“dragon green lion head Japanese style studio ghibli 4k”
Overheard : On vision
Patrick Collison (Co-Founder and CEO of Stripe) shared this snippet of an internal email that David Stearns (Staff Engineer at Stripe) wrote about Dee Hock. Dee Hock was the founder of Visa and this statement on Dee’s vision really connected with me
Today, I can hop on a plane to most anywhere in the world and use my Visa card to purchase goods and services regardless of the language spoken by the merchant, the currency of the merchant’s bank account, or the time zone difference between the merchant’s shop and my issuing bank. In the 1960’s this was unthinkable. Today’s magic was yesterday’s dream, and Hock was one of the biggest dreamers of all.
Full copy of the snippet below
Overhead : Tactic vs Strategy
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
Savielly Tartakower (French-Polish Chess Grandmaster)
Overheard : On cutting down “stuff”
We’re good as humans to committing to things that are positive. That’s very motivating for us. We’re bad at trying to avoid things that are negative
– Cal Newport in conversation with Tim Ferriss
Cal was speaking about how we are good at adding things that seem good to to us (facebook is good because we can communicate on the fly), but bad at avoiding negative things (being on facebook and doom scrolling is a bad thing). He instead suggests, just using technology for things you like (I will have facebook, but only follow and read messages from folks I want to).
Overheard : Watermelon Metrics
Watermelon Metric : Green (good) on the outside and red (bad) once you dig in.
– Daniel Shapero (LinkedIn COO) on a post on LinkedIn
Some examples
- If churn is down (looks green)… but when you look into why it’s down is because all of your customers left last year (very bad)
- A manager’s EVS scores are up because everyone who was unhappy left
- Brand awareness could be considered watermelon if it’s high but brand perception is poor.
- The click-through rate of an email campaign is high, but when you dig in you learn that it’s because so many users are clicking in the footer to change their email preferences or opt out.
- YOY Revenue is increasing (Green) – especially currently as businesses are raising prices to accommodate inflation – but when you dig in, you see profits are actually suffering (red)
Overheard : Tradeoffs
Everything that you take on is implicitly something that you’re not taking on
– Francis Davidson (CEO of Sonder) in conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
Speaking about tradeoffs that organizations and individuals make when prioritizing work.
Overheard : Empathy
LibertyRPF on Empathy during a conversation with Jim O’Shaughnessy on his Infinite Loops podcast
Don’t just treat others how you would like to be treated. Take the extra step and figure out how they would like to treated and treat them like that.
HOWTO : Flex your muscles
A tongue in cheek headline :-). The post is not about body muscle, but about how you can flex your market power (muscle).
Here is a screenshot comparison of default apps settings in Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11. Notice how instead of just giving one option to change the default browser, Microsoft has moved the option to change it by file extension? Does a layperson even know the difference between htm, html, http and https? A clever way for Microsoft to make it a bit more difficult to switch away from edge (Microsoft’s new Internet browser). Some might even call it sinister 🙂
Update Oct 11 : Looks like the main stream media is catching up on this. The Verge has a post on this topic https://www.theverge.com/22714629/windows-11-microsoft-browser-edge-chrome-firefox