sorooshazary

[sorooshazary]

"You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don't. They've got life going on around them, but they don't look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."

The City of Absurdity: The David Lynch Quote Collection

[sorooshazary]

"You may say that people look for meaning in everything, but they don't. They've got life going on around them, but they don't look for meaning there. They look for meaning when they go to a movie. I don't know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn't make sense."

The City of Absurdity: The David Lynch Quote Collection

[sorooshazary]

People’s desires change, and they get bored of things, so Facebook has to keep changing the mix to try to reflect that, and this has made it an unreliable partner for everyone from Zynga to newspapers. Facebook has to make subjective judgements about what it seems that people want, and about what metrics seem to capture that, and none of this is static or even in in principle perfectible. Facebook surfs user behaviour.

The death of the newsfeed

[sorooshazary]

50% of Facebook's engineering effort goes into stuffing more noise into the newsfeed, and the other 50% into working out ways to filter it

The death of the newsfeed

[sorooshazary]

‘Zuckerberg’s law’ (the supposed tendency to share more and more on social media over time)

The death of the newsfeed

[sorooshazary]

Microsoft is also suggesting that Xbox is not strategically core either, reflecting the reality that it will be the smartphone, not the TV or a box plugged into it, that will be the hub of the digital experience for most people. The smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits it.

Microsoft, capitulation and the end of Windows Everywhere

[sorooshazary]

though a big part of Microsoft's mobile strategy has been to push towards common code across Windows on the desktop and on mobile, so that it's easy to write apps for both at the same time, in practice that's largely irrelevant. The apps that people want on smartphones are not being written for desktop Windows anyway

Microsoft, capitulation and the end of Windows Everywhere

[sorooshazary]

If culture flows from success, then it follows that an attempt to change culture is far easier to accomplish when the most obvious indicator of success — one that has a direct impact on employee pocket-books — is moving up-and-to-the-right

The End of Windows

[sorooshazary]

For YC companies, the major cause of failure is thinking you have attained product-market fit. You then try to scale up and inevitably your expenses rise. This is deadly. For startups in general, the leading cause of failure is founder disputes.

Y Combinator CEO: “If You Are Not Drowning in Demand, You Don’t Have Product-Market Fit” | Capital & Growth Blog

[sorooshazary]

Guy Kawasaki famously said that the valuation of an early-stage company is arrived at by adding a million dollars for every engineer and subtracting a million dollars for every MBA.

Y Combinator CEO: “If You Are Not Drowning in Demand, You Don’t Have Product-Market Fit” | Capital & Growth Blog

[sorooshazary]

The key to getting to the right outcome was to keep from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative.

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

[sorooshazary]

At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that you’d be associated with that kind of incompetence. Seeing people fritter away money, waste each other’s time, and do sloppy work can make you feel bad. If you are the CEO, it may well make you sick.

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

[sorooshazary]

I remember when I first became CEO, an investor asked me to send him the “cap table.” I had a vague idea of what he meant, but I didn’t actually know what the format was supposed to look like or what should be included or excluded. It was a silly little thing and I had much bigger things to worry about, but everything is hard when you don’t actually know what you are doing and I wasted quite a bit of time sweating over that stupid spreadsheet.

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

[sorooshazary]

It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

[sorooshazary]

The reason founders hire product managers and VPs of Product is not to set vision, but to help execute the vision

Product Visionary vs. Product Leader

[sorooshazary]

What does a product leader do at a tech company? It’s actually very little of creating a vision and a strategy from scratch. It’s about helping everyone understand what the vision and strategy is. It’s about communicating to the entire team why the company is doing what it is doing. It’s about building a process that helps a team execute on that vision. It’s about when there are competing visions, aligning and motivating the team to focus on one, and getting people to disagree and commit (including sometimes yourself).

Product Visionary vs. Product Leader

[sorooshazary]

Product visionaries are who we all hear about in the press. They are the people who come up with brilliant products that go viral or solve real needs in the market that no one else thought of. They appear to be masters of finding product/market fit

Product Visionary vs. Product Leader