Back during the tech boom of the 2000s, there was a saying going around that the market would be carried by internet firms so far that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would go from 10,000 to 30,000 in the span of a few years. Of course, the subsequent bust crushed that dream. But here we are, roughly ten years later, this time on the very real verge of hitting the mythical 30,000 benchmark. Now, a question remains: how long can we keep it up?
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A couple of blog posts ago, I discussed one of my primary tenets: making things 1% better every day. In this post, I’m going to drive home the key ingredient to this tenet: compound interest.
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There’s been a lot of fear recently that someone is going to fuck this grand economic cycle up. Of course the end of the boom is inevitable, and while players may debate as to when exactly the game will flip, it’s still fun to think about the consequences if it were to flip right now.
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Quite a while back I promised that I would elaborate on two functions that I posited: The Function of Success and the Function of Opportunity. Today I wanted to focus on success; more specifically, career success.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time as of late trying to determine patterns within successful products that I’ve seen, and I think I’ve finally found one that summarizes each of them pretty well. It’s quite simple, but I think there’s a lot of nuance to be developed here that would set this up to be a sophisticated theory. In this blog post, I want to lay down the fundamentals on how each new successful product brings the world towards convenience.
The baseline thesis for this is actually quite an obvious statement: every successful product/invention made the world just a little bit easier. No one should make products to enforce the status quo — and especially not to make things worse — and yet, there is a difference between having things be somewhat better versus fully better. In order to truly be successful, products must develop ease of access on all fronts, i.e. they must be convenient for the users, and the producers, and anyone who would be interacting with it on a daily occasion. For example, Uber has two main consumers: the actual users/riders, and the producers/drivers. In order for Uber to have been a successful product, it had to improve convenience for the user by making the ride ordering process easy, as well as improve it for the producer by making the ability to connect to new riders easily. If you only get one part of this equation right, then there’s going to be problems later down the line; especially if someone else ends up perfecting the equation before you.
So, in order to get the tech right and nail down the convenience factor, optimally two things need to happen: the tech needs to be mature, and it needs to be handled by people inside and out. Optimally, you would want a good team to come in just right before the tech is mature enough to get the largest amount of market share, but timing this can be quite difficult. “Maturity” is also a pretty esoteric concept that would have different definitions for each type of tech, though I believe it could be simply summarized as the point where the positives deeply outweight the negatives. For example, I would say VR tech hasn’t reached the point of maturity; there’s still a lot of problems with price point, mobility, and long-term use that need to be solved in order for it to start breaking through to a larger market. Smartphones, however, would be considered a mature technology, since it has gotten to the point where you can easily say that smartphones are on almost all fronts more convenient than the flip phones and landlines of yore. This follows as to why the team behind the product is so important; they were the early adopters and would know exactly what the tech needs in order for it to be successfully maturized. Tech can only be convenient when it is mature.
I also think that developing additions to already mature tech is silly. A new camera on a phone isn’t going to get me enough of a convenience factor to justify buying it over the phone I’m already using. In order to make big leaps in profit, you have to make big leaps in innovation (and hence, big leaps in convenience), otherwise you’re essentially fighting over the scraps.
I also don’t think the profit model has to necessarily be connected to the tech. Google is a great example of this; their convenience factor is obviously Search, allowing the access to the internet to be more convenient by making its pages easy to access. But Google doesn’t make money on Search; they make money on Search Ads, which really isn’t that much bigger of a leap. Same thing can be said with Facebook; selling data doesn’t provide an insane convenience factor, but allowing for an easier way for people across the world to communicate and share with each other is.
Speaking of selling data, there’s also a lot of problems that come alongside developing towards convenience, things such as privacy and socialization. I believe that these problems will likely be solved by convenience tech down the line (for example, a maturized blockchain could be an answer to the data problem) but I also think we need to be careful not to step back and lose convenience by trying to solve these problems; the only way to get people to pay attention is by moving forward, not moving back.
Since I personally believe a lot of what I’m saying is pretty esoteric without concrete examples, I wanted to add an appendix to this post that goes over some of the biggest companies in the world as of now and why they would suit this hypothesis.
Anyway, that’s all for this one. If you want to keep in touch, check out my biweekly newsletter! Following this will give you the low-down of all the new stuff I’m working on, as well as some things I found interesting. As an added bonus, you’ll also receive the Top 10 Tools I Use on a Daily Basis to help better manage your workload and do higher quality work in a shorter amount of time. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
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While I don’t believe we’ll have a universal language any time soon, it seems like the two obvious answers for one would be either English or Mandarin. This seems like a bit of a fight between east vs west, and I’ve heard good arguments from both sides, but I wanted to see if I could throw my own thoughts about this into the ring.
First, I find it ironic that the two most likely candidates for lingua franca are the two languages that are possibly the most complicated. English, with its various nuances and outdated rules, can certainly be hard to understand. However, I believe that the sheer size of the Mandarin language causes it to be much harder to grasp fully than english. While having a large alphabet combined with a large vocabulary may help in describing details, most international communication would be fine in just getting the general point across; and so I think more would be willing to describe less in order to spend less time learning a new language for business.
There’s also the fact that, due to eurocentricity, English has already had a grasp on global communications for quite some years now. With China not opening up broadly until roughly the 1960s, combined with the fact of the relatively isolationist nature of Asian cultures in general, Mandarin has had much less time to fester internationally. And while China’s population may have exploded in the meantime, this doesn’t necessarily translate to exponential cultural exporting. As English has expanded, more English-speaking generations have passed, and more people globally are prone to picking up English as their preferred second language.
Finally, to summarize this, I do think it’s certainly possible to have a lingua franca. In an age where the majority of people on Earth have endless knowledge at their fingertips, it becomes quite a bit more easy to learn a new language. And, with globalization becoming a key force due to such technology, more and more people need a common tongue to speak in.
Anyway, that’s all for this one. If you want to keep in touch, check out my biweekly newsletter! Following this will give you the low-down of all the new stuff I’m working on, as well as some things I found interesting. As an added bonus, you’ll also receive the Top 10 Tools I Use on a Daily Basis to help better manage your workload and do high quality work in a shorter amount of time. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
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It’s true; the key to success is, for the most part, hard work. But there’s a difference between working hard and doing hard work. Just because you devote a lot of time to something doesn’t inherently mean that you’re going to perform well in that category. And yet, it seems that a lot of what the modern “hustle culture” values are long hours and back-breaking work above all.
If you’ve followed any startup community for long enough you’ve definitely come across the hustlers; individuals who are convinced that caffeinated 100-hour work weeks, constant social media blitzes, and product rushing are the keys to success in the modern business world. And while I can see that their heart comes from the right place and that this somewhat holds to be true, what we end up getting is a bunch of people walking around who are much more obnoxious than they are motivational. This is primarily because many of these so-called hustlers go around spewing the virtues of hustling while not really understanding anything that they’re saying.
This, I believe, comes from the commodification of “the hustle” based on individuals such as Gary Vaynerchuk and company. Now, I don’t actually have anything against GaryVee, and I do understand the motivational importance of his videos, but when describing the same five “hustling principles” over and over again without elaborating too much, I believe it can easily confuse people who only take those principles at their surface level without actually looking at all into “Hey, do I really need to spend 100 hours a week working on this project?” or “Hey, is answering five Quora posts a day really helping my business?”.
The problem with this I believe comes from a more intrinsic issue with people themselves. It is easier for people to just have an answer given to them rather than for them to have to say “Well, it’s more complicated than that”. People thrive on simplicity, and so if you tell them “just work a really long and stressful amount of time and you’ll reach your goals”, they’ll believe it regardless of how dumb it sounds. Now, is this innately the “hustler”’s fault? I don’t think so. But something all founders should keep in mind is that there’s no shortcut to success.
