🍔 roast beef and recurring revenue.
on the agenda this week: roast beef, recurring revenue & mackenzie scott.
📖 reading time: 5m 10s.
hi, hey hello :) happy monday.
i hope you & your loved ones are keeping safe 🤞.
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👂 earworm: listen to moglii and lissa.
📚 word of the week:
“
discommode
”.
to cause inconvenience to; disturb, trouble, or bother.
i decided not to discommode him further on walks by abruptly bringing him out into the same car-whizzing streets that had so shivered and terrified him.
- the tail of a ruff few days," washington post, february, 2020
🧠 brain candy:
🍔 rax roast beef was a fast food chain with 504 outlets in 38 states in the 1980s, but took a nosedive in the '90s. it now has just five remaining locations. could a commercial have killed the chain?
💰 recurring revenue is emerging as a strong asset class. when it comes to software costs, some (like aws, twilio) represent the “central nervous system” of businesses and many can’t afford to switch them off.
👨⚖️ in criminal justice policy, there’s a bad habit of solving problems by increasing punishment. the existing logic is that people don’t want to comply so they should be forced to. the authors of this study had a different idea: redesign the summons form and make critical information more obvious. the result? “these interventions reduce failures to appear by 13-21% and lead to 30,000 fewer arrest warrants over a 3-year period.”
🐦 have you ever spent months or weeks agonising over the perfect design of your website or business before launching? consider taking a look at twitter’s homepage in 2006.
🇺🇸 most patients’ covid-19 care looks nothing like trump’s. his experience with the coronavirus seems to have so far benefited not only from power, money and access to first-class medical treatment, but also from the timing of his illness.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
🤑 the 60 billion dollar woman
.
while jeff bezos was building amazon from a garage into one of the most powerful companies on earth and becoming the richest businessmen of this age, the world knew very little about his wife, mackenzie, a novelist and a mother of four who helped start amazon from that garage. even after their divorce last year, accompanied by a public affair and scandal, thrust mackenzie scott (the name she took after the split) into the spotlight, she remained a private and elusive figure. now, scott, one of the richest women in the world, a billionaire tens times over, announced in july that she was giving away $1.7 billion to a wide swath of nonprofits, from historically black colleges to a crisis text line. the gift was stunning in scale and in approach: scott was making a mark as a new kind of philanthropist.
with a gift of that size, scott could’ve built a cancer center, had a museum wing named after her, made a college rededicate itself in her name. or, like virtually every other person who’s made significant amounts of money from tech, she could’ve created an organization to dole out grants based on her notions about how best to fix social issues. she chose another route.
scott gave 116 grants, all at once, with very few strings attached, to mostly small organizations. they didn’t have to hit metrics she named; they didn’t have to create programs she favored. she even refused thank you notes when nonprofits asked how they could show their gratitude. and she specifically chose organizations led by people with “lived experience,” as scott put it: women leading women’s groups, people of color leading racial equity groups.
with that, scott far outpaced her ex-husband in the giving realm, and rewrote the typical playbook for high-profile tech philanthropists — who often operate as if they know best not just in business, but in solving societal problems, too. “their engineering or technocratic orientation to their business, their wealth creation, transfers over to their philanthropic practices,” says rob reich, a stanford political science professor, referring to tech superstars like mark zuckerberg or bill gates. “to put it really crudely, technocratic philanthropy is philanthropy that is done to people rather than with people.”
👉 read more via marker.
👨💻
the friendship that made google huge
.
one day in march of 2000, six of google’s best engineers gathered in a makeshift war room. the company was in the midst of an unprecedented emergency. in october, its core systems, which crawled the web to build an “index” of it, had stopped working. although users could still type in queries at google.com, the results they received were five months out of date. more was at stake than the engineers realized. google’s co-founders, larry page and sergey brin, were negotiating a deal to power a search engine for yahoo, and they’d promised to deliver an index ten times bigger than the one they had at the time—one capable of keeping up with the world wide web, which had doubled in size the previous year. if they failed, google.com would remain a time capsule, the yahoo deal would likely collapse, and the company would risk burning through its funding into oblivion.
in a conference room by a set of stairs, the engineers laid doors across sawhorses and set up their computers. craig silverstein, a twenty-seven-year-old with a small frame and a high voice, sat by the far wall. silverstein was google’s first employee: he’d joined the company when its offices were in brin’s living room and had rewritten much of its code himself. after four days and nights, he and a romanian systems engineer named bogdan cocosel had got nowhere. “none of the analysis we were doing made any sense,” silverstein recalled. “everything was broken, and we didn’t know why.”
silverstein had barely registered the presence, over his left shoulder, of sanjay ghemawat, a quiet thirty-three-year-old m.i.t. graduate with thick eyebrows and black hair graying at the temples. sanjay had joined the company only a few months earlier, in december. he’d followed a colleague of his—a rangy, energetic thirty-one-year-old named jeff dean—from digital equipment corporation. jeff had left d.e.c. ten months before sanjay. they were unusually close, and preferred to write code jointly. in the war room, jeff rolled his chair over to sanjay’s desk, leaving his own empty. sanjay worked the keyboard while jeff reclined beside him, correcting and cajoling like a producer in a news anchor’s ear.
👉 read more via the new yorker.
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