Experts: bias for the status quo.

Every innovation that had a lasting impact on the world has been in a form or another a direct and fundamental challange to the status quo.

Also, before any innovation can reveal its actual impact on the world, there is a point when people get exposed to it and start wondering what it is and how to make sense of it.

In moments like this, people tend to turn to “experts”.

Not surpisingly, these “experts” ARE the status quo and, by extension, are directly threathened by the said innovation.

Because of that, they will take a conservative position and will…

Even as I am celebrating yesterday’s news that Pfizer may have developed an effective Covid19 vaccine, I thought this would be a a great time to reflect on the challenges ahead and on the things we can learn from other epidemics.

As it happens, I have spent a significant part of my career on the frontlines of the HIV epidemic, mostly in Eastern and Southern Africa.

While HIV is different in so many ways from a respiratory pandemic, there are a few fundamentals that these two epidemics (and maybe any epidemics?) have in common. …

Innovators gonna Innovate

I have spent a big chunk of my life among innovators. Most of them are ridiculously predictable in their mistakes .

There is one mistake in particular that every single innovator I ever worked with made at some point, yours truly included.

If you are an entrepreneur, bringing innovation to market, do not make this mistake.

*Do not try to innovate in every aspect of your business.*

Follow the Playbook

As you are bringing your innovation to market you will encounter many problems that are actually solved.

Millions before you have trialed-and-errored them into conventional “good practices”. There are playbooks for these problems…

The Thing About User Interviews

Impact or no impact, if you are building something you need to make sure people actually care for it. It is important to remember there is a HUGE difference between these three things:

1. People saying they want something;
2. People saying they would pay for something; and
3. People actually paying for something;

Point 1 and 2 above are dangerous traps in product-market-fit. The graveyard of products that never took off although they were built on clear evidence of 1 and 2 above is vast.

Everyone who knows about building products will advise you to spend time doing user interviews. And that…

For those who don’t know, Coinbase is a company that for the last several years has lead the charge for mass-adoption of crypto.

They have built a a businesses offering simple, easy ways for (mostly US-based) regular people to buy and hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

While their approach can be simplistic and overly-centralized for the taste of some of the more radical blockchain enthusiasts, anyone who truly cares about the values behind crypto has been rooting for Coinbase. The importance of mass-adoption is one of the very few principles with which most people in the blockchain space agree.

A Brief History of Crypto Activism

The…

As a tech entrepreneur preoccupied with the impact of my work I love simple mental frameworks that provide perspective. One of these frameworks is the Thermometer vs. the X-Ray machine.

It helps of course that one of the products that I am working on is a public health tool, with striking similarities to a thermometer, but this framework helped me with other products I worked on over the years and I argue it is useful to anyone building any products.

Ask yourself this: is what you are trying to build more like a thermometer or more like an X-Ray Machine?

The Humble Thermometer

…

A few weeks ago I went to see a doctor for a small thing. This is how the whole thing went down:

• First I asked around in my circles about a good doctor; I got recommendations, some of them conflicting;
• Then I called a few of them up — after 30 mins listening to various versions of the same music, I managed to get a booking — 3 weeks from then, at a time that was inconvenient but manageable. …

At every given point throughout history, things have been happening that ended up shaping the world and define the future as we know it. While these things and their impact are obvious with hindsight their impact was not so obvious at the time.

RELATED: Why It is so hard to read a trend

Historically, these future-shaping things have included violent, brutal events — the French Revolution or WW2, for example. Other times, they included technology innovation — the printing press, or the internet, or antibiotics.

Or they have been simple demographic facts — population growth, for example. Or migration.

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