Briefs
Sunday, March 1st, 2020
Venkatesh Rao’s Into the Yakverse is just too disgustingly awesomely good. Think the tone of David Goldman’s visits to Cardinal Richelieu, along with the cynical wit of top Armando Iannucci satire, and the light momentum of an Eliyahu Goldratt business novel.
A call to arms for gigworld: Towards Gigwork as a Folkway by Venkatesh Rao.
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of an Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
Brent Schlener and Rick Tetzell
Although the simple thesis gets repeated interminably, nonetheless it’s a nice one: that Steve Jobs’s greatness stems muchly from his constant becoming, constant learning, constant trying to overcome himself (hence the title, which can be read as descriptive).
It’s great to be in his company, which you feel you are, as one of the authors was himself repeatedly so for decades.
One thing new to me was Pixar’s role in maturing Jobs; we don’t often read about who and what shaped the shaper.
Friday, February 28th, 2020
Monday, January 27th, 2020
The inaugural State of SaaS Report.
Wednesday, December 18th, 2019
Matt Layman’s handy Failed SaaS Postmortem — too much tech tinkering; I need to take heed. Plus it’s great he’s getting right back in the saddle.
Saturday, December 14th, 2019
“Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict” — the inaugural James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Lecture in Economic Inequality at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics by Thomas Piketty (March 30th, 2018).
Wednesday, November 27th, 2019
Quite the overview: “The Real Class War” by Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs.
The real class war is between the 0.1 percent and (at most) the 10 percent—or, more precisely, between elites primarily dependent on capital gains and those primarily dependent on profes sional labor.
Wednesday, October 16th, 2019
Succession as comedy. Obvious, given its producers, but still, nicely written.
Sunday, October 13th, 2019
Install bullshit.js as a bookmarklet. Your insides will thank you.
Thursday, October 10th, 2019
ExpressionEngine (EE) is the content management system that until recently I used for building every web property. In November 2018, EllisLab, the producer of EE, was sold to Digital Locations, Inc. (DLOC) and EllisLab owner Rick Ellis joined the parent company’s payroll. The acquisition is detailed in Digital Locations’ Quarterly Report (Form 10-Q) dated August 13th, 2019.
But the Digital Locations acquisition seems downright skeezy. Despite the company’s tagline about Artificial Intelligence, it appears to be nothing more than a holding company for Mr Bill Beifuss. Moreover it looks like he’s scrimping on incorporation fees: the company was founded in 2006 as Zingerang, then became Carbon Sciences for a decade, before morphing again into Digital Locations. It self-reports never having had any revenues.
According to the linked-to Bloomberg profile, Mr Beifuss is also CEO of some other companies: Warp 9 Inc, Coeur D’alene French Baking Co, and Cumorah Capital Inc., none of which appear to provide any actual products or services either.
Rick must have been aware of and a party to this bullshit. With ExpressionEngine he had a great thing going; I wonder what happened. All I can speculate is that he very much wanted to segue EE’s success into enabling him to try other things professionally but that it remained his biggest achievement and he couldn’t bring himself to let go of the golden goose even though it was fading without his hands-on vision. And then at some point last year he suddenly really needed a buyer.
Recently, on October 3rd, 2019, he bought EllisLab back from Beifuss then sold it a week later to development house Packet Tide, that is, Tom Jaeger. So it Rick Ellis has finally let go of ExpressionEngine, even if he held on too long; despite being free EE can barely be be given away now; the technology has moved on.
I’m relieved to have moved away from it onto the Node ecosystem. I really enjoyed meeting the EllisLab team at an EE conference in 2017 — such cool nice folks in person — but for me EllisLab is a cautionary tale.
Thursday, September 26th, 2019
Starting from WeWork, Matt Stoller coins “counterfeit capitalism” as the Amazon model: “take inputs, combine them into products worth less than their cost, and plug up the deficit through the capital markets in hopes of acquiring market power later or of just self-dealing so the losses are placed onto someone else.” It is, he argues, terrible for society as a whole.
Wednesday, September 18th, 2019
For anyone (like me) working on doing the same, see Wenbin Fang’s article “The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company”. Of course the technologies used will differ, but the frankness here is refreshing, the contour of what’s required enlightening.
Monday, September 16th, 2019
Re Uber, Izabella Kaminska asks: “If you have a company with lots of employees, margins are very low and it is acquiring market share through subsidisation, and not necessarily through quality, how can you guarantee that this is going to be a sustainable and profitable model? You can’t.”
Monday, August 26th, 2019
It’s a Kentucky Fried Miracle: KFC will sell meatless Beyond Fried Chicken.
Monday, August 5th, 2019
Eric Elliott the JavaScript guru lays out his vision of the technical roles of a software company.
See the “Download 2019 Report” link here at for the lengthy and infographic-packed Global Innovation Index (GII) 2019: Creating Healthy Lives-The Future of Medical Innovation wherein Israel breaks into the top 10 for the first time.
Saturday, August 3rd, 2019
How the rich differ, according to the currently-popupar Big Five psychological framework. More conscientious, less neurotic, less agreeable, more extravert, and more open to experience.
Friday, July 26th, 2019
See the “Download 2019 Report” link here at for the lengthy and infographic-packed Global Innovation Index (GII) 2019: Creating Healthy Lives-The Future of Medical Innovation wherein Israel breaks into the top 10 for the first time.
Monday, July 22nd, 2019
Friday, July 12th, 2019
Some unconventional wisdom from David C Baker that I’d like to revisit every once in a while: “Why Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) Arrangements May Not Be Ideal”. He concludes: “If I’ve confused you with all this, just concentrate on this one point: retainers and MRR relationships scream hourly work, and you shouldn’t be doing hourly work.” But at least for me at Engaging, the opposite is true: I’ve always billed hourly anyway, and some MRR arrangements I’ve made more recently have freed us from thinking in terms of hours (even though I’m still habitually keeping a log of hours worked).
Saturday, June 8th, 2019
Monday, May 13th, 2019
A manifesto for the remaining sensible: “Tucker’s Right” by Michael Anton.
Thursday, April 11th, 2019
“Clients that come to you only for implementation are going to be your worst clients.” Yes! “The Strategic Independent” by Tom Critchlow.
Saturday, April 6th, 2019
Venkatesh is a treasure, what with his “Jonathan Livingstone Corporation” on solving not for money but aliveness.
Friday, March 15th, 2019
Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2018 [PDF] by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Monday, March 11th, 2019
Putting the ack! in acquihire: Our Incredible Journey.
Thursday, January 17th, 2019
Most in-depth article on hoarding I’ve yet seen.
Sunday, October 14th, 2018
You’re ♬ never ♫ too old ♬ to ♫ be young. “The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45” in the Harvard Business Review.
Friday, October 12th, 2018
Worrying that you’re late is one of the signs of a good idea.
Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas
Try to do things that would make your friends say wow.
Paul Graham, “How to Do What You Love”
Saturday, September 29th, 2018
Tim Berners-Lee announces his startup Inrupt to support and popularize Solid, a platform to enable people to regain control of their own data.
Thursday, September 20th, 2018
Million Dollar Consulting
Alan Weiss
This most renowned book by the engaging Alan Weiss has a tone of practical, optimistic advice. Its title however is unfortunate as the first part may come off as cheesy while the second part comes off as only applying to consultants. Its subtitle, “The Professional’s Guide to Growing a Practice”, is more accurate; I was talking with an old friend who now has his own one-man legal practice and realized that pretty much all the book’s advice applies to him.
Although famous for advocating value billing rather than hourly, perhaps the book’s dominant concept is that you should invest your marketing energy in becoming a thought leader — in speaking and writing.
Weiss is a bit of a minor national treasure (despite hovering sometimes on the edge of bad taste — and I believe he is way sophisticated enough to understand exactly what he’s doing) and despite becoming slightly cranky in his more recent musings (not that I disagree with where he’s coming from, but political musings may be off-putting to others). He is a gifted writer in that having read his book you feel he is your friend looking out for you.
Thursday, August 30th, 2018
“Breaking Smart” by Venkatesh Rao. This is the first collection, “Software is Eating the World”, inspired by a residency at Andreessen/Horowitz.
Friday, August 24th, 2018
“Service Design 101”, a primer by the Nielsen Norman Group.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2018
Who is Michael Cohen? Part of the exquisite series on Trump’s coterie by Josh Fruhlinger in The Baffler.
Sunday, August 5th, 2018
Why does tech have so many political problems? A list of 17 answers by Tyler Cowen. I love the phrase “Robespierrean social justice terror”.
Friday, July 20th, 2018
We have a bunch of companies that are comprised of a sales department and a tech department, because every other job has been outsourced to a website run by another company composed of a sales department and a tech department.
Peter Welch, “How to Worry Less About Being a Bad Programmer”
Thursday, July 12th, 2018
Tuesday, June 12th, 2018
Internet Trends 2018 — all the stats. A presentation by Mary Meeker.
Tuesday, June 5th, 2018
The US Supreme Court has ruled 7–2 in defence of Colorado baker Jack Phillips who refused for religious reasons to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple who subsequently sued him.
Justice Anthony Kennedy: “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”
Tuesday, May 8th, 2018
Even as the USA is troubled at the national level, it is often flourishing locally, argues James Fallows, who has spent five years criss-crossing the country with his wife.
“America is becoming more like itself again,” he writes. “More Americans are trying to make it so, in more places, than most Americans are aware.”
This is good, it seems to me; better than if the reverse were true.
Thursday, May 3rd, 2018
Ben Thompson concisely contrasts Amazon and Apple. “I’m not sure that Amazon will beat Apple to $1 trillion, but they surely have the best shot at two.”
Eric Posner and Glen Weyl provide some diagnosis of and solutions for our new Gilded Age.
Tuesday, May 1st, 2018
Jaron Lanier on social media: “We got into this by trying to be socialist and libertarian at the same time, and getting the worst of both worlds … we have to choose.”
Saturday, April 21st, 2018
We have entered an uncanny valley of algorithmic culture. I believe it’s still easy to step out of, but even easier not to. And maybe it’s merely a speeding up of how things have always worked.
Friday, April 13th, 2018
Brian X. Chen, technology writer at The New York Times, checks what data Facebook and Google have on him and provides links to do your own. “Be warned,” he concludes. “Once you see the vast amount of data that has been collected about you, you won’t be able to unsee it.”
Google for instance, keeps a record of every time you open an app on an Android phone, Facebook of whom you unfriended when.
Thursday, April 12th, 2018
It’s nice to see Slant Magazine praise something fulsomely and in detail: Chuck Bowen on Billions, Season 3.
Friday, March 23rd, 2018
If you’re worried about Facebook, just take a look at WeWork.
