âThe challenge with 30 year thinking is it requires making difficult choices in the short term so you can move towards the life you want in the long term. Time for writing has to come from somewhere. You might get FOMO from skipping happy hour. Friends whose 30 year trajectories don't excite you may need to go. The changes arenât easy, but a little pain now is better than a life of regret.â
2. A Founder's Guide to Writing Well
âCrafting Churchillian prose is beyond the reach of most and isnât likely to land you the Sequoia term sheet. Yet, writing ranks as perhaps the highest-leveraged tool available to leaders of all stripes. Logically, the bigger your company becomes, the more writing is a skill worth having. Even in a world filled with weekly TGIF meetings Zoom-ed around the world, a few carefully-crafted paragraphs can often win the day.â
3. Bill Gates on Covid: Most US Tests Are âCompletely Garbageâ
âWired: At this point, are you optimistic?
Gates: Yes. You have to admit thereâs been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022.â
âBut what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?â
5. Number Fever: The Pepsi Contest That Became a Deadly Fiasco
âDecades ago, a marketing stunt promised Philippine soda drinkers a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winnersâand to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.â
6. Storm in a port: The unfolding disaster of the Ruby Princess
âMuch of Australiaâs response to the COVID-19 outbreak has been based on a faith in the old saying that âdoctor is rightâ. The Ruby Princess showed the limitations to this faith, when, amid a fast-changing public health crisis, there was a convergence of bad organisation, bad systems design, bad communication, a legacy of bureaucratic rigidity, and a set of guidelines that was, in Walkerâs words, âdoomed to inadequacyâ â not to mention plain bad luck.
His inquiry neither sought nor found a villain, nor indeed found that anyone had failed to follow the steps that had been laid out for them on the day. The operation was a success, as it were, and yet at least 21 patients lost their lives. This harrowing fact would exercise its own silent judgement.â
7. How the Pandemic Defeated America
âSometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a humanâand another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVIDâ19 pandemic had begun.â