I really liked this article. FWIW, I didn’t know he is the CTO of Facebook until just now.
But I can relate to the challenge of making decisions with a lot of competing interests, especially in comparison to the clarity that comes from feeling like you have a mission to accomplish.
I checked Facebook every single day for over 10 years, until I left the platform. Today, the only thing I use Facebook for is Marketplace, which still has the focus he’s talking about.
Hopefully we can all learn from their mistakes as we build products people want to use.
I would never have had SpeedTest on my board of unicorns…that’s an unbelievable sale price. To all the agents who negotiated that deal, my hat is off to you.
If you’re going to go through the effort to write 5,000 words—-spend a bit more thought on what to do.
I am aware that the sky is falling and I am aware that there are foxes who would gladly replace 10%+ of global knowledge work in the next few years. I understand that there are cultural ramifications.
About a year ago, I researched the most comfortable T-shirt. There were quite a few people who mentioned this specific brand I’d never heard of so I bought about 10 shirts and was sorely disappointed—-I got had by a smart marketer I think.
But a few other people mentioned the Peruvian Pima cotton shirts that are sometimes available at Costco. Generally they show up once per year, in February.
So when they finally showed up, I bought 11. I didn’t realize, until I had these shirts, that I’d never really owned comfortable T-shirts. I’ve worn these every day since I bought them and cannot recommend them enough.
I work with these tools every day, and I’d say my productivity increase is on the order of astronomical.
This isn’t true of everyone, but depending on pre-existing skill sets and context, there’s a group of people who are actually multiples more productive than they were in 2022.
I had a friend with plenty of experience in HR get laid off.
He looked for a job for 13 months. One of the top 3 smartest people I’ve ever known looked for seven months and had to take a big step back in his career, despite having Amazon and Home Depot on his resume.
Both of them said that even getting an interview was almost impossibly hard.
These are people in different parts of the county, and in different industries.
I think we have a serious problem on our hands with employment that’s probably not getting better any time soon.
At some point, the market for markets will demand better regulation than this. But I find it a little absurd that anyone is still putting their money into these markets with story after story of obvious fraud.