Scott Hartley's Blog, page 2

"Low-Egoing" Is As Important as "Up-Skilling"

Claire Cain Miller had a great recent piece in the New York Times entitled "Why Men Don’t Want the Jobs Done Mostly by Women," highlighting how as Harvard's Larry Katz states, men have "retrospective wait unemployment." Men wait for the job they used to have. But in today's extremely fast-moving world, low-egoing is as critical as up-skilling. As General Assembly founder and sociology major Matt Brimer said in an interview for my forthcoming book,The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts...

False Dichotomy of STEM versus Liberal Arts

The debates of Charles Percy Snow continue on over 60 years after he delivered his "Two Cultures" lecture at Cambridge University. A novelist and physicist by training, Snow lamented the growing chasm between the sciences and the humanities. Today, we still perpetuate this "either or" mentality instead of considering their mutual, concurrent benefit. Increasingly we have political scientists who are highly statistically competent, and mechanical engineers who are shrewdly versed in "design th...

The Fuzzy/Techie Economist

The Economist ran a great piece on the "art and science of economics," looking at both the need for hard and soft, both methods and questions. In the era of increasing technical capacity and the need for "evidence-based" approaches, have we gone too far in considering how we prove rather than why we ask? Keynes wrote that a master economist ought to be a "mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher," in other words both a fuzzy and a techie, but today the primacy of the techie has dimini...

Finalist for FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize

This week I had the honor to attend the 2016 Business Book of the Year Awards dinner at London's National Gallery. Alongside the Book of the Year award, offered annually by the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company, they offer the Bracken Bower Prize for the best business book proposal by an author under 35. Along with Igor Pejic of Austria, and Nora Rosendahl of Finland, my book proposal for The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, was a Finalist for the B...

CoverWallet Raises $7.8M Series A

Today, CoverWallet announces that it has raised a $7.8M Series A investment, led by Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures. They have raised $9.5M to date, from new and existing investors Highland Capital Partners, Two Sigma Ventures, and Founder Collective. Union Square has invested in other companies such as Twitter, LendingClub, Kickstarter, Tumblr, and Twilio. Index has invested in companies such as Slack, Dropbox, Skype, MetroMile, and Wealthfront.

CoverWallet is reinventing how small b...

Short-Listed for the Bracken Bower Prize

I'm very excited to announce that my proposed book,The Fuzzy and the Techie, has been short-listed for the Bracken Bower Prize for the best business book proposal of 2016 for an author under the age of 35. The Prize is put forth by the Financial Times, and McKinsey, and named after two prominent figures in each respective organization,Brendan Bracken, who was Chairman of the FT from 1945 to 1958, and Marvin Bower, who was Managing Director of McKinsey from 1950 to 1967. In its first year, the...

Humans, Not Data, Failed to Predict Trump

Aaron Timms, Director of Content at PreData, authored a great piece in today's Fortune entitled "Was Donald Trump's Surprise Win a Failure of Big Data? Not Really." In the piece, he makes the great point that humans, not big data, failed us. Polling data has never been infallible, nor has it ever been predictive. Human biases shape every aspect of its framing, and its interpretation. That we "got it wrong" is not a failure of polling data, it is a failure of our interpretation of polling data...

Race to the Bottom of the Brain Stem

Since I met Tristan Harris in 2005, he's always been a reasoned iconoclast who has stood for something. After college at Stanford, I recall seeing him with matted hair in downtown Palo Alto. He told me he'd been sleeping on floors in self-imposed hardship to keep himself focused on the most important thing at the time, which was launching his company, Apture. At Apture he sought to bring more depth and context to the web, ultimately signing up the who's who of the publishing world before sell...

Death of the App... Birth of New WYSISYG

As the Slack API makes writing platform specific conversational chat bots easier, and as YC churns out new companies like Prompt,making a Twilio-like Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables easy cross-platform development, there will be an explosion of conversational AIs built over the coming months not dissimilar from the Apple July 2008 App Store launch. Moreover, as Slack has developed an $80 million fund to support bots on their platform, there is a coming race for platform dominance....

The Startup Jam Session

Jam sessions used to refer to bands. Today, I often find myself in conversation with a group of entrepreneurs about "having a jam session," nailing down ideas. If startups are the new version of the band, the after-school get-together, the creative moment, then today's jam session you don't need a lead guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer. What you need is a Hacker, a Hustler, and a Designer, a techie, a business lead, and someone to help communicate the story. The backend architect holds the...