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The Profit* is pretty interesting. It's like the shows where Gordon Ramsay goes into failing restaurants and tries to turn them around, except here the show's host tries to fix all kinds of local businesses. It's not about tech startups per se, but you still see a lot of common issues through the lens of local businesses: founder disputes, poor unit economics, bad marketing, etc. It's a little cheesy, but pretty good…
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Re watched recently HaCF, supplementing it now with book "The soul of the new machine" which also enjoy. The book also appeared in last episode.
Soul of a New Machine is one of the best books chronicling product development. (Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one.) There were a lot of parallel threads in the early 80s that didn't really intersect a lot. You had the PC/BBS world, the ARPANET/Internet, and the minicomputer & mainframe worlds. I knew a lot of the people in Soul of a New Machine and actually dotted-lined into Tom West for a while. (Lat…
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I use that quote similarly. It's about knowing where you stand, where the value is, and of course not chasing the shiny new thing.... Perhaps Its pragmatic humility. That's how I see it.
> and of course not chasing the shiny new thing... The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just…
It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.
But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.
Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.
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Soul of a New Machine is one of the best books chronicling product development. (Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one.) There were a lot of parallel threads in the early 80s that didn't really intersect a lot. You had the PC/BBS world, the ARPANET/Internet, and the minicomputer & mainframe worlds. I knew a lot of the people in Soul of a New Machine and actually dotted-lined into Tom West for a while. (Lat…
I will check Showstopper, thank you for recommendation. It was definitely a fruitful time, a lot of meaningful job was done. I envy you that you could work with those folks.
The interesting thing about the doco is that the film maker seems to get converted midway. At the start the founder is portrayed as a obvious charlatan but by the end he is presented in a much more favorable light.
I think Halt and Catch fire remains the best show about startup life and the personal story arcs are bang on in my experience
It sprang to mind as soon as I saw the title of the post. One of my favourite ever programmes. It was on Prime in the UK but vanished some time ago.
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Halt and Catch Fire was a great show! Leaving this gem here: https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/
I love this show, re watched it recently, but did not know this site. Thank you for sharing!
It seemed to turn 100% drama, no tech. I couldn't get past episode 2 of the last season!
'Halt and Catch Fire' (Fictional but good) 'Sillicon Valley' (Fictional and comedy but also good) 'The Playlist' (About Spotify, which isn't failure)
Highly recommend.
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> About Spotify, which isn't failure Is that true? They are still losing money after, what, 10 years? I like Spotify but I don’t think they are out of the woods yet. Just like I wouldn’t call WeWork (isn’t a failure) in 2018.
There are degrees of failure. WeWork has raised $23B and they’re currently worth $350M. Losing $22B is a pretty insane failure.
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I love this show, re watched it recently, but did not know this site. Thank you for sharing!
I certainly liked the first season, even the second, but I wonder if the last season even had anyone in front of a computer. Or doing anything other than complain about other people. It seemed to turn 100% drama, no tech. I couldn't get past episode 2 of the last season!