FM Notes

Foreigners, who are about a third of the country’s population of 30m, must find ways to cope in the 40°C heat. Many aren’t Muslim. Unlike Saudi citizens, many work on sweaty building sites, so going without water is a bit of a problem. They eat at home or sneak water and food during trips to the bathroom. Some hotels discreetly put on room service for “non-Muslim guests”.

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

This is why diversity matters — and it arguably matters even more at new companies that are right now creating the 'rules' of their products that, should they be successful, will be all but impossible to change. ... More broadly, I hope that the fundamental humanity that goes into any decision — product, policy, or otherwise — is appreciated by everyone in tech. Just as products and companies are either growing or dying, so too efforts to make the technology industry more accurately reflect, and thus better serve (and better monetize!) the diversity of the human race, are either explicitly improving the status quo or implicitly embracing it. There are no neutral 'rules.'

The big difference right now, between Bernie Sanders and Hillary is that, Bernie Sanders is shooting for the stars, even if the rocket ship might blow up. And uh, Hillary is almost like, let’s just fly to Akron and get there in one piece.

Our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned - there was one in the car, one in the fridge and so on, and they owned maybe a dozen. In the same way, we know roughly how many devices we own with a network connection, and, again, our children won’t.

You see, in these intervening forty-two years I've lived a good life. I've loved a good woman. I've raised a good man. I've seen the world. And I've forgiven myself. And you were the source of all of it. You breathed your spirit into my lungs one rainy afternoon, and you can't possibly imagine my gratitude.

From our observations, pushing registration to checkout vs. at app open increases conversion by more than 50%.

In marketing lingo, adtech is a form of direct response marketing, which is descended  from the direct (aka junk) mail business, not from Madison Avenue. The difference is critical, because what we really need to block is  adtech, not all of advertising.

But the speed issue is an entirely separate advantage, one Trump is dominating first because he's been playing this game for decades but especially because he's adept at social media and is palpably going by gut and operating on his own without the complex messaging operations that cling on to every other candidate. News organizations and media figures can always move faster than candidates because they have to hold press conferences and prep for them or send out press releases which by definition need to go through the media itself. Twitter has the added advantage of allowing him to flick the news cycle without showing his face or getting questions in response. But the whole picture brings home just how much the modern campaign is built around risk aversion, protecting the candidate from him or herself. When you see tweets like these you are absolutely certain Donald Trump wrote them himself. It's definitely him, as clear as a tweet from Chuck Grassley could only possibly be from the senator himself.

This song personifies drug addiction, likening it to the love of a woman and has been described as “classic pop” by critics, comparing its sound to that of Michael Jackson.

“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official mathematicians could handle,” he continues. “But then once Arabic numerals came around, you could actually do arithmetic on paper, and we found that 7-year-olds can understand multiplication. It’s not that multiplication itself was difficult. It was just that the representation of numbers — the interface — was wrong.”

By following the network, it’s possible to illuminate other narratives of history and politics, ones which have not been seen and told so clearly before, and may point the way to other futures.

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything. I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company. I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

The [Blackberry] Storm had "a 100 percent return rate" for Verizon