What’s Next — Fail, Bubbles, Flyingby Jordan Gonen | 2.12.2018
by Jordan Gonen | 2.12.2018
Hi 👋 Writing this edition from Taipei 🇹🇼 Hope you are having a great start to your week.
A few friends and I launched StartupSift — a dead-simple tool that lets you query high potential startups by industry, location, etc. Here are some of our favorite companies. Lmk what you think and would be awesome if you could share with friends looking to join a breakout company. Articles to Read.
In Our Cynical Age, No One Fails Anymore, Everybody Pivots:
A word once used to describe a guard angling for position on the basketball court is now in wide circulation in politics and business. That’s especially the case in Silicon Valley, where pivoting has become the new failure, a concept to describe a haphazard, practically madcap form of iterative development. With its sheen of management-speak, pivoting is well suited to our moment. And like any act of public relations, pivoting is also a performance. A key part of the act is acknowledging that you are doing it while trying to recast the effort as something larger, more sophisticated, highly planned. The pivot, though it arises from desperation, is nevertheless supposed to appear methodical.
Making the Most of Second Chances:
We all get lucky. Once in a while we do something really stupid that could have resulted in death, but didn’t. Just the other day, I saw someone who was texting walk out into oncoming traffic, narrowly avoiding the car whose driver slammed on the brakes. As the adrenaline starts to dissipate, we realize that we don’t ever want to be in that situation again. What can we do? We can make the most of our second chances by building margins of safety into our lives.
Sophie Scholl Was Beheaded at 21 Years-Old for Standing Up to Nazis:
She distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets at the University of Munich.
A year ago, I lived in San Francisco. I spent over $2,000 a month for one bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment in the Mission District. Outside of working on my startup, I devoured books on my Kindle and brooded with my fellow liberals about Trump and the GOP on Twitter. Most everyone I knew was agnostic.
Today, I live in Provo, the most conservative (and religious) city over 100,000 people in America. I live in a one-bedroom apartment that costs $800 a month. I no longer tweet as much, and especially not about politics. A majority of my friends, including my girlfriend, are religious, and most of them are conservative. I go to church every Sunday.
20 Secrets From the World’s Most Frequent Flyers:
The best seats, the best planes and the best point schemes, as told by the jet-setters who spend their lives in the air.
10 Year Futures (24 minute video) (must watch IMO):
Andreessen Horowitz’ Benedict Evans reflects on mobile, Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon, innovation, machine learning, computer vision, autonomous cars, mixed reality and crypto-currencies — and more, in this keynote delivered at the most recent annual a16z Summit (November 2017 in Las Vegas).
How Gesture Control Will Transform Our Devices:
In 1970s, wired gloves were invented to capture hand gestures and motions. The gloves use tactile switches, optical or resistance sensors to measure the bending of joints. Those gloves had clumsy setup, limiting the applications to research purposes.
Vision based gesture recognition uses a generic camera and/or range camera to capture and derive the hand gesture. It requires higher processing power compared to a wired glove. There are multiple methods for camera based gesture recognition. The simplistic approach can do basic stuff like finger counting. However, it is not suitable for more complex use cases. The reliability is strongly affected by factors like lighting and skin tones.
Edison’s commercialization of the electric light bulb quite literally changed the world. His technology helped enable the power grid, modern transportation, and ultimately the lifestyles we enjoy today. Lighting improved gradually over the last century until the recent mass adoption of LEDs.
As LED lighting goes mainstream, we face new challenges. You can no longer buy a 60 Watt bulb. Instead, you have to dive deep on CCT, CRI, lumens, and other jargon. There is an increased awareness of the risks of blue light coupled with unwarranted demonization of the new technology. The lighting industry as a whole faces stagnation.
More to Check Out:
– A Way to Detect Bias
– Ethereum’s Whitepaper
– 10 Days of Silence
– The Days Are Long But Life is Short
– Grove (cool new startup)See My Full Reading List
My Update:
– Launched StartupSift with a few friends! Hopefully can become a helpful resource for tons of people.
– Headed back from Taiwan to HK soon. Will be doing lots of traveling over the next few months.
– What can I do to improve this newsletter?
By jordangonen on February 12, 2018.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.