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Ethan Mollick Profile picture
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11 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
I am somewhat thrilled that NFTs immediately moved beyond parody. Here’s people bidding to acquire a signed tweet about people bidding to get a signed Pokémon card. Image
And now you can buy a signed copy of my tweet about signed copies of another tweet about signed Pokémon cards. Please don’t buy it: v.cent.co/tweet/13700528… @Cent
Probably still beats substack as a long-term business model though.
Damnit. I am trying to avoid creating art here, people. Image
I think I just created a third-order NFT derivative. Or possibly NFTception. Either way, don’t buy this, but it does exist: v.cent.co/tweet/13701557… Image

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More from @emollick

Ethan Mollick Profile picture
12 Mar
I think we underestimate how much COVID disruption will help big organizations in the long run. So many bad routines were disrupted, and new improvisation rewarded. Reminds me of this paper: when star NBA players are injured the rest of the team has improve & create new patterns. ImageImage
I’ve been talking to people at big companies that thought they would not have been able to make the switch to online, and it is clear that the sudden disruption to routines led to revelations. It is like a version of @work_matters & Rao’s subtraction game. hbr.org/2014/02/scalin… Image
Plus, the fact that every other competitor was disrupted in at the same time meant a breather from competitive pressure during the most confusing period. And the backstop of government aid helped, too.

So the real question is: what did your company learn from COVID practices?
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
6 Mar
The most sci-fi aspect of this century: if space development continues at the present rate, it is likely that the last time in history that all of of humanity was on Earth at the same time was November 2, 2000.
Currently, it looks like the moment that the ISS is retired (likely 2028) the private Axiom modules being attached to it will become their own commercial space station - the one in the image. And that assumes that no one else builds another space station first. After that? 🌙 🔴
The population of space. (The next barrier to cross: surpassing the maximum space population record...13) nefariousplots.com/figures/4
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
21 Feb
You may have heard that learning a second language makes you smarter, but more recent careful work, including meta-analyses of 157 studies, has found no advantage in any cognitive dimension for learning additional languages.
Similar negative news on chess. Previous work found that teaching kids chess improved a whole lot of outcomes, from math to logic to academics.... except that these studies were generally small. A large randomized trial with 4,000 students finds no advantages to learning chess.
But learning to code does actually improve other academic outcomes. 👇
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
29 Jan
Venture capital is the final big holdout of instinct-based investing in a finance world that has gone quant. This is from a giant survey of VCs & it shows only around 1 in 10 do any sort of quantitative analysis of past decisions & nearly half often make gut investment decisions ImageImage
This is because analysis doesn’t help that much. But neither does any other method: picking an unexpected first winner appears to require a lot of luck (VCs who do it once don’t do it again), but then that luck can be turned into status, and status generates profitable deal flow!
The issue is that if you are just going on instinct, investment decisions can suffer from many biases; including homophily - the tendency of people to like people like themselves. That creates real consequences for both the types of startups that get funded & VC performance 👇
Read 4 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
17 Jan
A thread 🧵 on launching & understanding one of the most common types of startups: marketplaces (also called platforms), which connect buyers and sellers together.

The grandfather of this type of venture is Craigslist, basically every Craigslist category became a startup. 1/4
Just before the pandemic, using billions of transactions, @a16z built a list of the biggest marketplace startups of today. The results are honestly not that encouraging for new startups: 4 older players, dominated by @Airbnb, take up 76% of all $ spent. 2/ a16z.com/2020/02/18/mar…
How do marketplaces make their money? By charging a fee on each transaction. This terrific piece of research lays out the amount each platform takes from a transaction. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Ethan Mollick Profile picture
16 Jan
We are living in a golden age of optical illusions developed for science. Some favorites: 1/

This square is not actually rotating! This illusion by Caplovitz & Harrison shows us how our brains create the perception of motion by integrating tiny movement: weforum.org/agenda/2016/07…
The Perpetual Diamond discovered by Flynn & @agshapiro2 never moves. Instead, it shows that our brains pay attention to the edges of objects to infer motion. More in their article: 2/
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
All of the lines in this illusion have the same gentle curve - really! The curvature blindness illusion by Takahashi suggests that our visual system defaults to seeing edges, given a lack of other information: 3/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20… Image
Read 6 tweets

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