Viewing profile — GCA10

Can we roll back the debate a little? If I'd said "wider audience" instead of "rest of the world," we could explore the question of scope more amicably. I've been at two memorial s…

Kept out of sight in this rogue essay is the classic question: Who's your audience? If you're writing for yourself (and maybe a very small number of equally erudite readers) cut lo…

Meta has made some very strange decisions in terms of who it's hired to lead various aspects of AI, including the model-building efforts. Also lots to marvel at re: its ability to …

I've come to believe that Big Tech's fondness for launch-and-kill approaches to new products is closely related to the career incentives for both PMs and finance chiefs. Both of th…

JSTOR does exactly this with scholarly journals, and it works out pretty well. Recent issues are accessible only to paying customers. Back issues (usually at least a few years old)…

The timeline doesn't match up here. We're told that historian Stefan Lorant was doing his research in the 1950s. Then we're told that he checked with Teddy Roosevelt's wife and got…

Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves t…

Ah, but when you're little, if each misstep annoys a few early users who hit a dead-end with your project, the longer-term reputational damage is trivial. You've still got 99.999% …

Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From wha…

Professional writer here. On our longer work, we go through multiple iterations, with lots of teardowns and recalibrations based on feedback from early, private readers, profession…

OP's critique feels like a celebrity economist's variant of those travel magazine pieces that tell us why Zermatt, Phuket or Nantucket is no longer a "cool" vacation spot. On some …

Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe wa…

Ah, it would have been nice to get OP's perspective on Russian population counts. They've stayed remarkable stable at 144 million for two decades, even though the fertility rate ha…

This sounds desperate.

If Lou Gerstner had put any energy into growing RJR Nabisco's tobacco business, I could see your point. But during that 1989-1993 timespan, RJR Nabisco's leaders at the time (Gerst…

So a while back, I was interviewing business people still active in their 80s and 90s -- as part of a very intriguing project that got cut short but did produce some fascinating no…

There's a crucial extra factor that isn't in the original article, but ought to be: Money's ability to buy great experiences decreases as you get older. I've seen this with beach v…

It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surpri…

Verifiable evidence of them learning key new skills on their own, building passion projects (ideally somewhat comparable to what your startup needs), taking work to the finish line…

Hire people on the way up. Hire people who are going to do their best work ever, for you, after having partially but not fully mastered everything you want, via their previous jobs…

Wall Street and the big corporate law firms of NYC/DC have been championing extreme hours since the 1980s. Maybe earlier. So it's interesting to see the short- and long-term effect…

That's actually the point. Yahoo in 2005 had the financial muscle -- and an interesting starting point via Flickr's user base -- to spin up its own version of YouTube without needi…

Yahoo did have a unique ability to smother any business that it acquired -- and I think the reasons go way beyond an inability to monetize them. In fact, I'd argue that it was actu…