Stats for nerds
3recommend
13mentions
11people
2018–2023years
23% recommend69% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A synopsis:
* Jake is an entertaining writer, even if his style is not what one would call "information dense"
* This was written back in January
* He is grateful for the opportunity to have worked as an investment banker and feels it has opened other doors for him
* Investor banker hours are indeed quite long (70 - 90 hpw) but people in the business typically exaggerate their hours
* Answer to the title question: "I knew by this point that I did not want to rise through the ranks in typical investment banking fashion, so rather than stay until I found something else to do, I decided to quit and do anything else I wanted to do."
* Praiano, Italy on the Amalfi Coast is an awesome place to visit
* Recommends World After Capital by Albert Wenger and The Fixer by Bradley Tusk
- Hey all.
Can someone explain to me WHY in 2019 we still tie the infrastructure to the power to make decisions?
Marketplaces are built not on open protocols (like email) but closed platforms.
They amass people from both sides and extract rents. But that’s a side effect of the closed nature of the software.
Why yell at doordash or uber or facebook to add a feature? Why does country X go after them for deleting posts while country Y yells that they didn’t delete similar posts? Closed software is the issue. “Zero to one. Competition is for losers” is who funded Facebook.
If people wanted to add tips in Wordpress or Email or whatever, they could just go ahead an add those. Or a million other features. Their clients would still interoperate.
Main reason: the capitalistic system we have encourages getting very wealthy as a result of building a successful company. It encourages people to work extremely hard and take risks while competing and duplicating 90% of the work others are doing. But in the area of software and information, copying is so easy. Collaboration beats competition nearly every time, relegating the proprietary solutions of yesteryear to obsolescence. The private market is reduced to turning out brief “bleeding edge” innovations which are then subsumed into the open source snowball.
Wikipedia, the Web, Webkit, Wordpress, MySQL and NGinX has beat Britannica, AOL, Blogger.com, IE, Oracle and IIS. So why don’t we have more of it in other areas? Drugs? Marketplaces?
Albert Wenger from USV has a nice online book called “World after Capital” that speaks about this.
- Really enjoyed:
- 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer
- American Wolf - Nate Blakeslee
- Atomic Habits - James Clear
- But What If We're Wrong - Chuck Klosterman
- Conspiracy - Ryan Holiday
- The Courage To Be Disliked - Ichiro Kishimi
- Elements of Fiction: Characters & Viewpoint - Orson Scott Card
- The Elephant In The Brain - Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
- Gridiron Genius - Michael Lombardi
- The Longevity Diet - Valter Longo
- Open - Andre Agassi
- Warriors & Worriers - Joyce Benenson
- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker
- World After Capital - Albert Wenger
- Who said anything about forced open sourcing?
People naturally tend to give things away in a gift economy when the marginal cost of making a copy is zero. Dan Pink explains it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Consider science: it is a privilege in most scientific disciplines to publish one’s discoveries openly for everyone to build on. Except in the bio and pharma departments — there, the intellectual property system has made generically engineered crops trap farmers and has made drugs extremely expensive in the very country that enforces this system. I wrote about Open Source Drugs a whopping 12 years ago: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93
Newton said, “if I saw further, it’s because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. He didn’t pay rent to the giants for those shoulders.
Thomas Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Albert Wenger, a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist, general partner at Union Square Ventures here in NY and who raised their climate fund, wrote an entire book called World After Capital about this very thing, and is giving it away: https://worldaftercapital.org
Back then, USV and other VCs were really bullish on Utility Tokens as a way for the participants to own the network, and to incentivize open source voluntarily, without government force:
https://avc.com/category/blockchain/
I also mentioned Meta open sourcing ML, and said you should be thankful to Zuck’s tendencies, which he can exercise in an area that isn’t a core business proposition of facebook. The capitalists have stranged Mark Z’s tendencies in every area where Facebook could extract rents and profits from its ecosystem. And in this, it could have easily gone another way had an IP-loving Steve Jobs type been at the helm. Had FB chosen to branch out into it, like Apple did into, say, banking or cars, then you would see FAR LESS open source competition in AI. Maybe Bloom model?
- World After Capital by Albert Wenger (USV) reaches a similar conclusion:
- This comment is top rated yet misconstrues – in order to advance the author's values – both the argument and the context. Topically, Wenger is a partner at USV (Manhattan) and _The World After Capital_ was published as a Gitbook in order to be open source.
It is not intended to describe nor comment, politically, on the day to day of capital flows. Attacking it as such is a straw man argument at best and intellectually lazy at worst.
