notes dump Acquired - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Acquired andreesen notes

As long as there's Moore's law or something like Moore's law, it isn't over. New businesses and new ideas are going to be important and interesting

Idea The Void::The Platform for crowd sourcing messy problems

Just because the technology makes sense for my product standpoint doesn't mean the technology from a technical standpoint is actually ready, see the Nintendo 64 and Mark andreasen's second job

Caa vs the studios-- what's is the "point(s) of integration" in a value chain? Where do things come together to form value?

The dream execution machine

Open source data is like open source code, it allows others to build on and help with what you've created

Andresen on fomo - sometimes you embrace it a little bit. You don't let it control you but you listen to what it might be telling you

And recent believes the open sourcing of tensorflow makes AI a lot more interesting. It used to be a government-funded research group, then it was a huge division of google, now it's literally just greg.

The idea is to get to the it independent of what surrounds the it

To me it's like andreessen can obsess about the future because he's so good at understanding history and because he likes history

Look up Marcelo from SoftBank on Latin America

Hamilton hillmer started with an economics PhD. He floated around a lot and finally interviewed with Bill Bain for the strategy Capital group, to get in he was extremely interested in the company, and ended up not saying very much about himself in his final interview. Just asked a lot of questions. Show genuine interest.

A good strategy is hard because it is simple but not simplistic. It is comprehensive without being overcomplicated. Businesses in the early faces pivot to find a consistent mechanism they can rely upon for growth in the late years in which pivoting is rare

A power is made up of a benefit and a barrier. The benefit is what it does for customers, the barrier is what makes it hard to replicate

First power is counter positioning this is very similar to disruption. A small company comes up with a novel business model that incumbents cannot or are not willing to pay the financial price of replicating

The unwillingness of the incumbent must only last long enough for the Challenger to scale the business. Then they will be hard to take over by the incumbent that is finally realized their mistake

Netflix versus Blockbuste

Hamilton believes Blockbuster was only one year late of winning by turning off their late fees. But they failed to turn off their late fees and lost

Dell beating compact by going direct to consumers is another

One of the things that permits this to happen is myopic compensation packages for execs!!

Hamilton does not think that this is exactly the same thing as the i innovators dilemma. He does think there is what he calls a mini-to-many relationship

In-N-Out is counter positioned against mcdonald's, even without major innovation

Disruptive technologies may not Deliver enough value to be considered counterpositioned

Peter Wang on the Friedman podcast The larger your user base the more general your scope.

The real difference Peter is interested in between human to human and human to computer communication is that human to computer communication is precise and iterative. Human to human has such loaded context and is not iterative really

Peter believes that collaboration is an evolutionary adaptation to mutually assured destruction

Love, as defined by a desire for the recipient to be the best version of themselves, should be the

basis for any powerful human-like AI system. Peter believes in something between half and 5X dunbar's number of people can form collectives that are or are like corporations that can act with positive collective power. Peter points out how fictions like Nations are well respected and good working rules. But the social rule around corporations are not clear.

Andreesen on masters if scale Timing is the number one success predictor for startups. So many things are tried again and again and again, with very little variation, but they take when the timing is right.

You have to live in the tension of being in the future and present at the same time. You have to be willing to try something again, the idea might not be the problem. Oftentimes, successful companies don't realize that there were a lot of very similar companies before them without the right timing it's interesting. Being too where the history can be a negative because you have too many reasons why your project will fail, but the ground conditions change between iterations

The past does not predict the future.

Is the problem fundamental or is there a mismatching timing? Vincent's take is that the past is only useful if you understand why it played out the way it did, it is not useful as a direct predictor.

Reid Hoffman missed square and stripe because PayPal had had to pivot away from a similar model earlier

You can use Network effects to quote create your own timing, or perhaps make up for what timing was not perfect

A good example is the Hollywood blacklist, and email survey about unpublished scripts that people would get really really excited about.

Dreams and imagination should produce interesting questions, not firm predictions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACNhHTqIVqk Definitions and incentives matter