Blog - Page 3 of 9 - Assert Digital Ventures

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts…

July 13, 2020July 13, 2020
by Andy

This is important not only for core science but anywhere there are unknowns and lack of confidence in the conventional knowledge. Most people resist this relying on tradition. A fatal flaw.

For science… It does not matter whether you are young, old. You can be rich or poor. You can be schooled or not. But you must listen, learn and be patient. In effect, you need to be a constructive skeptic. And you must question your own ideas with even more effort than you question other ideas.
https://lemire.me/blog/2020/07/12/science-is-the-belief-in-the-ignorance-of-experts/

Policy

The chip-making machine at the center of Chinese dual-use…

July 13, 2020July 13, 2020
by Andy

We’re seeing technology and policy cross more and more as tech continues to move into more central roles in lives. However, different than the current discussions around free speech, privacy and national laws comes this:

Recognizing the strategic importance of EUV machines, and under pressure from the United States, in November 2019, the Dutch government prevented ASML from shipping an EUV machine to China. Related news coverage painted ASML as a pawn in the U.S.-China trade war, but the Dutch decision was about so much more. There are many strategically important technologies in the development pipeline that are potentially dangerous or destabilizing. They include artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems, hypersonic missiles, cyberweapons, surveillance tools, and the latest generation of nuclear weapons. These technologies, and many others, require state-of-the-art chips to develop and deploy. Keeping these chips away from the Chinese government, or those acting on its behalf, can pre-empt many worst-case human rights and security scenarios in the coming decades. The Chinese government cannot engage in techno-authoritarianism or arms races if it lacks advanced chips.
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-chip-making-machine-at-the-center-of-chinese-dual-use-concerns

Product Management

What comes after Zoom?

June 29, 2020June 29, 2020
by Andy

That’s not the most interesting question here but “why” people are in video and why they do what they do. When I teach about product, I always tell my students to ask the deeper why — some refer to it as the “5 whys” — to get to the core of why someone does and decides what they do. That’s the interesting question here.

The easiest one is “why do we have mute”? Shouldn’t it sense that I’m not talking and auto-block background noise (admittedly, only one use-case of mute)?

When Snap launched, there were infinite way to share images, but Snap asked a bunch of weird questions that no-one had really asked before. Why do you have to press the camera button – why doesn’t the app open in the camera? Why are you saving your messages – isn’t that like saving all your phone calls? Fundamentally, Snap asked ‘why, exactly, are you sending a picture? What is the underlying social purpose?’ You’re not really sending someone a sheet of pixels – you’re communicating. That’s the question Zoom and all its competitors haven’t really asked. Zoom has done a good job of asking why it was hard to get into a call, but hasn’t really asked why you’re in the call in the first place. Why, exactly, are you sending someone a video stream and watching another one? Why am I looking at a grid of little thumbnails of faces? Is that the purpose of this moment? What is the ‘mute’ button for – background noise, or so I can talk to someone else, or is it so I can turn it off to raise my hand? What social purpose is ‘mute’ actually serving? What is screen-sharing for? What other questions could one ask? And so if Zoom is the Dropbox or Skype of video, we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/22/zoom-and-the-next-video

Uncategorized

Tim O’Reilly makes a persuasive case for why venture…

June 27, 2020June 27, 2020
by Andy

Tim O’Reilly has a financial incentive to pooh-pooh the traditional VC model, wherein investors gamble on nascent startups in hopes of seeing many times their money back. Bryce Roberts, who is O’Reilly’s longtime investing partner at the early-stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), now actively steers the partnership away from these riskier investments and into companies around the country that are already generating revenue and don’t necessarily want to be blitzscaled.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/26/tim-oreilly-makes-a-persuasive-case-for-why-venture-capital-is-starting-to-do-more-harm-than-good/

Exactly. VC is broken and breaks entrepreneurs and solid businesses by putting them on an unsustainable growth push looking for outsize returns. Its all in the interest of the VC.

Product Management

Does your SaaS product stack up?

June 24, 2020June 24, 2020
by Andy

New SaaS product report for product managers.

Innovation

The new trucker’s helper?

June 23, 2020June 23, 2020
by Andy

I’ve been advocating for a modern trucker’s helper. Maybe coronavirus has brought us one.

When you compromise UX for a perceived competitive threat.

June 8, 2020June 8, 2020
by Andy

We can’t know for sure but this is not a user-centric tradeoff.

Amazon order confirmations and shipment notifications no longer include any item details. I could not for the life of me figure out why they would do this. They’re not scored on MAUs, they don’t need me to click through. Then I realized: is it so Google can’t see my order data?
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/06/01/unhelpful-amazon-order-confirmation-e-mails

Sad if true but what happens when you drift from your customer.

Behavioral economics

Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss…

June 2, 2020June 2, 2020
by Andy

This study adds weight to Loss Aversion theory through an interesting experiment design.

Loss Aversion: a cognitive bias that causes potential losses to be weighed more heavily than potential gains (the ratio is somewhere around 2:1, meaning that most people will feel comfortable with a decision only when the likely gains are double the likely losses).

In it, Steven Levitt (of Freakanomics fame) had people facing a life decision — from big ones like ending a relationship and leaving a job to lesser ones like going on a diet — and who were on the fence, toss a coin to indicate the direction and then tracked their happiness over the next year.

Under Loss Aversion, this would mean they were valuing the change at about 2x utility of not taking the decision. However, since people who made the change report higher happiness, this counters expected utility theory.

…when it comes to “important” decisions (e.g. job quitting, separating from your husband or wife), making a change appears to be not only correlated with increased self-reported happiness, but also causally related, especially six months after the coin toss.³ Those who were instructed by the coin toss to make a change were both more likely to make the change (as noted above) and, on average, report greater happiness on the follow-up surveys. This finding is inconsistent with expected utility theory; those who are on the margin should, on average, be equally well off regardless of the decision they make. This result provides strong empirical support for the notion of a status quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1998; Kahneman et al., 1991). There is suggestive evidence that the coin toss outcome on “less important” decisions (e.g. going on a diet, dying one’s hair, quitting a bad habit) influences future happiness in a similar, but more muted, fashion.
https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/restud/rdaa016/5834495

This part is particularly interesting in that simply making the change brought people more happiness — ie “change is good for the soul”. That needs to be studied more but is one explanation.

…for all decisions—not just the most important ones—there appears to be a causal impact of making a change on how satisfied the subject is ex post with the decision. Those who were instructed to make a change by the coin toss are substantially more likely to report that they made the correct decision and that they would make the same decision again if given the chance.
https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/restud/rdaa016/5834495

When thinking about adoption of your product / service / cause, finding a way to message this in your value proposition might have an effect to tip the balance even if the utility is biased against making the decision. I look forward to seeing more study in this area.

What's tech?

What’s Tech?

May 18, 2020May 18, 2020
by Andy

The semester recently ended and what a semester it was. Having 48 hours notice to switch all classes online was a bit of a fire drill. This was exasperated in having a new class, Tech Product Management II, which was meant to be all cases and workshops mostly delivered by guest speakers. We pulled it off and I think it went reasonably well but I would make some changes to the class if it were to stay online exclusively as the Socratic method doesn’t directly translate to video.

The next month gives me cycles to explore the building of several businesses. I value these times and, if I can keep focused, find them highly productive. Its never a good idea to pursue multiple new products at the same time. Thus, I run short cycle (typically 1-3 weeks depending on the complexity of the research) deep dives to get a qualitative sense of whether the need exists and my potential solution is viable. My goal is to get down to one primary area of focus for the next few months via this process. If I don’t whittle it down then I can’t put the depth of cycles around building one thing that’s required for any new product. A likely death knell.

However, I afford myself these times periodically to go expansive and heavy on research so I have some evidence that my most valuable resource, time, is best utilized. It also doesn’t mean that others are killed but might be put on hold or pivoted as I did to one product line extension recently moving from building myself to looking to acquire — saving time but costing money.

If focused efforts by small teams can build ventilators in a month, I think I can handle it. Doing this last August was highly productive and got me focused on building a new class and specialization in my teaching, a successfully expanded digital business and the groundwork for this plan. I just don’t know if I can come up with something so timely and innovative as this.

Innovation

Welcome to the future…now

May 10, 2020May 10, 2020
by Andy

The patent-pending BioVYZER has already raised $124,341 in funding on Indiegogo which is significantly higher than the original goal of $7,104. The protective shield uses powered air purifying technology through N-95 filtration and offers protection to the users entire face. According to VYZER Technologies, the developer of the offering, the product can filter out 95 percent of particulate matter.
https://archinect.com/news/article/150196649/is-the-biovyzer-air-filtration-protective-shield-a-peek-into-our-future

Business models

Esports and the Dangers of Serving at the Pleasure…

April 28, 2020April 28, 2020
by Andy

Informative post on the economics and drivers behind the eSports industry. In summary, looking at it through the lens of IRL sports leagues (e.g. NFL, MLB, NBA, FIFA) is wrong. First, game publishers control everything through their game copyrights so you have to get their blessing to broadcast anything. Second, game publishers view eSports leagues and tournaments as marketing vs. revenue. Their ultimate goal is to expose the game to as many casual gamers as possible so they buy. In addition, income from merch and digital goods is mostly pocket change. However, they need to support this channel and there’s constant gamesmanship (sorry, had to) and jockeying for power. The title is apropos.

Still, excessive expectations aren’t sufficient to explain the struggles in the ecosystem. “If you looked into it, [the number of money-losing teams] is probably closer to 89 percent than 50 percent”, one esports executive told Kotaku. That has nothing to do with valuations or, in a direct sense, money raised. A number of teams have shut down, sold their rights to individual leagues, or otherwise scaled down. This isn’t necessarily bad. The industry is still finding its footing. But it also isn’t how leagues with capped competition and guaranteed revenues are supposed to work. And overall, the operating environment for any esports-based company remains shaky at best and boasts few success stories and myriad failures. To understand why, it’s helpful to start with what an “esports league” is. Most of the problems start from the fact that when you hear “esports league”, you think in terms of physical “sports leagues”.
https://www.matthewball.vc/all/esportsrisks

Watch Tesla’s neural net labeling complexity for stop signs+

April 26, 2020April 26, 2020
by Andy

Insightful and interesting video from Andrej Karpathy on the challenges of tuning and labeling different situations for self-driving. The stop sign variables show how difficult a problem this is. Getting to 80% is probably not too difficult. Getting to 95% is very difficult. Getting the last 5% and then 1% is not only a massive challenge but you can see how labeling could introduce false positives and negatives and actually hurt system performance. For many applications, 95% is good enough but not here.

Jobs

Great resource for PM interviews

April 24, 2020April 24, 2020
by Andy

A great resource for people interviewing for product management jobs: Product Management Exercises. Real PM interview questions with answers broken down by company including many from big tech.

Mobile

5G: Moving from HW to SW

April 21, 2020April 21, 2020
by Andy

Wide Area Networks (WANs) — or the wireless that connects your mobile devices when away from Wifi — have been slow to evolve due to the high costs of upgrading the physical network. That’s all because there are 100s of thousands of hardware towers (and/or supporting local infrastructure) that need to be swapped out when technology or use-cases change (e.g. video streaming).

With 5G, we’re seeing more and more of that move to software like so many other infrastructure services have on the wired Internet. This is a big deal. If wireless networks can adapt to new use-cases without having to upgrade the hardware, we’ll see much more rapid evolution of services over the coming years.

vRAN is about 5G becoming software-defined and programmable. By definition, vRAN involves disaggregation of software and hardware. There is an expectation that an operator will be able to run the same 5G software stack on a variety of servers and evolve capacity by swapping out the hardware, as we do with our PCs. There’s a cost to this: a lower degree of system integration implying lower performance per watt of power. But there is also an upside where Ericsson is taking the lead: greatly improving the pace of new network features and the adaptability of 5G to emerging use-cases.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2020/4/hardware-acceleration-5g-vran

In this highly technical Ericsson write-up, they describe their approach. Hopefully, standards take hold here so we don’t have balkanization at the SW level allowing all companies in the space to innovation vs. just those controlling the software infrastructure.

Innovation

New York Needed Ventilators. So They Developed One in…

April 21, 2020April 21, 2020
by Andy

What can be achieved when there is a mission, vision and focus on a clear need with urgency eliminating cultural barriers.

Manufacturing, engineering and medical experts have worked side by side for three weeks. Dozens of versions of the machine have been carted off to the dumpster, as upgrades and improvements were made. In recent days, M.I.T. engineers traveled to Queens to help with last-minute software tweaks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/technology/new-york-ventilators-coronavirus.html