Just a place to write.
Leopold Kronecker, 1865. God made the integers; the rest was up for debate. Credit: Getty Images. In 1886, Leopold Kronecker told the Berlin Society of Natural Scientists: “Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk.” God made the integers; all else is the work of man. 1 For years I read this as the ramblings of a reactionary. Kronecker as the man who harassed…
Years back I worked at RapidSOS. Today when you call 9-1-1, the GPS coordinates of your phone get routed to the dispatcher. It’s a life-saving service. The FCC’s number before this was grim: more than 10,000 people a year die because the dispatcher can’t tell where the caller is. 1 Say you call for help in the middle of some monotonous highway. Before RapidSOS, dispatchers had to mostly rely on…
Amazon's flywheel showing controllable inputs feeding growth In the autumn of 2001, in the middle of the dot-com bust, Jim Collins sat down with Bezos and a few of his executives and walked them through the flywheel. The team sketched their own version on a napkin: lower prices would attract more customers, more customers would attract more sellers, more sellers would increase selection, and…
Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London. Credit: Beata May, Wikimedia Commons. Everyone in tech seems to love Napoleon. I think the more useful lessons about scaling a company come from his naval nemesis, Horatio Nelson. What he did out there kept Britain on top of the world’s oceans for more than a hundred years after he was gone. The Battle of the Nile In 1798, a storm off Sardinia…