Email is one of the most important skills that isn't, you know, actually taught anywhere, except maybe by apprenticeship in sales and consulting organizations.

This seems like a missed opportunity for every organization which sits downstream of email.
"What do you mean 'email'?"

Literally everything. Inbox management; filters and tags. How to write well for different audiences. The social art of pinging. Difference between a query and status report. How to know what to never ever write in an email. etc, etc
Forward to legal, mark as Privileged and Confidential in subject line and at top, and say:

"Seeking your professional opinion with regards to this email I got [from someone who clearly didn't get the memo we didn't send about what not to write in an email]."
It's sort of absurd when you think how many *percentage points* of total factory productivity growth we'd get out of just being systematically better at email.
And luckily this is one of those "The world is broken and I hate it" observations which is actually actionable by individuals in it; you'd be plausibly 10% better at your career by getting 2X as good at email, and that's very achievable for most people.
From which it follows: your budget for getting better at email should be +/- what you spent on university, a large company should trivially justify tens of millions spent on this problem, etc etc.

Educators on the Internet: take the money, please.

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More from @patio11

18 Nov
So my two favorite companies (Stripe and @twilio) published a case study together about everyone's favorite topic, credit card authorization rates.

stripe.com/newsroom/stori…

I want to zoom in on what creates a tenth of that 10% uplift, because it's sort of wild. Image
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?

You're right. Meet our friend ISO 8583.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583
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.
Read 20 tweets
18 Nov
"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?"
Shaving context off following:

"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?"
Read 8 tweets
18 Nov
This is, for better or worse, a thing.

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”
Read 4 tweets
16 Nov
Some interesting thoughts in this thread.

I think there are a few places one can make tradeoffs; would encourage people to not plan on having to make all the tradeoffs at once.

(For similar reasons, try to avoid same time as major life transitions like marriage/parenthood.)
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.
Read 4 tweets
13 Nov
Idle thought:

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.]”
Read 4 tweets
13 Nov
An interesting thread, which I do not have very strong opinions on.
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.
Read 9 tweets

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