Listen. If you really listen to peoples opinion you’ll see the truth in their conviction after a certain point. I will often stay silent while listening other than confirming words to indicate I’m listening for uncomfortably long. People break awkward silence by continuing to talk. They longer they go on, the stronger or weaker their opinion point of view becomes.
Reflect. Revisit opinions you or others had in the past now. Are they still true. In my experience most opinions from the past end up being misguided. On this reflection I’m more skeptical while listening.
Write. Writing is thinking. Don’t start a newsletter or blog. Buy a cheap notebook and pen and write daily. That’s how you develop opinions.
It isn't possible for crash detection to differentiate between "phone falls off bike" and "bike crashed" because everything that happens to the phone could be identical in both scenarios.
If the phone is loose in a pocket (or even in a backpack) when the bike crashes, it can easily hit the ground, bounce, and then come to a stop... just like it does if it falls out off the bike in any non-crash scenario.
> “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
Google is not small.
Is too regulated to be scrappy.
And is NOT a startup
It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.
This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
Great read. The pandemic forced my close friends to go from in person drinks to zooms but then quickly transitioned to async voice messages. The by product of this is everyone gets a chance to be a giver and taker without having take the spotlight immediately. Sometimes our conversations last weeks as someone comes in and reignites debate after bringing a new point. It’s all async. Curious is anyone else has found similar success with voice messaging as a medium.
When I was a little kid, I remember my dad and uncle would mail cassette tapes back and forth, instead of writing letters.
Dad would gleefully find one in the mail, unwrap it, open a beer, and sit down with his headphones on and notepad in hand. Once in a while he'd actually pause the playback while jotting notes, but mostly the things he wanted to respond to only needed a scribbled word or two as a prompt for later.
Having finished the tape, he'd walk around for a minute to collect his thoughts, grab a second beer but not open it, rewind the tape, press Record, wait a count of 5 for the leader to be past the record head, then crack that beer right into the microphone -- every tape started with that sound -- and begin to hold forth.
Voice messages between more than 2 people? Oh interesting.
I do this with a friend in England that I met and became ultra fast friends with years ago. We traveled Asia together for 2 months. Haven't seen him in years and honestly might not again! But we are buds for life and keep in touch via async voice messages. The other day I sent him a short one asking a relatively intimate question and received a reply with an 18min message. Receiving it felt like Christmas.
Andy Grove's response when John Doerr decided to leave intel for kleiner
"Come on, don't you want to be a general manager and own a real P&L? I'll let you run Intel's software division. John, venture capital, that's not a real job. It's like being a real estate agent."
Businesses literally don't have phone numbers that can text or email addresses, but do have WhatsApp. If there was no WhatsApp, the main form of text communication that they use would be gone.
TIBCO has a lot of Analytics and Data products. One of their acquisitions, called Spotfire, is actually a really good product.
Over the last few years they've also acquired a lot of Data Science companies, but it always felt like they were bargain shopping and acquiring companies nobody else wanted to buy.
Honestly, I pity Spotfire. IME it's the best out of all the products in that space (e.g. Tableau, PowerBI, etc) and is much better for actually Analyzing data in comparison to other products it competes with. But they got acquired by TIBCO, who basically did a great job of losing the mindshare race against Tableau. I feel like some other company would have done a better job with Spotfire.
Citrix does desktop virtualization. Back when I was involved with using their stuff (20 years ago), it was a lot faster for global users to connect to our Citrix server to run client/server apps than to run them over the WAN.
Tibco does/did middleware for n-tier applications. Back when I used it (again 20 years ago) it worked, and was relatively painless.
Tibco is short for “the information bus company”. They practically invented Enterprise integration in large businesses, esp stock exchanges and banks, with a need for high reliability. These days Tibco is largely considered “legacy”. I’m surprised that VCs would see value in them apart from their Rolodex.
Tibco is owned by Private Equity, not VCs. Very different type of companies. VCs own a company on its way up, PE onws its way down. Some times a company is sold immediately from VCs to PE. In some rear occasions a company owned by PE can go public: e.g. Dynatrace, TeamViewer.
Yup. When I was a junior engineer, I was working for a bank and the various teams were all blaming each other about high latency in the stack, which involved Tibco Rendezvous. Basically, a way to distribute market data over multicast. They blamed Rendezvous, they blamed the network hardware, they blamed everything except their spreadsheets. (Yes, the tech stack at the time was spreadsheet <-> spreadsheet over multicast.) Anyway, I wrote a small Perl application that measured the end-to-end latency (when market data changed, vs when the published output changed) in addition to network induced latency (basically echo packets; write something out, see when it came back over the link). What the data showed was that the data processing spreadsheet introduced tons of random latency, and the network was totally fine. I sent that up the chain and the bug in the spreadsheet was found almost immediately, solving a multi-month blame game in hours.
