Distillations About

1/2/2017

  • Feeling so much love today. My favorite core value is to love myself and others infinitely. On a long enough timescale, it comes back around.
  • First birthday in a while that I’ve chosen to spend alone. Just me and my thoughts. While I finally feel like I’ve assembled a tribe here in NYC, it’s nice to just reflect on my own.
  • Planning my first 2017 trip. Looking like I’ll be in Austin.
  • On my way to finally meet Kevin IRL, Twitter has a magical ability to turn online friendships into offline ones.
    • The conversation was incredibly dense. Here are some notes:
      • Groups that name themselves before having a goal are usually the ones you want to bet on.
        • Kevin mentioned this and I found it fascinating. Aside from a professional context, I’ve seem this amongst friend groups that I’m really close to. TNN, a thread of a few HackCville alumni, and former bhangra team members group are examples for me. They’ve all had the common thread that we explicitly labeled ourselves (no matter how goofy of a name) and somehow that fosters the group dynamic (obviously a lot of factors at play here).
      • Brands are Schelling Points in an n-dimensional space, hard to enumerate what n is and its components
        • Direct competitors are along an n - 1 dimensional subspace
        • Schelling points are amazing. Now that I know the definition, it pops up all the time.
      • We often record the history of a company from when the founder(s) started work on their notable projects, but omit the experiences, friendships, etc. that precede them.
        • We noted that this is likely the reason that most efforts to take the best n people in a domain and having them come together to work on a project is often not successful. It’s often that the n + a and n + b-ranked people who have great chemistry (where a and b are nontrivial) that make a dent in a domain.
      • Dug a bit into how we think about what makes a good conversation:
        • Vulnerability equilibrium: both people need to find a meeting point when it comes to how vulnerable they are (i.e. we often don’t open up enough or open up too much, when the other person isn’t ready to be that vulnerable). Also, we think that the likelihood of being vulnerable decreases as the number of people in the conversation increase.
        • How our (intro|extro)version is often not fixed (it might be a trailing average of the past week). For example, if we hung out with peeps every day last week, the likelihood of us wanting to meet someone in the current week is lower (inverse if we took no social events).
        • The concept of single opt-in calendar events. This was a cool topic. What if we allowed our closest friends two hours of our calendar each (week|month) to fill in any way they think we should (single opt-in). I could help introduce my friend to a club/group they should be a part of and they could do the same for me. Really want to try this.
        • Coexisting
      • How media companies have explicit employees (traditional) and implicit employees (users) and the implications of this.