management

Overheard : Attention span

Some interesting metrics on the attention span of consumers before they make a decision to spend more time on the content or not.

Shared by Lulu Cheng in a conversation with Shane Parrish

And then in terms of text, because one of the ways that people get to know you is through your writing, I don’t know about seconds, but it’s like the first paragraph. For an email, it’s the subject line. For a tweet, it’s the first line, first sentence, the hook. So the opportunity, the surface area of the opportunity we have to latch on, is getting more and more fine, which means that the hook that we need to use has to get more and more sharp.

  • Writing : First Paragraph
  • Email: Subject Line
  • Tweet : First Line
  • Video : First 30 seconds
September 26, 2025 by Management OverHeard 0

Overheard : mental model and curiosity

Mark Bertolini in a chat with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on “Invest Like the Best” podcast, speaking about the need to update your mental model about the world constantly. And the two things that differentiate good leaders from the rest.

I always say to people, the mental model that exists inside your head about how the world works is the most critical tool you have. And if you don’t constantly add new information to it and are not a continual learner, you can’t possibly know what you need to know to make good decisions.

And so I look for two things in executives, curiosity and courage. The curiosity to continue to ask questions and learn more every day, and the courage to act on it when you have a hypothesis that might be powerful. 

August 22, 2025 by Management OverHeard 0

Overheard : AI needs cloud

On The Verge‘s Decoder podcast, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, explained why AI’s potential is intrinsically tied to the cloud. The scale and complexity of modern AI models demand infrastructure that only major cloud providers can deliver

You’re not going to be able to get a lot of the value that’s promised from AI from a server running in your basement, it’s just not possible. The technology won’t be there, the hardware won’t be there, the models won’t live there, et cetera. And so, in many ways, I think it’s a tailwind to that cloud migration because we see with customers, forget proof of concepts … You can run a proof of concept anywhere. I think the world has proven over the last couple of years you can run lots and lots and lots of proof of concepts, but as soon as you start to think about production, and integrating into your production data, you need that data in the cloud so the models can interact with it and you can have it as part of your system.

January 13, 2025 by business Management OverHeard Technology 0

Overheard : Good business vs Bad Business

A simple visual of attributes of Good business vs Bad business based on a snippet Codie Sanchez shared in a podcast with Shane Parrish

✅ GOOD BUSINESS

  • 💰 Profitable + Cash flowing
  • 🤝 Get paid upfront
  • 📈 Long history of success
  • 👵 Easy to explain to grandma
  • ♻️ Sustainable model
  • 🎯 Predictable future

❌ BAD BUSINESS

  • 📉 Unprofitable
  • ⏳ Pay comes after service
  • 🌱 New/unproven model
  • 🤔 Complex to explain
  • 🎲 Uncertain future

Codie said

In my definition, good business equals profitable, cash flowing, what I call a cash-flow versus cash-suck business (so you get paid upfront for a service, not after you provide a service), sustainable (it can exist for a long time), historical (it has existed for a long time), understandable (you can explain it to grandma really easily), and you have what’s called the Lindy effect, the likelihood of the future continuing to cash-flow just as it did in the past. Those are my parameters for a good business. A bad business would be a business that is unprofitable, hard to understand, hasn’t been around for very long, and you have to provide the service before you get paid for the service. That is a business that is just much harder. That’s a harder game to win.

January 8, 2025 by business OverHeard 0

Overheard : India 1-2-3

Great discussion between Jim O’Shaughnessy and Sajith Pai on the India as a market in the Infinite Loops Podcast. Sajith did a great job describing India as a combination of three markets and not a monolithic market of 1.5 billion people.

India is not a 1.5-billion-person market that many Westerners believe. Instead, it’s three distinct “countries” hiding in plain sight. There’s India One: 120 million affluent, English-speaking urbanites (think the population of Germany) who love their iPhones and Starbucks. Then comes India Two: 300 million aspiring middle-class citizens who inhabit the digital economy but not yet the consumption economy. Finally, there’s India Three: a massive population with a similar demographic profile to Sub-Saharan Africa, that’s still waiting for its invitation to join India’s bright future.

Highly recommend checking out the podcast and this report (on Indus Valley – a play on words comparing the market in India to the tech market in Silicon valley) that Sajith and team put together.

November 22, 2024 by business Management OverHeard 0

On AI Agentic Workflows

Amazing conversation with Bret Taylor on agentic workflows leveraging AI in the enterprises. The whole conversation is worth listening to multiple times, but this specific segment where Bret speaks about the difference between traditional software engineering and AI driven solutions was thought provoking on how much change management organizations have to go through to adopt to these new solutions.

Now if you have parts of your system that are built on large language models, those parts are really different than most of the software that we’ve built on in the past. Number one is they’re relatively slow compared — to generate a page view on a website takes nanoseconds at this point, might be slightly exaggerating, down to milliseconds, even with the fastest models, it’s quite slow in the way tokens are emitted.

Number two is it can be relatively expensive. And again, it really varies based on the number of parameters in the model. But again, the marginal cost of that page view is almost zero at this point. You don’t think about it. Your cost as a software platform is almost exclusively in your head count. With AI, you can see the margin pressure that a lot of companies face, particularly of their training models or even doing inference with high-parameter-count models.

Number three is they’re nondeterministic fundamentally, and you can tune certain models to more reliably have the same output for the same input. But by and large, it’s hard to reproduce behaviors on these systems. What gives them creativity also leads to non-determinism.

And so this combination of it, we’ve gone from cheap, deterministic, reliable systems to relatively slow, relatively expensive but very creative systems. And I think it violates a lot of the conventions that software engineers think about — have grown to think about when producing software, and it becomes almost a statistical problem rather than just a methodological problem.

September 11, 2024 by Management Technology 0

Overheard : Leadership

Leadership isn’t about being the hero. It’s about empowering your team to become heroes themselves.

Google Gemini

For folks that are driven, wired to see an issue and tackle it head-on, it is difficult to not jump in and “try” to help your team whenever they run into an issue. But the reality is that most folks are capable, creative individuals. They just need the space to flex their own problem-solving muscles.

If you team has the skills and experience, let them handle it :-).

April 9, 2024 by OverHeard 0