benjohnson1707's comments

Isn't SoftOps just product thinking from an ops perspective / designing the developer experience?

You might want to look into the works of Elliot Jacques, who came up with apparently rigorous concepts about hierarchy and management since the 70s. Wrote a bunch of books. Interesting stuff, I find.

For now. As mentioned above, it will trickle down. It's pretty embarrassing these days to be German tbh. Especially after what has happened in the last 12 months. Feels a lot like the country as a whole just gave itself up and stopped caring. Now people just decided to enjoy the decline as it doesn't really matter anymore. Especially since we're about to elect a party to govern is that will drastically increase state intervention. And we all know how that ends, I guess.

As always, scale matters. Plastic will be superior to all the alternatives as long as it's a cheap waste by-product of oil refinement.

Make alternatives economically competitive to basically free oil refinement by-products, and we're talking.

EVs might help here, it seems.

Maybe on the long run, this might be X's very legacy: figuring out how to become good at achieving moonshots, by pursuing a lot of them and failing at the most.

At least that's what Astro Teller is talking about a lot: Work on the approach, don't pursue single lucky punches.

Sad that loom didn't work out. If X fails eventually, I think the idea of radical corporate innovation from scratch is dead.

Then Elon seems to be the only one left with the most promising 10x or even 100x playbook: hardcore dedication to insane goals in terms of resources, work ethics and throughput.

Rather a platform, isn't it? Matches founders with VC for a stake of 7% as fee.

Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects.

So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.

Surely his 'expertise' expires over time.

Before YC, there was no real playbook about how to start a startup. Now there is one (startup school). That's one reason why sama switched gears towards openAI. Starting up is now kind of a solved problem, conceptually

But on top of that playbook, there is tons of advice available from countless people in any kind of niche imaginable, state of the art, updated almost every week. SaaS, e-commerce, platforms, engineering, marketing, you name it.

But this very differentiated professionalism was a direct result of the success of YC, among a bunch of other players. Starting up in your early 20s in your doorm was a niche itself before YC, now it's very much mainstream (thanks as well to cloud and mobile).

PG never was a 'startup expert' it seems to me. He always has been and still is a hacker that enjoys building things that are interesting. It just so happened that between 1995-ish and 2015-ish that very niche-y hobby turned out to be extremely valuable for (more or less accidentally) building the foundation of one of the most lucrative global commercial and societal transformations in history.

The period between 2000 and 2010 laid the foundation. But not because it was intended, but because in hindsight, the right people with the right mindset turned out to build the right tool set that paved the way.

And once this way was paved, the 'army' marched in with trillions of dollars and a global flocking of talent and ambition.

Job done, it seems.

That's why he lives in England now, writes, codes and checks out interesting stuff built at Demo Day. Like it has always been, but in a completely different world, in which building tech became the most valuable thing.

The big difference between him and top notch medical experts seems to be this : piles of cash and cutting edge tech across all disciplines thrown at a problem. It's not common that a research proposal gets granted hundreds of millions of funding.

But here is what I've learned from Tesla/SpaceX: Cutting-edge tech changes the initial conditions of a problem. How things are measured, analyzed, manufactured, simulated etc.

The only things that are fundamentally constraining are the laws of nature. As long as you don't violate them, things can be done, potentially (in principle).

That why Musk has been like: OK, I see a feasible trajectory, so let's throw money and talent at the problem and see how it goes. Which by the way is how progress works. Pushing things.

Experts (especially scientists) have acquired their expertise within certain initial conditions. Initial conditions incorporate assumptions that might be outdated after having thrown money and tech at the issue.

That's why Musk doesn't give a damn about conventional wisdom but in my opinion only cares about the fundamental physics when it comes to basic feasibility.

What seems to be different compared to a lot of others seems to be that he is a scientific mind by training and a hardcore engineer by profession. Plus basic economics literacy and tons of money.

You usually find only one or those traits in people.

Tldr : his mantra is 'question your constraints'... Let's see how well that goes with this project

The problem eventually seems to boil down to this: 'if you don't make stuff, then there is no stuff' (E. Musk)

And there are less and less incentives to contribute in making / selling things vs. just making more money out of money for a living.

It's an important debate that the MM is trying to facilitate. And actually quite a good historic recap of the term value over time.

But while the finance economy 'feels morally wrong' (especially when being on the loser side), that doesn't make for a convincing argument yet.

Interesting take. Seems legit from an entropy perspective.

Given that most corporations fail eventually no matter what, you might have a point there.

Maybe what I meant was the micro-level, not the macro-level evaluation. It might be easier for a given individual within a large corporation to play the game of 'keep the system running' and do well as compared to playing an active role in a small group of pirates that is building value from scratch which eventually can scale to a significant size.

Fair point though!

Most companies seem to screw it up once they leave the startup stage and enter the growth stage. Incentives schemes aren't designed to 'reward' failure, but zero risk-taking.

It seems to be that simple: If you WANT innovation, you'll get innovation.

What most people (at least those willing to climb the corporate ladder) want however is a career. And within a corporate incentive structure, career and failure don't go well together. Creating value out of nothing is way harder than simply not screwing up existing value. So it's obvious what you're gonna get.

Eventually, there is no such thing as 'corporate innovation'. There could be a thing called 'corporate sponsored innovation garage', or something similar. At least for new business development from the ground up.

The promising way to pull that off it seems is a blend of YC startup school tutoring, venture capital, [Google] X, the innovation culture of Tesla/SpaceX and access to cutting edge technology/people - baked into the right incentive structure.

IF innovation was repeatable, I'd bet on such a vehicle and allocate resources there.

100 $ / kWh battery packs. Or the range of the Semi, deemed 'physically impossible' by a Daimler exec. Let's see how that goes.

Musk's whole point is this: much more things are technologically feasible, but most people / companies limit themselves within apparent constraints.

As mentioned: he's a physicist. From a physics standpoint, only a small amount of things are actually impossible. Only the deepest fundamentals give rise to constraints, and only those are the constraints he accepts. Everything else is debatable. At least. Sure, money so that he can throw army of talented engineers at problems helps. But it's his whole point! If it's your goal and it's possible in principle, reach for it.

Be it batteries, reusable rockets, autopilot.

That's why he says that it's possible in principle to achieve level 5 autonomy without lidar (having worked with lidar as chief engineer at SpaceX) and that it's possible in principle to do brain-machine-brain communication of language or complex ideas within a decade.

It might not work eventually. If so, it might be very well delayed for years.

But there is a reason that ppl like Thiel or Palihapitiya say: never bet against Elon.

Imagine Tesla actually rolling out level 5 autonomy within a year or two...

Seems to be the physics way of looking at the world. Don't trust potentially accidental empirical observations, because they might fail you in a relativistic universe in which there isn't even such a thing as simultaneity (all swans are white until one isn't).

Only trust fundamental truths / laws of nature, as they govern what works / doesn't and prescribe fubdamental constraints on how the world works - most likely anytime, anywhere and independent of a particular context.

So the expert looks at the world and says: everyone is doing agile, so what you have to do is agile. Replies the scientist... It depends!

The innovator's dilemma

Systemantics

A farewell to entropy

The nature of technology - what it is and how it evolves

On being wrong

Agreed! Let me clarify: high wages, once you're an engineering manager it's probably comparable. However, you're not nearly as relevant, from a value-sdd perspective. FAANG etc. are software companies. Lidl is an offline retailer. So top notch engineering there is not nearly as critical as for a company like facebook. So let me rephrase: way more buck for way less bang!

But a fair critique! Thanks for pointing out.

Once you're in a managing position, expectations can be high. Depends on the department however. Everything that is core business related (purchasing, logistics, store management) can be insane. Especially IT is a joke, mostly. But that's just my perspective.

Former Schwarz employee here:

The company made SO much money in the past 4 decades with big box / discount retailing, you won't believe it. Salaries are off the charts (it would make senior software engineers in SV look pale). Hubris is as well. The only thing that drives reasoning are statements like 'we're not just some random company, we're Schwarz Group'. It's the poster child Corp described by Andy Gorves statement: Success breeds complacency, complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

At the same time, skill level did not take off so much. Just to give you some insight: The Lidl online store team is not even aware of KPIs like CAC or LTV or even how many new customers were acquired in a given year. And it's a 10-year-old unit (still burning millions per year) .

The whole corporation is basically a 2-person-empire (the only two people that own shares and have taken the thing from 1 store to ~13k stores globally). They make every major call, and even random minor calls. It should be mentioned that they are 72 and 80 years old, respectively.

The Cloud idea very likely was acquired together with a former SAP cloud sales VP. Here is the difference: Core Schwarz DNA is selling packed soup to end customers at crazy scale, without even intervening in the whole process. Core DNA SAP is large scale enterprise sales. Go read the Stratechery posting about why Google failed with GCP to understand why Schwarz should not do this. When I once mentioned this in a LinkedIn thread, I was urged by colleagues to delete the comment because 'management did not like it'.

They are getting into the car sales and recycle business as well. Just to give you an impression.

Interesting times though :)

I wanna take the chance asking this question while having so many physicists present in this sub: is the 'first principle thinking' approach to problem-solving somewhat helpful outside academia? Is it a thing in the first place? Seems super interesting as a non-physicist, however it's hard to judge from the outside. Thanks for some insights.