Postcard 19: Internet Friends
Greetings from New York!
This last week was a busy week, I learned a lot, and I have a ton of learnings to share with you.
It seems like there is a method to the madness of building up skills on the Internet. For me, those skills of writing and putting myself out there are starting to converge. And in one tweet, I got all my money's worth.
The side project my brother initially built and I jumped on to help, TapeX got over 1,000 users in 48 hours. All for free with no Ads. The majority of that came from writing, a few cold DMs, a Twitter thread, and the generosity of friends on the Internet.
The tweet alone got over 65,000 impressions so far. According to Twitter, 65k impressions cost somewhere around 5,000+ dollars in Ad Spend.
That tweet proves that writing is a critical skill for communicating with the world and aligning the world to help you. It also proves that building an audience, no matter how small, has massive value.
Let's get into some of the learnings from others this week.
A few ideas I ran into this week:
HOW TO WIN
Study the CEO.
Does the CEO have:
- tenure in the industry
- passion for product
- a large ownership stake
- decisionmaking authority
- a team-of-teams culture
- a deep grasp of the economics
- an experimental streak
- the will to be wrong
- a forever time horizon— Tom Gardner (@TomGardnerFool) August 1, 2021
Tom is talking about investing with this list, but I find the list to be true about the companies we pick to work for and the Startups we may choose to join or start.
We really should be in the middle of a golden age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did not exist. *Backspace* did not exist. You had to type it all by hand.
— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) November 19, 2020
An amazing thread from Balaji about productivity and the fact that we have more tools today than our kind has ever had and yet the productivity has evaporated. Balaji has 5 theories about where it's gone:
The Great Distraction - We are too distracted by non-productive stuff.
The Great Dissipation - Forms, Bureaucracy, Compliance, etc have eaten it.
The Great Divergence - Some people are really productive, so it's there.
The Great Dilemma - Productivity has been burned in wierd ways.
The Great Dumbness - Productivty is there for some cultures but we've made dumb decisions in the west.
I firmly believe all 5 are true at the same time.
“The braver I am, the luckier I get.”
— Glennon Doyle— Jesse J. Anderson • ADHD Creative 🚢 (@jessejanderson) July 31, 2021
"There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs."
- Thomas Sowell— Michelle Tandler ⚖️ (@michelletandler) August 3, 2021
Two quotes that got me thinking that I find to pack a ton of context and truth into them.
Employers bow to tech workers in hottest job market since the dot-com era
This article details well the war for Software Engineering talent. Post pandemic, things are getting crazier than ever.
From Stolen Laptop to Inside the Company Network — Dolos Group
A fascinating writeup on how hackers can exploit anything. Even a secured lost laptop can let them into your company network.
The Incredible Fig - Issue 104: Harmony - Nautilus
I love figs, I grew up eating them, they are healthy and delicious. Also very expensive to buy in areas where they don't grow. You may be surprised to learn that a fig isn't a fruit at all, it's a flower. And it plays a very important role in plant ecosystems.
A few more quick updates from me:
The total number of downloads of TapeX as of this writing:
A few strangers, from Asia, have paid for the Pro features so far. The Internet is an amazing and crazy place. Keep in mind that we only just launched Pro, a few days ago, and the flows are terribly unoptimized. But it least validates that someone is getting enough value to pay actual real life money.
After the course The Minimalist Entrepreneur ended on Wednesday night, we all met in the city for some drinks. Proving once again that the Internet is an amazing and crazy place and that you should use it to make friends and find your tribe.
Thanks for reading.
A reminder that my inbox is open; feel free to reply to this email. I love hearing from my friends and acquaintances who subscribed to this weekly postcard, and I am happy to help in any way that I can.
Have a great week,
Louie