I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.
It was a smart acquisition for sure, but "ruthless business genius" is a bit of hyperbole imho. FB's market cap was in excess of 200B at the time and they were growing like crazy. 16B on buying what they had failed to build internally and needed as a moat around their core business seems pretty straightforward.
Mere mortals like us just get caught up on all the extra zeroes these guys are playing around with.
Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive. If it were one percent of the business, sure, play defense, whatever--but 10%, over an abstract notion of "defensibility" is a really hard pill to swallow.
It would be amazing to know what the FB board thought at the time, and if zuck had to push hard for the transaction or not .
> Exactly, spending 10% (!) of your business to buy something that adds no revenue, was built by 20 people, where your team is working on an alternative that is "better", "just around the corner", etc is actually insanely counterintuitive.
It's not, and Facebook of all companies knows why. What they have is not some stupendous, irreplaceable technology. What they have is users and their relationships. That's how they killed myspace, not with revenue, not with their employee count, and not with their masses of technology, but with their users and the network effect. And that's how they will be killed.
Zuck controls the board though! Majority voting rights. Still, have to give it to him. Need guts to make such a call. WA and Instagram, the Crown Jewels of Meta.
Then again, nobody wins all the time (cough oculus cough).
I don’t think Facebook’s social graph / ad-based business model can be connected to a successful hw/sw XR experience.
However, Oculus is way too early to call as a bad bet.
Oculus could be like late model, pre-touchscreen Blackberry.
Where it is proving potential and demand for a new type of connectivity, but unable to leap forward far enough and fast enough to counter an entrance from Apple.
It could pivot its business model and become the most successful XR platform for Android users, consolidating support from Epic, Snap and others.
If Zuck wrote that email in 2013, he knows the headwinds against this direction and I don’t think he’s reached the Bowling Alley scene of There Will Be Blood quite yet.
Not sure what you allude to with Oculus, but the Oculus Quest is the best selling VR headset ever and is growing like crazy. With their research, they've also pushed the technological boundaries (things like inside out tracking, the new pancake lenses coming with Cambria by the end of this year, passthrough).
I truly believe that VR headsets will become the major computing platform. Not in the next 5 years, and not overnight, but eventually.
They sell Quest units at a loss and absolutely nobody is using VR to interact with any of Facebook's properties in a meaningful way. As of right now, it's a total distraction to their core business.
Granted, Oculus makes fantastic products that are making VR more accessible. However, as a business, it has been investment heavy[1]. Meta continues to make 10s of billions of dollars worth of investment to build an ecosystem around it.
I don’t think Zuck foresaw the level of investment he’ll need to make before turning profit.
Oculus (and the “Metaverse”) is a 10-20 year play, betting on people changing their habits and using VR as their primary medium of engagement online. They’re trying to build an iPhone/iOS like integrated hardware and marketplace experience, but it remains to be seen if they’ll be profitable as a business.
I surely wouldn't want to bet against Zuck, having bought multiple Quest2s, it surely has hit the product-market fit! Unless Apple steals their lunch coming year, Meta is going to be a big hit.
The quest2's standalone casual gaming capabilities are great - it's easy to setup a party guest for a round of beat saber in a couple of minutes, reminiscent of how accessible the Wii was
if the rumors of Apple's device costing $2000 are correct, they're not going to push the Quest out of that market.
You don’t need to respect him but continuing to disregard the intelligence of people you’re against (or not ) arbitrarily isn’t a smart move. Zuckerberg has proven beyond doubt that he’s more of a visionary than all other tech bro cEOs he gew along side.
If you have different goals competing for your limited time and energy (entrepreneurship, changing the world, building relationships, etc.) and you're not sure which to pursue, consider the values of self-actualization and personal agency and perhaps center yourself on them.
Self-actualization is tricky to define but it's basically the process of identifying whatever comes to you most naturally or has a tendency to emerge organically from your life experiences, and then pursuing it more fully.
The benefit of this approach is that whatever it is you end up doing, you tend to do it better, with more commitment, more creativity, and more satisfaction than if you had done something else.
It might change over time and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Other people may or may not like it. But in the end society's assessment of what you've done with your life is just noise compared to how you feel about it internally.
Listen to your thoughts... your unconscious, internal mental chatter. And if it's telling you to go a certain way, just do it, if it's the right call you'll probably end up doing something great, if it's the wrong one you will confirm that with experience and gain wisdom in the process.
When someone develops a distorted picture of the world and becomes an activist based on it, that's just as bad for society as if they had never activated in the first place. In fact you could make a case that it's worse, mass shooters tend to be highly ideological and have views that are at odds with reality.
The problem we have with social media (and to a degree traditional media as well) is that both the nature of the technology and the profit incentives of the platforms encourage shallow thinking and cognitive bias among users. Going from paper to screens was bad enough in terms of its documented effects on focus and comprehension. Add to that shrinking the screen down to the size of our palms, enforcing 280 character limits, amplifying the most outrageous voices etc. and I sometimes wonder how civilization is still intact!
I agree that people should maintain some form of awareness of social issues and participation in them, democracy doesn't work without this. But an information diet heavy on social media will promote a distorted awareness of the world. And time spent on social media feels significant but it doesn't actually effect change. Things that do include: voting, attending a protest, writing to your congressman, volunteering your time and labor, earning extra income which you can donate to a cause, etc.
There are a lot of ways to get informed, participate & influence society, social media is one of the worst. It's the junk food of activism.
The issue is absolutely bad government policy. The Reason article isn't very good but its premise is correct. I'm surprised to find myself saying this, but Truthout wrote a much better investigative piece almost a month ago: https://truthout.org/articles/company-responsible-for-tainte...
This is why government policy is at fault:
- Around two thirds of all infant formula is purchased through a single government program
- The government requires that there only be a single supplier of formula for this program in each state
- Through the natural tendencies of capitalism this has led to consolidation where one provider, Abbott, enjoys government-mandated monopolies in 34 states and a controlling share of the formula produced in the US
- Through the natural tendencies of monopolies which are unchallenged by competition, they sought to maximize margins above all else, concentrated their production and poisoned their own product, leading to the production shutdown and the shortage.
The government screwed up. Rather than blaming the problem on hoarding moms, Vladimir Putin or whatever next week's appallingly self-serving disinformation will be, they should amend the law which maintains a monopoly in the formula market. If the industry was not so consolidated by the government's addiction to picking winners, Abbott's screwup would have been more disastrous for Abbott and less disastrous for moms.
I wish people would give less medical advice over the Internet, even when it's well meaning. You're sort of right but the reality is that you can't just go find the root cause and "solve" it most of the time.
How do you know a person you're advising over the Internet hasn't already tried?
How do you know they weren't abused as a child, or a veteran suffering from PTSD, or a rape victim or any other number of things where the root cause is probably never going to be fully resolved, just managed.
There's a tragic amount of hate for doctors in this thread, and I really mean tragic because it's going to result in someone out there not getting the help they need, because they think they and the Internet are smarter than a doctor.
The medical profession has the right answer here, which is that in general for serious psychiatric disorders, you use a combination of drugs and therapy in order to get results. Drugs get you immediate results with a higher degree of reliability. Therapy is less consistent, expensive and slow, but when it works the effects are mostly permanent and side effect-free.
Now does the US system over-prescribe drugs and is it fucked up by cost pressures? The answer is way too often 'yes,' but people are conflating this with "doctors are awful."
There are people who need the drugs now as well as people who will need them forever.
In this case the parent said that they know what the root cause is, and hinted that they could solve it if it came to it. But they didn't think they needed to, because they thought that habitual cannabis use wouldn't cause them any issues. It seems reasonable to me to point out that such situations often cause problems, and that people don't usually realise until it's too late.
The reason I'm still a bit skeptical about password-less authentication is because the cost savings opportunity is enormous. So enormous that it would be easy to lose sight of everything else.
About a third of Yahoo Japan's customer support requests where password inquiries -- the FIDO Alliance estimates the cost of a single password reset inquiry at $70.
It's hard to look at those numbers as a manager with bottom line responsibility and not want to go full password-less.
But as a startup your main interest should usually be growth, cost reduction is best addressed after you hit a critical mass.
It feels like the jury is still out on whether password-less converts better -- this article says it does, but doesn't go into depth. Anecdotally it seems to frustrate a lot of people (me included).
Password-less may be great, I just know that in enterprise the support cost savings are going to distort or render all other arguments moot. We have a long history of ideas that have come out of FAANG, worked well for them, and been cargo-culted into the rest of the world where they promptly turned out to be a bad choice.
You can reduce password inquiries too by losing all your customers. It would be very Yahoo of them to lose thousands of customers and then promote the culprit because they reported that password request metrics got a lot better!
Not that I think that happened, but if it had to be any company that did that, they're a candidate.
What you're doing doesn't sound like ghosting. Ghosting is cutting off contact without warning or regard for the psychological consequences.
It's very easy to not be a ghost, all you have to do is provide a kind resolution. If someone asks you out on another date but you don't want to see them again, you just say something like "I'm sorry, I've gotten really busy lately, if I do have the chance to get together, I'll reach out."
No further communication is necessary. You've given them a plausible excuse that doesn't shred their ego too much and indicated that you're not interested in continuing.
If you don't do this, some people will speculate that it was their fault, and beat themselves up. They may blame it on their weight, their looks, their personality, over time, it may erode their self esteem. So it's good etiquette to not be a ghost. Unfortunately millions of people don't care enough to bother.
I agree that ghosting should be defined as actively not responding to someone who is trying to get in touch with you. But I would suggest that if someone is forcing the issue and asking to meet again, it’s better to respond with a polite version of “sorry, I am not romantically interested in you” than it is to say “maybe sometime”.
This isn't that great. Plenty of people will be waiting to be "reached out" to. This is like "I'll call you" then they don't. Just be less of a weasel and tell people straight that you personally aren't that interested, which is no ones fault. If you think they'll take it badly give them some reassurance to cushion a hurt ego.
Can't stress enough how valuable this is for small business. Auto-importing and auto-classifying transactions from financial institutions completely changes the way that bookkeeping functions. It also gives you real-time understanding of your financial situation and lowers cost/time.
Our accounting software auto-imports all of our transactions daily via the Plaid API and our classifying ruleset categorizes 95% of them automatically. All that's left for our bookkeeper is to spend a few hours a month going over the unusual ones and doing some general accuracy/sanity checks. In addition we get dynamically generated reports every week which are ~90% accurate. Prior to these features the model was "bookkeeper manually imports a bunch of transactions from multiple sources and does a ton of work at the end of each month and produces one monthly report." Automation here has been a huge win, lower costs and better results.
As much as I appreciate and prefer FOSS software I would never go back to the old way of doing things, the last thing a founder wants to spend a lot of time or money on is bookkeeping.
Personally I hope a day enough people join to push a law that impose banks to have a standard open API (like SEPA OpenBank, witch is mandatory here in EU BUT only open to institutions not private citizens) open to any customer NOT ONLY as read-only but also for disposing transactions to avoid the need of crappy web-banking porcals.
Unfortunately too many use computers every days without even understanding how can they work for their user profit instead of some third parties mostly employing the human customer as a data cow and small-microfinance bank...
If we legally mandate this what will the consequence be for small businesses that can't afford the cost to comply? (Even if you mandate it for only the big players - what if there end up being only three players who can afford it, they do it well, no one else does and you end up with only three banks?)
I'm super supportive of banks opening up their data for the reasons in my prior post. But the second order effects of regulation are often overlooked--this is exactly what has gone wrong in the US financial industry where we used to have thousands of credit unions across the country and since 2008 most of them have been driven out of business by compliance costs. Naturally the handful of banks that remain are the ones that were the biggest and had the best lobbying effort in Washington...
What "small businesses", the smallest bank I know can afford such change, indeed they already have anything in place because OpenBank is mandatory here, only artificially limited to just business operators. There is no costs for no one else.
I mean, you're clearly not describing a high documentation culture, you're describing a culture that underinvests in intra-organizational communication.
I run a high documentation, low meeting culture by necessity (we operate in five time zones around world). Meetings vs docs is remarkably similar to the decision between paying for office space vs paying for occasional team retreats. If you run a fully remote company retreats are almost always a better use of your money than leasing office space. But you still need to pay for something.
Similarly with meetings vs. process documentation. If you're heavily remote and spread out I'd say you should cut down on meetings and being high documentation is the better choice. But again you still need to "pay" for something - you save time on meetings but you need to reinvest at least part of that time into writing documents.
Another bonus of documents is that they scale better than meetings. McDonald's doesn't deliver the same big Mac in every corner of the world by holding a lot of meetings. They have a book that goes out to all of their thousands of franchisees. When they want to add another thousand franchisees, they print more books.
If the documents are out of date my answer to my team is always "update them!" Anywhere that we're writing documents there are revision and discussion features so it's not like you can irrevocably screw something up, just improve it and let us know what you did. I do struggle with getting people to actually do it though.