Four short links: 3 November 2017
End of Startups, Company Strategy, Complex Futures, and Bitcoin Energy
- Ask Not For Whom The Deadpool Tolls — We live in a new world now, and it favors the big, not the small. The pendulum has already begun to swing back. Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps.
- Notes on Developing a Strategy and Designing a Company — These notes provide a sequence of steps for creating or evaluating a strategy and associated company design, drawing clear lines to quantitative and evidence-based evaluation of enterprise performance and to financial valuation. The notes are intended for practical use by managers or instructors of MBAs and executive MBAs.
- Designing Our Complex Future with Machines (Joi Ito) — We should learn from our history of applying over-reductionist science to society and try to, as Wiener says, “cease to kiss the whip that lashes us.” While it is one of the key drivers of science—to elegantly explain the complex and reduce confusion to understanding—we must also remember what Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” We need to embrace the unknowability—the irreducibility—of the real world that artists, biologists, and those who work in the messy world of liberal arts and humanities are familiar with.
- Bitcoin Energy Consumption — 7.51 U.S. households powered for a day by one transaction; $1B of energy used in a year to mine; Bitcoin has the same energy consumption as all of Nigeria. “Bitcoin” is how homo economicus pronounces “externality.”
