A related thing: many Japanese folks will solicitously use first names for foreigners on an assumption this is what they/we want; that is a tough assumption to correct politely.
I try to be pretty solicitous here, but between my inner thoughts and Twitter, I did not spend six years in the salt mines to get first named during a business card exchange. And almost never a -san!
This salaryman is shocked at the state of the new generation.
I still have a deep appreciation for the boss of my boss at my salaryman job, who called me “Patrick” to the entire company during my ceremonial swearing in then paused for a moment, corrected himself, and said: “I apologize, that was clearly inappropriate. McKenzie-san”
I never asked him why, but I assume the math went “I think it is deeply unlikely that most Americans would care what I call them at an ultimately meaningless ritual foreign to them but *this* American has tried very hard to become a Japanese salaryman so Oh Shit Bayes Theorem.”
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I want to zoom in on what creates a tenth of that 10% uplift, because it's sort of wild.
Have you ever wondered what a credit card transaction looks like to the computers handling it, at the closest-to-the-bare-metal level of detail? Feel they're unlikely to be JSON given we've had them for 50+ years?
As a grossly simplified level of detail, the Internet is a network on which whose commerce gets reflected on other networks, which sometimes crisscross the Internet, shipping ISO 8583 messages between various parties.
Most relevantly from the perspective of declines, to issuers.
"But how will you compete with AppAmaGooBookSoft's infinite number of engineers to throw at this problem?"
"... Before or after the 5 year head start?"
"If you had an arbitrary amount of talent and money to build a competitor for $PRODUCT, $PRODUCT would be... maybe three years ahead.
The goal, assuming that someone has made this decision today, is for $PRODUCT to be 6 years ahead in three years"
Speaking of which: a good question to have an intuition on is "What set of problems does humanity have insufficient organizational technology to solve, even if it had billions of dollars to throw at them?"
Some potential tradeoffs: tapering work rather than going cold turkey (e.g. switch to 2 days a week contractor at old employer), get a consulting pipeline in bag then juggle (harder than you’d think!), bootstrap to $Xk in nights and weekends (longer than you’d think), etc.
Sequence products differently; infoproduct as first offering greatly decreases your weeks-to-$40k-revenue and will motivate you to get a lot of business infra stood up, most importantly the email/marketing engines.
Clearly there should be investment opportunities in, without loss of generality, new Substack writers, including both by the platform and by others.
“I would certainly quit my job to do that but...”
If the thing you are about to say involves either risk or money then that is An Eminently Solvable Problem.
“Here’s $100k. You’re covered for a year. Here’s our business-in-a-box recommendations. Here’s the Slack where we coordinate cross-promotion in the portfolio.
We don’t want a dollar until you make 2X the old job. After that, we’ll take 20% [of the first million a year.]”
The big question of entrepreneurs is whether value occurs at the network level, the provider level(s), the financial institution, the infrastructure layer, the application layer, the brand layer, or the distribution layer.
“That seems like an awful lot of layers.”
Yeah wait until you hear about how much I’m oversimplifying it.
Best detail is how they sent X00 Bitcoin to their crypto custody provider and then found out that the person they thought was their AM at the custody provider was actually a fraudster and the Bitcoin was now unrecoverable.
That is an attack vector in real finance, too, and has been for hundreds of years, so sophisticated firms are reasonably careful about checking.