Elon Musk’s 5 Steps to Build Better Products

During a June 2021 a tour of Starbase, by space journalist Everyday Astronaut, Elon Musk talked about previously private methods that his companies (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company) use to make better products. Elon described the method he uses to effectively build software, cars, rockets, solar arrays, or anything. His steps are (1) …

Simple questions you should ask to help reduce AI hype

As Machine Learning captures our imagination, it’s important to separate the material from the hype. Here are 5 simple questions you should ask to help reduce AI hype: “How much training data is required?” “Can this work unsupervised (= without labelling the examples)?” “Can the system predict out of vocabulary names?” (i.e. Imagine if I …

Clever Red Bull advertising in hexadecimal

Want to know how to spell “Red Bull gives you wiiings.” in hexadecimal? Check out these two red bull advertisement in silicon valley. Here’s a hex to text converter to see for yourself. It’s not a recruiting ad, because this is the only job they have in SF. Must be just advertising to thirsty programmers. I love …

Apple – Steve Jobs on “Think Different” – Internal Meeting Sept. 23, 1997

Video of 1997 keynote 2-months after Jobs returned to Apple. Sets the vision as something other than speeds and feeds. Launches the brand for the next 15-years, which you can see even today. The 1997 ‘Think Different’ billboards are reminiscent of the 2015 ‘Shot on Iphone 6’ billboards. Worth the 16 minutes if you’re interested in product …

Appreciating Willard Brinton’s data visualization

Excerpt from 100 years of Brinton, a website devoted to appreciating data visualization author Willard Brinton. I passionately believe Brinton should be as well known as other pioneers of data visualisation (Playfair,Priestley, Minard) and modern authors (Few, Tufte, Cairo) I agree. Below is an image from Brinton’s book, which is more about data visualization than about …

Requests for Startups

Excerpt from Y-Combinator article on ideas for new startups. [source: YCombinator Blog] —- Enterprise Software – Software used by large companies is still awful and still very lucrative. Category-defining enterprise software companies will emerge to solve problems for every vertical, every business size, and every job function. Here are 3 specific areas we think are …