"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?"
"Name one."
Deliver $10 to every citizen in the United States by the end of the week; no requirement for only-once delivery but hard requirement for at-least-once.
(I think Japan could actually do that, or 99% of it, if we assume the same magic wand that conjured the billions of dollars conjured instant political will to make it happen. It would require almost total mobilization of various government entities, but that is in the toolbox.)
(Let me observe that the prefecture of Kyoto put a watcher on every American on 9/11 overnight and had phones ringing before the US Embassy even asked Japan for assistance, because mid-level bureaucrat went to the case saying "State Capacity: in case of emergency, break glass.")
(Source: firsthand recollection by the person in charge of a school with ~60 Americans enrolled at it, who was greeted at dawn's first light by a police official apologizing that he could only spare two dozen officers in riot gear.)
("How is that even possible?" Foreign residents are required to be registered with the local ward and vis tourists there are only a few thousand hotels in Kyoto, all of which will comply almost immediately with a gov't request delivered in an "embarassingly parallel" fashion.)
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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.
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”
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.