Must-Reads for Entrepreneurs, Investors and Innovators — Part #1

After years of reading, filtering, sharing and bookmarking from the trenches of the Amsterdam startup ecosystem, these (hidden) gems are among the ones that survived at least a dozen of my “preferred bookmarking tool” switches.

Quotes

The Most Important Question by Mark Manson

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

Link to article: https://markmanson.net/question

The AI Revolution

Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockingly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts.

Link to part 1: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html

Link to part 2: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here

The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’.

Link: https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d

How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus by Antonio García Martínez

Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters, in Menlo Park, California, March 7, 2013. Photograph by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images.

Google Plus was Google finally taking note of Facebook and confronting the company head-on, rather than via cloak-and-dagger recruitment shenanigans and catty disses at tech conferences. It hit Facebook like a bomb. Zuck took it as an existential threat comparable to the Soviets’ placing nukes in Cuba in 1962. Google Plus was the great enemy’s sally into our own hemisphere, and it gripped Zuck like nothing else. He declared “Lockdown,” the first and only one during my time there.

Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus

Your Life in Weeks

A great article to put some perspective into the value of your time. Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.

Link: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

The Empty Brain

We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.

Link: https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

Startups need to do due dilligence, too

Red flags to keep in mind during your journeys of seeking funding. Do your homework. Do it early. Do it often. Don’t be afraid to ask for references and more info about the person who’s investing. If they’re sufficiently motivated and interested in you, they should be happy to do it. If they’re sufficiently smart, they’ll respect you asking. If they’re sufficiently sketchy, you need to think about casting a wider net.

Link: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/30/startups-need-to-do-dd-too/

The Neural Network Zoo

With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) can be a bit overwhelming at first.

So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these are neural networks, some are completely different beasts. Though all of these architectures are presented as novel and unique, when I drew the node structures… their underlying relations started to make more sense.

Link: http://www.asimovinstitute.org/neural-network-zoo/

Good and Bad Procrastination by Paul Graham

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad? Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you’re not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

Link: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — written in 1956

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

Link: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

What did Billion Dollar Companies Look Like at the Series A?

Some startups that seem poised for greatness go on to crash-and-burn, while others that are slow to get off the ground surprise everyone with their triumph. There is no formula, expectations are often wrong, and each success story is unique and unprecedented… but that doesn’t mean there are not patterns worth paying attention to.

Link: https://medium.com/@todfrancis/what-did-billion-dollar-companies-look-like-at-the-series-a-e53ea8043a85

The Startup Zeitgeist by Jared Friedman

Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.

But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.

Link: http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/05/the-startup-zeitgeist/

The Inside Story of BlazeMeter, from First VC Meeting to Exit

By late September 2016, BlazeMeter had signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA. The acquisition extends CA’s DevOps portfolio; CA was particularly interested in adding a SaaS-based application performance testing solution built on open source software. After the acquisition, BlazeMeter seamlessly integrates with CA’s continuous delivery solutions to improve testing efficiency and accelerate the deployment of applications for CA’s customers.

Link to article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/inside-story-blazemeter-from-first-vc-meeting-exit-yoav-leitersdorf

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule

Link: https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/

The Habit of No

The habit of no can be scary but it can also be transformative. It starts with one person and then it spreads. It’s certainly not the easiest habit to develop, but if you can commit to keeping your head down — to executing on a common goal, and inspiring others around you to do the same, you might all look up one day and realize: “Holy shit! We’re on the moon.”

Link: http://ethansaustin.com/2015/01/01/the-habit-of-no/

The Fermi Paradox

Beyond its shocking science fiction component, The Fermi Paradox also leaves me with a deep humbling. Not just the normal “Oh yeah, I’m microscopic and my existence lasts for three seconds” humbling that the universe always triggers. The Fermi Paradox brings out a sharper, more personal humbling, one that can only happen after spending hours of research hearing your species’ most renowned scientists present insane theories, change their minds again and again, and wildly contradict each other—reminding us that future generations will look at us the same way we see the ancient people who were sure that the stars were the underside of the dome of heaven, and they’ll think “Wow they really had no idea what was going on.”

Link: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Dr. Sagan : In the Valley of Shadow

But if there was one lesson I keenly learned, it is that the future is unpredictable. As William John Rogers, cheerfully penciling his postcard in the brisk air of the North Atlantic, ruefully discovered, there is no telling what even the immediate future holds. And so, after being home for months—my hair growing back, my weight back to normal, my white and red cells counts in the normal range and me feeling absolutely splendid—another routine blood test took the wind out of my sails.

Link: http://www.bauleros.org/saganenfermedad.html