My writing shtick is: 1. Find real-world situations that make more sense when you frame them in terms of financial and economic theory: Schelling Points, externalities, carry trades, optionality, the Capital Asset Pricing Model, etc. 2. Find examples of other people doing this, and point out that they’re wrong.
When I was younger, I was outraged by how popular athletes are. It made perfect sense to me that the world valued stuff I’m good at, like banging out five double-spaced pages on why literally any literary character is a Christlike figure, or getting a grade-inflation-adjusted Gentleman’s C
Subscribed is one of those books that you can dismiss as an extended press release. It’s a book arguing that every business should explore, or ideally switch to, a subscription billing model, and it’s written by the CEO of — a company that sells software to help companies manage
When I need to get a lot of work done, I go somewhere quiet, turn off alerts on my phone, close every program except Emacs and the terminal, and crank up the soundtrack to The Social Network. I know I’m not the only one — a lot of work gets
I had a pretty solid post lined up for today, but it’s going to have to wait. Instead, let’s talk about the importance of: 1. Backups, and 2. Bouncing back First, backups: back up your files! This is one of those things you can “know” but subsequently “learn.
A good bullet point for your bucket list is to write something that will change a lot of lives. There are a couple ways you could theoretically pull this off: you could come up with an amazing new idea, or at least a compelling sales pitch for an old one.
I’m on a SaaS/Enterprise software kick lately. Mostly from a process of elimination: if you understand consumer web pretty well, but suspect that the good ideas will mostly be implemented or perhaps murdered by the market leaders, what’s the closest adjacent market? It helps that as a
MBAs love to talk about “optionality” and how they want more of it. But you don’t need an MBA to explain yourself by saying you’re “Keeping your options open.” Optionality is the Millennial lodestar: we keep our options open. This is bad behavior, both morally and financially. (Isn’
One thing I never anticipated about being a parent was how many conversations would revolve around school. What are the schools like near our neighborhood? How much should I contribute to a 529 plan? Right now the answer is a little unclear, but I’m leaning towards “I don’t
Basis, a cryptocurrency project trying to build a token with a stable exchange rate against the US dollar, is shutting down. Basis was one of the smarter projects attempting to build a post-dollar currency exchangeable 1:1 for dollars, so if they couldn’t pull it off, it must be
Public policy is a powerful tool, but the two things policy can’t beat are technology and demographics. We’re used to thinking about technology, because the benefits are distributed according to whoever understands it best. Demographics are different: the edge from understanding them isn’t big, except perhaps for
Every so often, you see somebody try to summarize somebody else’s worldview in a way that accidentally perfectly encapsulates their own. Here’s an example I keep coming back to: last year, Lyft launched a shuttle bus service that offered fixed-price, fixed-route transportation during commuting hours. The predictable response: