My sister @JMollick produced #TheDropout - the new Hulu series on Elizabeth Holmes. In addition to being entertaining, it also shows some drivers of success in entrepreneurship.
So: a 🧵 of research on Theranos, and what honest investors & founders can learn from the lies. 1/
Much of the fraud was explained by "Symbolic Action." In a classic paper, Zott & Huy find that founders who skillfully use symbols do better, since folks view the symbols as indicators of real ability. They identify four categories of symbolic action, all exploited by Holmes 2/
The first category is showing personal capability, and the paper describes multiple ways of doing this: you can look the part of the entrepreneur; you can conspicuously show connections to top schools; or you can show that you are personally "all in." Elizabeth did all three. 3/
The 2nd category is showing that you are organized like a real professional organization. Common ways for entrepreneurs to indicate this are to have professional office spaces and the trappings of what people expect to see in a real firm. Elizabeth was very aware of this. 4/
The third category is to show symbols that your business can achieve its goals. The three classic ways to do this are to show off half-working prototypes, win industry awards, and show that you have received money from prestigious funders. 5/
Finally, we have a demonstration of key stakeholders, because if important people back your company, it must be good right? See the Theranos Board! (Of course, this didn’t convince real biotech VCs, who would have wanted to see stakeholders in the medical field.) 6/
And Holmes also was very good at pitching. This paper shows how she pitched Theranos using powerful techniques:
🖼Framing: Why the world needs improvement
💉Filling: Vivid images of how she would solve it
👥Connecting: Showing others trusted her
💪Committing: Showing dedication
7
Unethical startups are more likely to raise 💰 but also tend to waste it, hurting overall innovation. By comparing 2 sets of books, this paper identifies Chinese startups that got grants via fraud. Frauds were less likely to hire quality people & to conduct significant innovation
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Write me a corporate memo covering the following points, integrating them together in a good way:
-Forgive me for the murder I committed
-We will hit quarterly steel crumpet goals
-The fish people are here to evaluate our offer. Make sure to speak to them only in fish. Include some fish people sayings
-Do not touch the vortex in the break room. Explain why. -We have pivoted from a NFT company to an artisanal pickle shop. Give details about their similarities.
-Anyone not acknowledging Pluto is a planet will be fired. There will be a series of tests.
The legal and PR teams have asked you to walk everything back (even though everything that happened was real, and everyone knows its real), each point for a different reason, write that memo make the excuses elaborate and obviously transparent and over-the-top.
the floor is now lava, explain why, give new procedures, spin it positively. its actual lava. not fake, not a joke. lava.
(OMG, it has it in for Steve, hilariously, see the last memo)
So how is Runway AI able to model fluid dynamics reasonably well?
The prompt: "A highly detailed portrait of a marble eagle with honey oozing down. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
It isn't perfect (the viscosity seems to change a bit, etc), but why does it work at all?
This is going to be one of those posts where the reactions are divided between "this isn't anywhere as good as you could get with a physics model of fluid over a surface" & people who say "wait, how does a text-to-image model have anything like consistent physics for new scenes"
That prompt: "overhead shot: Two pirate ships sailing back and forth in a cup of coffee in a storm. Cinematic, highly detailed, film grade."
The Civ series is sort of like Ender’s Game, but for management rather than murdering aliens. Business school students who were good at Civ V also turn out to be better planners, organizers, and problem-solvers, in this small experiment.
Other games work as effective tests of fluid intelligence:
⌨️Performance in MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota correlates with intelligence
🎮Performance in FPSs like Battlefield, Destiny, and (likely) Fortnite don't show the same pattern
This qualitative research paper argued that the the skills of a raid leader in World of Warcraft & MMOGs work for offline leadership skills as well. Good guild leaders make good real leaders.
AI detectors have high flaw positives & teacher intuition seems to work even worse: “Here we show in two experimental studies that novice and experienced teachers could not identify texts generated by ChatGPT among student-written texts.”
Probably the most consequential technology that should have been “obvious” but wasn’t:
🌾The moldboard plow. As this excerpt from Mann's 1491 shows, it was a simple idea which China had for nearly 2k years before Europe! It was basically a prerequisite for the Enlightenment.
The invention of the moldboard plow in Europe was at least a millennia closer to the invention of the iPhone than it was to the invention of the moldboard plow in China!
Plus:
🚲The wheel was invented surprisingly late & maybe only once (as anything other than a toy). It came after sailboats & harps, and was not used at all in the Americas
🐴And the horse collar, a simple invention that sped up plowing by 50%, wasn't common in Europe until 1000
I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests
It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone... reddit.com/r/forhire/comm…
Agents are going to open a whole bunch of cans of worms.
It was actively monitoring the thread to take offers.