Hello everyone! I have some big personal and professional news: I’m joining Shopify. In my mind, Shopify is the most interesting company in the world right now. If you took everything I’ve ever written about scarcity and abundance, about technology, friction, complexity, and antifragility, and expressed it in a business, you’d get Shopify. They’re an accelerant of the future of commerce, and a lifeline for this present crisis. This is their moment. Beyond Survival My grandfather, Léon Danco, loved small businesses and the entrepreneurs who ran them. He dedicated his… Read more Shopify →
The other day I went for a drive around town, just to clear my head a bit and check out the empty city. For the most part, it looked empty, but ordinary; like being out at dawn before the city wakes up. But there was a notable exception: Starbucks. The lines for Starbucks drive-thru (and I saw three different locations) all stretched down the street, multiple blocks long. I’m not a great estimator of these things, but I’m guessing they were half-hour wait times, at least. In that moment, I… Read more It’s going to get worse →
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out… Read more Life is Made of Unfair Coin Flips →
So, everything’s gonna be totally different for, I dunno, let’s say a year. And then at some point, the crisis will be over and life will return to a normal… Read more Positional Scarcity and the Virus →
So: To be clear, I don’t think we can really call COVID-19 itself a Black Swan event. Plenty of people saw it coming, in some form or another, and said… Read more Black Swan Events →
Seems like a good week, with the Coronavirus pandemic and all, to talk about this: Upon request, I feel like I ought to explain some of these misunderstandings. I already wrote… Read more Antifragility →
One way to think about employee stock option programs (ESOPs) is that they’re good because they align economic interests between the business and its workers. When the business does well,… Read more Employee Stock Options: free money, kinda →
A lot of VCs play poker, and I get why. But as a metaphor for venture capital, or as a skill-honing extracurricular activity if you want to call it that, I… Read more VCs should play bridge →
