venturing.in

The pioneers of new technology must raise a lot of capital to create foundational infrastructure, which can lead to over-investment and speculative bubbles. When these bubbles burst, weak firms fail, and market power consolidates around industry leaders and their paradigms. Through this consolidation process, we can identify the common elements across applications and isolate them into standard, modular components that can be open-sourced or sold as individual services.

These abstractions make it easier to build more complex applications and enable a shift from capex-dominant to opex-driven cost structures that allow new products to launch faster and with lower startup costs.

– Link

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.

– Derek Sivers

A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.

Talking about your ideas with other people is a good way to develop them. But even after doing this, you’ll find you still discover new things when you sit down to write. There is a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

– Paul Graham

Sometimes sanity-checking ideas means demonstrating that they require absurd real-world assumptions. But sometimes things compound in such a way that the world turns out quite absurd from the perspective of the recent past.

– Byrne Hobart

Every political and religious movement in history has sought to undermine the family. The reasons are obvious. Not only is the family a rival coalition competing for a person’s loyalties, but it is a rival with an unfair advantage: relatives innately care for one another more than comrades do.

– Steven Pinker

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

– John Gall, Systemantics

Technologies inherit parts from the technologies that preceded them, so putting such parts together – combining them – must have a great deal to do with how technologies come into being. This makes the abrupt appearance of radically novel technologies suddenly seem much less abrupt. Technologies somehow must come into being as fresh combinations of what already exists.

– W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology

For years the traditional wisdom – long on tradition, short on wisdom – held that inflation protection was best provided by businesses laden with natural resources, plants and machinery, or other tangible assets (‘In Goods We Trust’). It doesn’t work that way. Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return – rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses.

– Warren Buffett

A good argument for strong norms of free expression is not that it leads to truth, but that it’s a form of system design that protects against the harms produced by small but well-organised groups that impose self-serving orthodoxies and taboos on the broader population. When that happens, you can’t challenge the orthodoxies without risking social punishment. By upholding norms in favour of free expression, however, you lower the scope and costs of such punishment.

– Dan Williams