Posts

Recycling has become a bit of a crutch these days. It’s a way for people to feel good about what they’re doing (“saving the planet”) without changing their behaviour. It gives people a free pass on generating waste; it allows them to save face. Mountain of trash generated by my apartment building. Where does it go? No one knows.

I’ve never been great at talking to people, especially strangers, but I’m much better than I used to be. In this post I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned in my quest to be a better human. It’s good to have friends

I’m publishing this post against my better judgement, and at the risk of starting a flamewar. However, I think it’s time for a reality check for those beating the drums of “diversity and inclusion”. First of all, let me make it perfectly clear that I’m very much in favour of diversity and including everyone regardless of their physical attributes. And if you decide to judge me based on my skin tone or which chromosomes I was born with, that’s on you.

I’ve long held the belief that it’s better to try and fail, than to never even attempt doing something. Along with a few successes in life, I have had a very long list of failures to my name. Here’s a story about one such failure. Christening Ursula, my canoe

Dopamine is a chemical in our brains associated with good feels. Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll share a quote from the book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, (pp. 102-103): All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this dopamine response. Rats who can press a button to deliver electrical stimulation to their reward centers will continue pressing until they collapse from starvation.

I don’t like making predictions, but one prediction I do have is that many future big companies will be what I call “skin in the game startups” (you heard it here first). Having skin in the game simply refers to sharing risk and rewards with a counterparty. In startupland, angel investors have skin in the game: they give money to founders to help them start a business in exchange for equity with the hope that the business will become more valuable in the future. The investor is sharing the risk of the company (by outlaying their money), and if the company does well the investor will eventually reap grand returns.

I get asked all the time by strangers, something to the effect of “Can I pet your dog?”. People see her, think she’s cute, and feel a sudden strong urge to touch her. Some people will just reach out without asking, but the majority of people ask first. My pup at the Union Square dog run in Manhattan

Make something people want Y Combinator has a famous motto: make something people want. The first reference I could find to that motto was this blog post from Paul Graham.

I recently decided to start a new blog and rebuild my website. It’s something I’ve been planning to do for a while, and now, here it is. I’ve decided to publish on my own site rather than using a platform like Medium. For those who are interested, the site is built with Hugo for content management and Netlify for deployments. Hugo is a fantastic and very quick static site management tool. Netlify is a great product for deploying and hosting a website from Git.