1/ You create value when you fulfill the unmet desires of people better than the alternatives they have (from competitors).
2/ The idea that capitalism rewards things that are rare and valuable was proposed by @ScottAdamsSays in his essay on career advice where he recommended readers to master various skills until no one else has the mix that you have.
A great example of building something that's rare and valuable is Facebook. Read about it in the full chapter here: invertedpassion.com/capitalism-rew…
4/ A fatal but common mistake that entrepreneurs make is misjudging what makes something valuable.
Many entrepreneurs start companies around their own passions and desires, but not many share their passion.
5/ Entrepreneurs are an odd bunch, what excites them isn't representative of the wider public
If you don’t understand what's valuable to others, you'll end up building products and services that nobody needs
6/ However, even if you end up correctly identifying a broadly shared desire or frustration, another costly mistake is to ignore how such desires or frustrations are currently being serviced.
(Why would customers switch from the tried and tested options to you, the unknown one?)
7/ Hence, value creation requires identifying what specific desires of people others haven’t yet figured out.
Turing’s Dream first batch - who is in it and what they’re upto.
🧵
1/ Praveen Chavali - @praveen_chavali is exploring the math of neural networks, and is trying to build a black box optimization method for compressing large models into smaller models.
At yesterday’s tech deep dive, he showed why GANs never converge.
@praveen_chavali 2/ Mehul Goyal - @observerforever is a former hedge fund guy who is now exploring how to model time series data using deep networks.
Yesterday, he explained the problem formulation of predicting sharpe ratio via a reinforcement learning kind of a setup.
1/ I love thinking about thinking. Give me a research paper on rationality, cognitive biases or mental models, and I’ll gobble it up.
Given the amount of knowledge I’ve ingested on these topics, I had always assumed that I’m a clear thinker.
2/ Recently, though, it hit me like a lightning strike that this belief is counter-productive.
That’s because is you “know” that you’re a clear thinker, you’re less likely to suspect that you might be missing something big in your thought process.
Effective technique for not getting involved with thoughts and emotions.
Correction: it’s acceptance commitment therapy.
By the way, not fusing with thoughts and emotions is the core of mindfulness and is pretty powerful.
Thoughts and emotions that bubble up to your consciousness is mostly clickbait - they got selected precisely because they’re exaggeration’s fabricated to make you pay attention.