installment of the Wired Silk Road story is out and I wanted to share it, The Untold Story of Silk Road, Part 2: The Fall. This one is actually a lot more normal, with some surprisingly simple breaks leading to the downfall of Ross, but there’s an interesting twist at the end.
Wearable gadgets portend vast health, research and privacy consequences, the Washington Post takes on the quantified self. I’m in the medium end of this, I track pretty much everything that’s easy, but no blood / hormone tests yet.
Tad Friend has a great New Yorker profile of Marc Andreessen, one of my favorite people to debate and talk to (though it happens all too rarely). Check out Pmarca Says if you want to catch up on some of his recent thinking from tweetstorms.
The Verge: Slot machines perfected addictive gaming. Now, tech wants their tricks. Includes information from one of my favorite authors Nir Eyal, who also spoke at WordCamp San Francisco a few years ago.
Sam Altman of YCombinator wrote a great post on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, The days are long but the decades are short. There’s a lot of subtlety and nuance in each point, so even if you’ve read it already it’s worth another pass.
This Untold Story of Silk Road is pretty amazing writing, a gripping story regardless of the genre (non-fiction, in this case). I can’t wait for the next chapter to come out on May 14. Also when reading about Ross, it’s interesting to keep in mind Vanity Jones who was in many ways the brains behind the operation, and also undiscovered.
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
Mark Lynas writes How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food, particularly how GMOs impact the places where crops are needed the most. If you’re looking for a catch-up check out this link collection on ma.tt last year.
I checked out the new book Becoming Steve Jobs by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli because there had been some interesting excerpts published to the web, and apparently those closest to Steve didn’t like the Walter Isaacson book, with Jony Ive saying “My regard [for Isaacson’s book] couldn’t be any lower.”
Along with about a million other people I bought and read the authorized biography, and didn’t think it portrayed Jobs in a way that made me think any less of him, but there must have been some things in there that someone who knew him closely felt were so off that as a group they decided to coordinate and speak with a new author to set the record straight, as Eddy Cue said of the new Becoming book, “Well done and first to get it right.” I will never know who Steve Jobs really was, but it is interesting to triangulate and learn from different takes, especially Isaacson’s biography that Jobs himself endorsed but might not have read and this new one promoted by his closest friends, colleagues, and family.
As an independent third party who doesn’t know any of the characters involved personally, I must say that I felt like I got a much worse impression of Steve Jobs from Becoming than from the authorized biography. It was great to hear the direct voices and anecdotes of so many people close to him that haven’t spoken much publicly like his wife Laurene — he was a very private man and his friends respect that. But the parts where Schlender/Tetzeli try to balance things out by acknowledging some of the rougher parts of Steve’s public life, especially the recent ones around options backdating, anti-poaching agreements, book pricing, (all overblown in my opinion) or even when trying to show his negotiating acumen with suppliers, Disney, or music labels, they make Jobs look like an insensitive jerk, which seems to be the opposite of what everyone involved was intending.
The direct quotes in the book could not be kinder, and it’s clear from both books that Jobs was incredibly warm, caring, and thoughtful to those closest to him, but Becoming tries so hard to emphasize that it makes the contrast of some of his public and private actions seem especially callous. The personal anecdotes from the author are the best part: one of the most interesting parts of the book is actually when Jobs calls Schlender to invite him for a walk, as one of the people he reached out to and wanted to speak to before he passed, and Schlender — not knowing the context — actually chastises him for cutting off his journalistic access and other trivia, and then blows off the meeting, to his lifelong regret.
It’s tragic, and it’s very human, and that’s what makes for great stories. No one suggests that Steve Jobs was a saint, nor did he need to be. His legacy is already well-protected both in the incredible results while he was alive, and even more so in what the team he built has accomplished since his passing, both periods which actually amaze and inspire me. Becoming Steve Jobs tries harder and accomplishes less to honor the man. It is worth reading if, like me, you gobble up every book around the technology leaders of the past 40 years and want a different take on a familiar tune, but if you were only to read one book about Jobs, and get the most positive impression of the man and his genius, I’d recommend Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.
You can’t go wrong with Amazon’s 100 Books To Read In A Lifetime. I’ve only read a bit over a dozen of them, and some of those in school when I probably didn’t appreciate them. I’ve never had a time in my life when I thought, “You know, I’m reading too much.” It’s a weekend — read!