Goals are binary. They create an expectation, not just of completion, but of reward. Rarely do these align with anticipation.
Instead, goals are for focusing your now. This moment.
If you can learn from this moment and realign to fit your learnings, you’ll end up somewhere unexpected, but usually far better than where you were trying to go.
From Fast Company:
I didn’t see this when it was announced last year, but the logo and typeface for an environmental project “spearheaded by Prince Charles” is absolutely lovely in every way and miles apart from the sleek industrial look that Ive is famous for.
To design LoveFrom Serif, Ive’s team studied original Baskerville punches and matrices. They analyzed the shapes and cleaned them up into digital characters. From there, the team began making Baskerville their own, adding details inspired by other lettering work of the era.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90693444/jony-ives-first-major-design-since-leaving-apple-isnt-what-youd-expect
I’m excited to see what Ive and his new company do next!
Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, confirmed that Ukraine was using facial recognition software to find the social media accounts of deceased Russian soldiers, allowing authorities to contact their friends and families. The aim is to dispel misinformation surrounding the war in the country, and specifically Russian claims that it is just a special operation with few losses, he wrote on his Telegram channel.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/24/1048268/the-download-ukraine-claims-its-using-facial-recognition-to-identify-dead-russian-soldiers/
Yeesh. A new tool in psychological warfare: snuff shots sent to family members. Russian media may not produce real coverage of their unjust war (and is only reporting 498 deaths so far) but you can bet that Ukraine informing families via social media of their missing lived ones will not be easily swept under the rug. NATO estimates “40,000 Russian troops killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or gone missing.”
I loved this Nilay Patel interview of Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (and thereby WordPress, Tumblr, and WooCommerce; as well as the maker of high quality apps like Simplenote, Pocket Casts, and Day One).
I had no idea how prevalent WordPress has become.
WordPress in the CMS space now has 43% of all websites. It’s growing faster than all the others combined. That will reach probably 80–85% in the next decade.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
43%! In the interview, Matt talks about a potential market share of 85% within the next decade. He could be wrong, but his directional velocity is probably right. That’s incredible. What’s even greater than that, in my opinion, is how he’s scaling the company ethically. You can see the responsibility he feels for monetizing the right way and empowering distributed decision-making across the entire organization.
Most of our business models are through people paying us, as opposed to advertising or other models. We provide upgrades and that recurring revenue is what allows us to come to work the next day. We’re about to come up on 2,000 people working full time with Automattic. It’s really grown a lot, even since the last time we talked. I think we hired over 700 last year.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
The other fun thing I like to say about Automattic is that it’s fractal. When you zoom in or out, it’s self-similar. When the entire company was 20 people, it looked a lot like what a team of 20 people looks like now. We try to make it so there’s a natural growth and division of teams.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
The final bit I wanted to call out and record for posterity, because it’s novel and aligns with how I think distributed companies should be run, is this bit:
I ask for transparency, so that things are written down, shared, communicated. I love the idea of decision journals. We use this internal blogging system built on WordPress called P2. […] What’s interesting at Automattic is there’s no internal email. I get a handful of emails a year from my colleagues. Everything happens on these internal blogs. What that means is we have essentially an organizational blockchain where every single decision going back to 2007 is on one of these internal blogs. You can find how every piece of code works, or every business decision, or every logo. Everything is in there somewhere.“WE HAVE ESSENTIALLY AN ORGANIZATIONAL BLOCKCHAIN WHERE EVERY SINGLE DECISION GOING BACK TO 2007 IS ON ONE OF THESE INTERNAL BLOGS.“
Even if you and I decided something in a meeting, we need to write it up afterwards. It’s on this P2, so people can participate in it asynchronously. Future generations or future versions of ourselves who’ve forgotten why we made a decision can tell why we did that.
Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr Are Keeping the Internet Weird
Nothing is done until it is written up and recorded. This has always been an aspirational goal of mine, even when it is out of alignment with how my employers worked. Now that I run my own company, though, I get to do it how I want.
Isakov’s music turned up big at my wedding. This is why.
I love the relaxed execution by a bunch of dudes who know their craft. While I wish I could have been in the room with a whiskey and rocks, I’ll settle for the repeatable “comfort of my own home” version here on YouTube.
“The Godfather” (movie) stands the test of time as a work of art because of the hard work that Coppola put into the details of translating the literary work into cinema. When you think about the director lugging this notebook with him everywhere on set and using it as the singular resource for coordinating actors, production crew, etc. you get a sense of how he was able to maintain an understanding of where “true north” was at all times.
Key takeaways:
Followup: Found another, even more detailed look at this notebook.
Hailing from Redding, CA, I’ve seen my fair share of wildfires. Once, in high school, while late night swimming at Whiskeytown Lake, some friends and I beat out a fire with our towels alongside highway 299. A car speeding by saw us on the roadside, hit the brakes, and sparks flew everywhere, lighting the roadside scrub in an instant and immediately beginning to spread. Scary stuff.
As bad as the last few years have been for wildfires, it looks like this year is shaping up to be apocalyptic. Wired has an article talking about chamise and how the chaparral scrub is being used to measure the ambient water retention in these dry areas. TL;DR, it’s not looking so great:
And nothing scares a fire weather scientist quite like a year with dehydrated chamise. If it’s dry, then that’s a good indicator that everything is dry. “Right now, these are the lowest April 1 fuel moistures we’ve ever had,” Clements says. This is supposed to be the time of year when moisture levels are at their highest, thanks to recent autumn and winter rains. But California is withering in a drought. […] The California landscape appears ready to burn epically this year.
The Humble Shrub That’s Predicting a Terrible Fire Season, Matt Simon, Wired
So let’s check back on this one. I’ve put a reminder to check-in in the CA situation in November 2021 (hopefully post fire season) this year to see how accurate this forecast is.
I started learning about investing when I joined Amazon in the late 90’s and couldn’t stop staring at each day’s ticker. What did all that movement mean? Why was the stock splitting all the time: How were investors evaluating the company? Was I going to be a fabulously wealthy customer service rep (spoiler alert: only those who joined literally several months prior to me and before got that privilege thanks to the timing of the e-commerce bubble pop). Fast forward 22 years and I now run an investment advisory and have created valuable frameworks that I use to invest on behalf of myself and others.
And now, Bitcoin. A few years back when I took a small position, I spent time reading about it (and all blockchain technology), listening to podcasts, and just generally attempting to educate myself. There’s nothing like skin in the game to keep your interest high, so I took a very small position in 2017 and just watched it.
And then this year in May, even though I can’t say I full understand Bitcoin and the other various major cryptos, I decided to purchase an “option call on the future” by purchasing shares of the private Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, using some money from my self-directed IRA. As of tonight, that stake is up 175%. While it would be nice to claim brilliance and keen insight, I clearly do not have a handle on the space yet.
Even though I’m a long way from being a Bitcoin bull, and I have yet to recommend it to any of my advising clients, I do find most of the arguments against Bitcoin to be moronic and largely addressed answered by reading the first few paragraphs of the original Bitcoin White Paper.
Based on what I see, my hope for Bitcoin is that it starts to roll up more and more transactional value, working up from the least credible and highly volatile fiat currencies to the most trusted and most stable over time. You might have trust in the full faith and credit of the US government, but that doesn’t mean your home bias should apply to the rest of the world’s population. Citizens of Venezuela and Greece, for example, may have a very different tolerance for their currencies than you do. Trust in the USD is not universal and probably not deserved.
My guess is that we’ll see Bitcoin transfers happening across borders at a much larger scale ahead of it being used to purchase daily groceries. The price of Bitcoin is stable enough to transfer funds and convert it into a local currency that can be spent. I would take the uncertainty of that principal changing between point a and point b, over the certainty of feeding financial intermediaries like Western Union or banks.
My strategy, until I learn more, is this. Take a percentage of my assets I am comfortable learning with, find a way of covering as many of my blind spots as possible (hence the cap-weighted index from Bitwise), and let it go. I don’t have to understand everything to understand the asymmetry present if any of these large crypto projects get real traction and adoption globally.
This little app looks to be a godsend. The first couple of videos I used it on—for an authenticated site that will remain unnamed—it worked like a champ.
I am an archivist, especially when it comes to video research on companies where I invest. This looks to be a fantastic way to pull it all down locally so I can maintain my own dated copies.
Hellz yeah.
Eric Frankl.in 