I just finished Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem, the winner of the Hugo Prize in 2015. Liu is one of the most popular and prolific authors of science fiction in China, and this book is one of the first of his works to be translated into English.
I will try to avoid spoilers, since mystery is really one of the driving plot points of the novel.
Liu addresses a variety of themes, although thankfully never meditates too long on any one of them. Perhaps the structural theme of the novel is the juxtaposition of the micro versus the macro. The novel begins with vignettes from the Cultural Revolution involving one of the main characters, Ye Wenjie. We witness Ye’s struggle with the chaos of that conflict in just the first few pages, seeing clearly how small yet brutal our politics can become.
Ye is also an astrophysicist though, and so even though she has faced these horrific challenges very early in her life, she also works with the stars and the wider question of what humanity’s place is in the cosmos. This theme plays out across the novel, and Liu carefully expands our field of vision so that the politics of the Cultural Revolution seem distant, albeit still echo in our minds. That transition is really quite brilliantly done, and represents the craft of science fiction at its absolute best.
Liu is known as a more “hard” science fiction writer, and there is definitely detailed discussions of mathematical theories and fundamental physics that certainly has the feel of a Neal Stephenson novel (albeit with better editing). Those theories play a pivotal role in the plot, and so it is nice to see this sort of deep science research that isn’t just for flavor but actually provides
Update: I published a copy of this base on the Airtable Universe, check it out.
People are annoying (I will add at this point that this is a recurring theme on this blog). They are constantly changing jobs (thanks Gen X!), changing locations (thanks millennials!), and changing messenger apps (thanks Gen Z!). Like many of my friends, I have struggled to just keep up-to-date with people while maintaining my sanity as a knowledge economy worker.
Over the last decade, I have tried many solutions to this problem, from paper and spreadsheets to software such as Rapportive, Contactually, Trello, among many, many others.
None of these solutions has worked out. The reasons often overlap, from being a jumbled mess to being just too hard to update (especially on mobile). But frankly, I have not made any progress in tracking people better today than I was doing several years ago.
Recently, I moved my entire CRM database over to Airtable. It’s been a long learning process, but my current setup is the best I have ever had, and so I thought I would share what has worked for me, and how I set up my database.
Before we begin, an Important Disclosure: I am an investor in Airtable through my former VC role at CRV. I am writing this because I think it is helpful for others, but feel free to discount everything I say (minus my complaints about millennials — that’s completely legitimate no matter how much I am paid by Baby Boomers to say it).
Thesis on Personal CRM
Before I dive into the how-to, I want to talk a bit about how I think about networking and why I track people. The reality is that I communicate with roughly 2000-4000 people every year — just professionally. One week last
It’s been about three months since I left CRV to become an entrepreneur. There is lots to talk about, but I want to write up a quick hit list of some thoughts since switching back to the entrepreneurship side of the table:
The market is far more saturated than it used to be. Really, I have some really long-tail ideas that I have been working on, and it never ceases to amaze me just the sheer number of founders working on projects. I feel like you could be building a startup around outer space meat processing and you would still be able to create a stereotypical 2x2 competitive landscape.
That said, it’s always hard to judge execution. I think ideas are worth more than a lot of people give them credit for, but at the same time, the same idea — executed by two different people — can return wildly different results. Even though we have reached a level of market maturity and there is a veritable gravesite of former startups, that doesn’t mean we should actually throw any of those ideas away. Hell, even Quirky is coming back to life.
Market monopoly leaders are a huge problem. Over the last three months, I have been doing the co-founder matching game (have leads – send them my way!). One of the interesting dynamics that isn’t emphasized enough in the monopoly discussion around Google and Facebook is how much these companies have essentially created a union job that saps the risk-taking of potential founders. How much of the decline in entrepreneurship in the US is driven by the increasing desire to work at these top jobs by the Founder Class?
Another obstacle to mobility is the growth of state-level job-licensing requirements, which now cover a range of professions from bartenders and florists to turtle farmers and scrap-metal recyclers. A 2015 White House report found that more than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs, with the share licensed at the state level rising fivefold since the 1950s.
Janna E. Johnson and Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota found in a nationwide study that barbers and cosmetologists—occupations that tend to require people to obtain new state licenses when they relocate—are 22% less likely to move between states than workers whose blue-collar occupations don’t require them.
The second article was about the challenge of building housing in New York in this lengthy discussion in the New York Review of Books. Exclusionary zoning is making it harder to build houses in many neighborhoods in the city, raising prices and driving more and more middle class workers out of the city. Although salaries have had a bit of growth over the decades, that minuscule growth has been dwarfed by the rapidly increasing rents we have seen in the city over the past ten years.
While housing and job protections seem to be quite politically quite different, the reality is that both occupational licensing and exclusionary zoning are really part of the same pattern: using
Basically, a citizen built stairs in a garden really cheaply (at 0.3% of the cost!), and Toronto took them down.
The story is absurd, but all of it is unfortunately “rational.” You can imagine a bureaucrat at city hall realizing that the stairs don’t meet a number of requirements for safety, reliability, inspectability, and more, so the obvious answer is to tear down the whole thing. Bad stairs are only likely to invite lawsuits, and so the city would prefer stairs not exist (increasing injuries on the hill) than to allow potentially unsafe stairs to exist.
I say potentially, because the more I study the problem of cost disease, the more that safety in a very broad sense is the root of the cause. No one wants to actually fight over the safety of a small staircase. No, a couple of steps shouldn’t be $150,000, but neither does anyone want to do the work to prove that a lower-quality model would be more than sufficient for the needs of its users.
When it comes to safety, no one ever wants to stand up for the issue of cost over the value of human lives. Even though economists have built an entire literature around the concept of the “value of a statistical life,” it actually takes someone to argue in a council meeting that no one is going to be hurt by a small and cheaply-built staircase in a garden.
So we get these absurd cases where we spend 1000x on a staircase, to reduce
I am a big believer in subscription models — both for software and for media. As such, I often bring up the topic with friends to get their take, since more publications are moving from ads to subscription, and more apps are doing so as well (for instance, through in-app purchases in the App Store for iPhone).
The consistent view I have gotten is that people absolutely hate subscriptions. That hate is particularly vituperative when it comes to content, but software is given no mercy either. And listening to some of my friends and their stories, it seems people will go to the ends of the universe to avoid paying some of these fees.
That said, nearly every person I talk to does pay for something, whether it is Netflix, or The New York Times, or something else. And many seem happy to do so.
Where’s the disconnect? While we can talk about perceptions of quality, utility and many other facets of products, I think the simple answer is that most subscriptions are just incredibly overpriced.
Take a couple of popular products as examples. 1Password is $60 annually for a family license, Pocket is $45, and while Evernote has several tiers, Premium comes out to be $69(!). I do pay for these licenses, but they seem shockingly expensive for the real value I get out of them. How many people — probably with less disposable income — saw those prices and just walked away?
It isn’t surprising that most software companies are priced this way. The traditional advice from VCs for years has been to just ignore cheaper users. “Fire your cheapest customers” and “just raise prices” are heard ad nauseam. VCs actively won’t fund startups where the average revenue per user is in the single digits, because past experience
One of the challenges I feel founders face, yet don’t discuss often enough, is how income inequality is changing product development.
One doesn’t have to read through Thomas Piketty’s behemoth Capital in the Twenty-First Century to understand that our society has become far less equal — just take a good, long look around startup hubs like San Francisco and New York. What used to be a continuum of incomes is now turning into a handful of groupings, and products are increasingly targeting a single bucket rather than the broader consumer market.
The best analogy I have to this is the current configuration of domestic airlines. Today, there are roughly four classes of service on Delta and other legacy carriers: Basic Economy, (Standard) Economy, Premium Economy, and Business/First. What used to be the Economy, Business, First three-class distinction has become a two-class distinction, with one of the classes strongly stratified based on a few dollars difference between consumers.
The trend in startups has been to focus on that elite Business/First demographic, but I think that is a mistake given the history of technology exits over the past few years.
Basic Economy
For those who don’t know, Basic Economy takes away such airline “luxuries” as the ability to select a seat or use overhead bin space. What’s happening is that a large number of Americans want to reduce their costs to the bare minimum, regardless of the quality of the product or experience. Thus, we see the massive rise of dollar stores across the country, which in some cases are outcompeting Walmart.
The Basic Economy demographic is hardly tiny – it’s hard to put a figure on it, but I would put it somewhere at 40-60% of the population.
Recently, I had a debate with a group of friends about the future health of suburbs when autonomous cars arrive (let’s set aside when exactly that might be). The general consensus has been that the suburbs are going to grow rapidly, since commutes into the city (or just going out for a night on the town) will be far safer, efficient, and convenient than today’s status quo of driving a car and having to find a place to park.
I disagree with this view quite strongly.
The decision on where to live isn’t made in a vacuum. In fact, quite the opposite - people spend enormous time choosing where to live and the mix of amenities, convenience, and price they are willing to bear. Apartment searches, along with job searches, are among the canonical examples of search costs in the economics literature, and for good reason.
First, a lot of the analysis I have read on this topic assumes that people will choose suburbs with autonomous cars instead of cities, but they somehow miss the fact that cities will get these vehicles as well. Autonomous cars will usher in incredible conveniences for everyone, regardless of where they live, and I don’t think cities or suburbs are frankly going to beat the other on this point.
Instead, the key factor is going to be economics. There is this assumption that a) traffic will be better with autonomous cars, and therefore b) people will live even further away from cities, because the decay function of convenience with regards to distance is going to degrade much more slowly than it does today.
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Head of Editorial at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.