Thanks to DALLE-3. One thing I notice in people who haven’t accepted who they really are is a desire to skip steps. I know several tech workers a few years out of uni who dream of being a General Partner at a VC firm. A friend’s flatmate had a poster on his wall that said“Wake me up when I’m CEO”. There’s a certain type of guy who wants to be“a founder”. I think I went through the ultimate version of this in my final year of uni: I wanted to work in private equity. Imagine par...| xsrus.com
You don’t live life in your books. You live it out there! You’ve mastered survival mode, now its time to live. Have main character energy. “The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.” “People, ideas, machines, in that order.” “You can either be Somebody, or do Something.” “What you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.” Do what makes you feel powerful. “Where a man’s wound is, that’s where his genius shall be.” ~Rober...| xsrus.com
Ongoing list of live players. How do you spot a live player? They’re probably high agency, independently minded, and surprisingly capable. Individuals Ray Dalio Jeff Bezos Elon Musk Zuck Venkatesh Rao Visakan Veerasamy Alexey Guzey Sam Altman Paul Graham (at least up until he stopped running YC) Ben Thompson Peter Thiel Mark Lutter The Collisons Brian Chesky and co Samo Burja Institutions Apple Institutions that were dead but were revived Jack Welch at GE Archetypal Live Players who are now...| xsrus.com
The basic ingredients How do you know if you’ve made something people actually use? The short answer is: check your retention. Different products measure retention using different metrics– if you can, it’s best to use a metric that implies regular use of your core product. For Facebook this is Weekly Active Use, or Daily Active Use. If some proportion of your users keep coming back to use your product every day/week/month, then you have created something they actually use! Congrats. For...| xsrus.com
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of education over the past couple of years, and here are my favourite resources on it. Books How to Solve It, by Polya. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. Online things Quantum computing by Michael Nielsen and friends. Constructionism Mastery Learning Nintil blog on Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem Very cool companies Primer Synthesis| xsrus.com
I will add more to this as I come up with more What companies will be applying to YC in 3, 5, 10 years time? What are the fastest growing industries today? What will be the fastest growing industries in N years time? What are ten things you want to have done in the next 5 years? Where in life might you be intending too hard?| xsrus.com
Some notes from The Uncertainty Mindset, by Vaughn Tan. All errors and omissions mine. Anything interesting is Vaughn’s. The Uncertainty Mindset, by Vaughn Tan. ‘The unknown is existentially threatening, which is why people and organisations act both instinctively and rationally to reduce or avoid it.’ ‘Where the future is uncertain, people and organisations have the freedom to influence what it becomes.’ — The Uncertainty Mindset, Vaughn Tan. What do startups, test-kitchens, and ...| xsrus.com
How a question from Game of Thrones helped me work out what I want to be when I grow up. It took a year after graduating from UCL for me to truly realise why I attended in the first place. As an aspiring scientist in school, I thought I chose my alma mater for its rigorous academics. But why then did I reject offers from much tougher physics programs? The true deciding factor dawned on me after rereading the congratulatory Facebook comments under my graduation photos. I chose UCL for its pres...| xsrus.com
An introduction to the best distribution channel you’ve never heard of. In this time of Tiktok, OnlyFans, and the end of the world, more things are competing for people’s attention than ever before. For marketers, the biggest problem is convincing a would-be buyer why they should spend more than an instant considering your product. There are millions of different consumers out there online. Before you even think about holding their attention, you need to work out where they spend their ti...| xsrus.com
It’s been a smidge over a year since I started this blog. And 24 posts and over 30,000 words later, it’s been quite a good year. I started this blog to de-clutter my mind and improve my thinking. On both counts I think I have succeeded. Below are some highlights and learnings from one year of being a partially-online-person. --- Share to forget Publishing ideas lets one forget about them. Everything you wanted to say is already written down, the intellectual paths, if not fully mapped out...| xsrus.com
Pharmaceutical Contract Manufacturing and Development Organisations are the billion dollar companies you’ve never heard of. Sell a man a drug and you’ll be rich for a day. But contract manufacture drugs for pharmaceutical companies and you’ll be rich for eternity. The pharmaceutical contract development and manufacturing industry is an important vehicle in public health - It reduces the time-to-market for new drugs, getting life-saving treatment to patients sooner. I couldn’t find a p...| xsrus.com
Coronavirus upended my life. I was bed-ridden, locked-down, and furloughed from a job I had just started. Feverish, confined within four thin walls, and missing the sense of purpose I had outsourced to my career, I had nothing to do. I spent days waiting for 4pm, the earliest acceptable time to creak open the fridge and crack open a beer. Weeks wasted away. Eventually routine returned. Previously, my day was dictated by external demands. Get to the office before 9am. Go to the gym after work....| xsrus.com
Why do some easy things take groups of people so long to do? This question has perplexed me for years. While I wait for friends deciding where they’d like to eat, I often wish we could pick a restaurant at random. Toss a coin, cut through the committee, and put us out of our misery. But I am not talking about complicated decisions, like “where should we go for dinner?”. I am talking about things like marshalling a group after a decision has already been made. Simple things. Things like ...| xsrus.com
I admire Josh Wolfe and have learned a lot from him over the past year. I couldn’t find a good collection of Josh’s ideas online so I had a stab at summarising them myself. Everything great is down to Josh. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. Randomness and Optionality Everyone can explain their life decisions perfectly ex-post facto. We see a consistent linear chain. Success feels like destiny — we earned it. But this is far from the truth. In reality, success and failure h...| xsrus.com
In the film Monster’s University, Sully and Mike Wazowski learn how to scare humans. They have two different styles: Mike reads everything there is to know about scaring, while Sully simply practices being scary. Alone, they struggle. Sully is terrifying but ignorant, and Mike has encyclopaedic knowledge, but can’t frighten anyone. They both end up having to leave scaring-school. Together, though, they make an awesome team. With Mike as the mastermind and Sully as the executor, they work ...| xsrus.com
Hurtling at full speed across the savannah, a man flees a charging lion. After a prolonged chase, he evades it by scrambling up a tree. To an onlooker, whether it’s the first or hundredth time the man escapes, the scene looks the same. But to the fleeing man, those experiences feel worlds apart. The first time he escapes he is terrified beyond belief. The hundredth time, he is excited, but calm. The situation doesn’t change, but his emotional response to it does. This post is going to dis...| xsrus.com
After two weeks of struggle, it seems I have overcome COVID-19. The virus infected my mind long before it penetrated my body, and I am still struggling with it mentally today. With the news media spouting real-time-all-the-time-coronavirus-right-now updates, it is hard to think of anything else. At the risk of adding another voice to the infernal choir, I’m sharing a couple of perspectives on the virus, in an attempt to free my mind to think about something else. In this essay I’ll descri...| xsrus.com
Despite studying physics for four years, I never did a single experiment. It’s not that I didn’t like experiments; I loved them. It’s not that they weren’t required on my degree either; A year of labs was mandatory. I managed to weasel my way out of labs, even though I liked them. Why would I do such a thing? To maximise my Grade Point Average. --- Like the real world, labs are messy. Messiness is fun, but to a GPA hunter like I was, messiness is danger. It’s hard to do an experimen...| xsrus.com
This is a short essay based on the readings and discussions from week 1 of Organising Genius. All errors and omissions are my own. All the good stuff is due to the authors, and my discussion partners at Entrepreneur First. What did Richard Feynman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Claude Monet have in common? They were all members of Great Groups. Renoir and the impressionist painters nourished Monet’s ideas, emboldening him to paint an entirely different canvas. CS Lewis and the Inklings critiqued and ...| xsrus.com
What Blue Ocean Strategy and Carlotta Perez’ theory of techonological revolutions have in common. Writing has been tiring lately. Too often recent readings just fill up my head, leaving no space for thoughts of my own. This can make the writing experience overwhelming. It is easy to jot things down, but hard to weave the disparate threads together. But sometimes, you get lucky. And several ideas bubbling inside your head crystallise all at once. --- Today I read the original “Blue Ocean S...| xsrus.com
A summary of Richard Hamming’s talk “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”. All errors and omissions are entirely my own. All good stuff is down to Richard Hamming. Cristiano Ronaldo is about to kick a football. He takes a step, places his supporting leg next to the ball, and strikes it sweetly with his laces. It curls wickedly into the bottom corner of the goal. He has just performed a difficult feat, a remarkable piece of biomechanical coordination. And he made it look easy. ...| xsrus.com
A summary of “Destruction and Creation” by John Boyd. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. Everything good is down to “The Mad Major”. Introduction The goal of most humans is simple: To survive on their own terms. Making decisions and taking action are critical to survival. In different environments, humans have to carry out different, repeated actions over and over again. Before humans take actions, we have to decide to do so. Decisions are needed to determine the precise natu...| xsrus.com
A summary of More is Different by the great P. W. Anderson. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. All good stuff is down to Mr. Anderson. One of the breakthroughs that kickstarted modern science wasn’t a scientific discovery, but a philosophical one. Reductionism, the idea that you can learn about higher-level systems by breaking them down into their atomic constituents and studying those instead, fuelled the accelerating engine of science in the 19th and 20th centuries. But reductio...| xsrus.com
An adequate summary of Michael Porter’s‘What is Strategy?’ so you don’t have to pay $8.95. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. All good stuff is down to Michael Porter. Michael Porter’s idea of strategy is summed up by the legendary Apple ad: Think Different. Strategic Positioning All differences in competitive advantage between companies stem from differences in the activities each company prioritises. Operational effectiveness is providing the same activities as your compe...| xsrus.com
A summary of this paper which provides a coherent framework for analysing hysteresis and phase coexistence in bistable systems. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. All good stuff is down to the authors. Sometimes, it is remarkable how simple the world really is. In my small room there are trillions upon trillions of particles, billions of which are jiggling and flying across the room randomly. Despite this frenetic atomic bombardment, objects are distinct. Even though each molecule mo...| xsrus.com
A summary of this great game theory paper which provides a continuous framework for analysing all classes of games. All errors and omissions are mine entirely. All good stuff is down to the authors. Imagine you and a stranger are tasked with lifting a heavy weight. Neither of you know exactly how heavy it is, and whether it will be possible for you to lift it. If the weight is lifted successfully, you each get a reward. If you helped lift it, you pay a cost, depending on your exertion. If the...| xsrus.com
This is a transcript of a 3-minute thesis I gave on this paper about Big Data in biology in 2018. Modern Science is moving faster than ever. We are now in an information age, and the sheer quantity of measurements is making Big Data bigger all the time. This explosion in data offers a tantalising new way to conduct science; away from a hypothesis driven, to a data driven approach. A famous historian once declared the fall of the Berlin Wall to be the end of history. Similarly, scientists in s...| xsrus.com
It’s one of the more surprising laws of nature: More numbers start with 1 than any other digit. I’ve come across Benford’s Law a few times before, but today was the first time I fully understood it. It’s amazingly unintuitive. Benford’s Law states that in large enough, naturally occurring sets of numbers, more numbers will start with smaller digits than higher ones. So in any dataset that is pretty big, there will be more numbers beginning with 1 than 2, more beginning with 2 than 3...| xsrus.com
How much is a great friend worth? I struck on this question while procrastinating acquiring leads for my tutoring business. We use a simple model to| xsrus.com
These are my notes from Jim Rutt’s excellent podcast with David Krakauer. Errors and omissions are my own. All credit goes entirely to David and| xsrus.com
OnlyFans has become part of the zeitgeist recently. The rise of e-girls and the prospects of making millions make it a fun thing to gawk at in a| xsrus.com