After literally years of being told that by technologists about software, books, etc etc I can’t think of almost any market which has ever been saturated in the way that people claim every market is saturated.
Freaking *Starbucks* is not.
Starbucks of the industry-leading commercial real estate team which will give serious consideration to putting two Starbucks on the same street corner to avoid losing potential Starbucks customers who were at that street corner wanting Starbucks but not enough to turn for it!
Tagging the above tweet as being in no way sarcastic; they factually are one of the best real estate operations in the US (Walgreens and McDonalds also very good at this even within their categories) and they absolutely will take two corners.
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If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.
That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.
I think the so-called Bitcoin treasury companies have just reinvented exchange tokens: there is an asset with X real world utility but not naturally leverageable. It should flow to place in world where most leverage is bolted onto it; immediately incentive compatible. Repeat 100x
And then “Holy %}*]^ how did so much of it end up in a place with grossly deficient risk management?!”
(I understand that MicroStrategy is the opposite of leveraged exposure from the common shareholder’s perspective but if someone with hands on keyboard believes they are allowed leverage if they hold more exchange tokens then the model happens regardless of whether that is true.)
(n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
As I've mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say "There are many situations in society and in business where you're Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this point* We Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?"
People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like "Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great."
Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization.
You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. Their DB holds a pointer to physical address. If you move, you tell them, pointer changes.
And then when dealing with an e-commerce merchant instead of doing the traditional laborious address entry (which in Japanese usually requires redundantly providing the pronunciation of the address as well) you just give them the code.
This follows some more limited experiments with address virtualization, like the double blinding of addresses used in e.g. P2P marketplaces, where neither buyer nor seller strictly need to know where other lives if packages can move between them expeditiously.
Listening to @_rossry ‘s new podcast about drug development and the first episode about operational competence issues in clinical trials is giving me flashbacks.
Ross and Meri discuss how clinical research organizations, who are essentially GCs sitting between pharma labs and sites which actually have clinical staff that can see patients, often are other than competent at meat and potatoes execution.
Interesting article about falling backwards into founding a non-profit and then doing policy advocacy work, which had a number of points which resonated with me:
There is another paragraph about feeling turbocharged imposter syndrome when talking to subject matter experts and then realizing they’ve spent 0.01% of their career on *exactly* your new problem and so you understood it better than they do as of about day four or so.