About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
TLDR; Investor-focused accelerator programs no longer serve founders or investors. Over the past 6 months, I’ve been hired by two different pre-seed accelerator programs to look at founder outcomes and make recommendations for improvements. In total I talked with 25 founders (growing, pivoting, sustaining and shuttered) and a handful of early stage investors, and I …
Continue reading “The End of Cargo Culting Startup Accelerators”
Claude and I talk regularly. I’ve reached the end of multiple context windows with Claude. I credit Claude with helping me articulate the long running thread through my career and personal interests (e.g “Find what we forgot”) and clarifying the current positioning of my business (e.g. “When technology breaks your revenue model – call me.”). …
On the news of Netflix acquiring Warner Bros, I’m reminded of how good Netflix has been at innovating their business model. Over the past 27 years, their business model has changed multiple times and each evolution appears to be in direct response to the bottleneck of growth, from maintaining inventory of DVD to acquiring global …
Patrick reminded us a decade ago that Everything Happens in Time, said another way: “everything happens at a time – whether deliberate or not.” It’s been three and a half years since I wrote about my ever evolving calendaring practice. Everything I wrote about in 2022 is still true. The biggest change has been in …
Continue reading “Calendars are for Commitments or How I Use a Calendar in 2025”
A 5 gallon bucket with a spout that’s also a paint tray and a dustpan. At the risk of evoking all of my past writing on chindogu, this is a nice reminder that there’s always room for improvement. It’s just a matter of determining that developing improvement is worth your opportunity cost. It might not …
Continue reading “Reminder: There’s Always Room for Improvement Somewhere”
I recommend AI: How/Why I Use It in its entirety here are just a couple of my favorite passages: “As any musician knows intimately, the most interesting part of a new musical technology is its glitches: the inventors of the synthesizer hoped to position it as a replacement for strings or horns, but what we …
Continue reading “Mike Doughty on Art & Computer Technology (AI)”
Generative AI and LLMs continue to provide the least controversial answer to any question I ask them. For my purposes, this makes them little more than a calculator for words, a generator of historical fiction short stories. As I mentioned two years ago, this doesn’t make LLMs useless, but it does greatly shrink their usefulness …
When I first got a robot vacuum cleaner, the first thing I noticed was how much worse its cleaning quality was compared against a person. The second thing I noticed: it added a job to the household (one that came with zero training): robot vacuum maintenance Just as we handwash dishes even though we have …
https://www.calmtech.institute/calm-tech-principles
FedEx was started in 1971 The first email was sent in 1971 The Pony Express began in 1860, ceased operations just 2 days after… …the transcontinental telegraph was completed in 1861