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“The Knowledge,” the test required to become a London taxi driver, is famously one of the most difficult exams in the world. The Knowledge is no longer required; it has been outsourced to an app. An Uber or Lyft driver is thus an “augmented worker.”
Every passenger is required to rate their driver after each trip; drivers also rate passengers. Drivers whose ratings fall below a certain level are dropped from the service.
“Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work.”
“A platform strategy beats an application strategy every time!”
In a presentation I heard General McChrystal give at the New York Times New Work Summit in the summer of 2016, he said, “I tell people, ‘Don’t follow my orders. Follow the orders I would have given you if I were there and knew what you know.’” That is, understand our shared objective, and use your best judgment about how to achieve it.
This outcome-focused, outside-in approach means that, effectively, a team is promising a result, not how they will achieve it.
DevOps is a way of seeing the entire software life cycle as analogous to the lean manufacturing processes that Toyota had identified for manufacturing.
The flip side of every problem is an opportunity.
There was also “black hat SEO”—creating websites that intentionally deceive, and that violate the search engine’s terms of service.
Given the traffic that a hot story can bring today, even professional news organizations use automated “social listening tools” to quickly pick up trending topics and republish popular stories on their own publications without the careful fact checking that used to characterize mainstream media.
black box, by definition, is a system whose inputs and outputs are known, but the process by which one is transformed to the other is unknown.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
“The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than it is in theory.”
Once an entrepreneur takes money from a venture capitalist, he or she is promising to sell or go public within the lifetime of the fund.
“If you want to understand the future, just look at what rich people do today.”
Work gives a sense of purpose, and it’s also worth considering how many things people work at that are currently unpaid, or low paid, that are actually far more valuable to them than things we have been mistakenly trained to pay for.
Every advance in our productivity, getting more output from an equivalent amount of labor, energy, and materials, has come from the pairing of human and machine.
Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off for you having tried.
One test of a bubble is how many entrepreneurs are focused on their upcoming payday rather than on the big things they hope to accomplish.
