start again today no. 89: amaryllis
information, wedges, contracts, Taylor Swift, friends, Vision Pro
The amaryllis my Mom sent us after Thanksgiving started to bloom Monday morning.
It was a 10 week process.
For the first 6, I figured it was defective, or worse (but more likely) that I’d killed it.
But I kept watering it without expectations. With flowers and with people, sometimes slow is fast. Good things take time.
I’ve felt a lot of joy and gratitude from blooms at home and at work lately.
It’s taken me a while to see that serendipity comes from the seeds we plant and water. 18 months of building rapport for 5 minutes of real talk. 10 years to an overnight success.
What are you watering?
What I read this week
💡 how to find information - Alana Levin, Variant Fund,
If you put an idea out into the world and many people call it stupid or silly but someone with deep category knowledge thinks it’s interesting, there’s probably something there. This is a tactical way of spotting opportunities that fit the “good ideas that sound like bad ideas” adage.
🛠️ the vertical wedge for a horizontal product - Sam DeBrule, HeyDay
Our goal is to build Heyday into the AI copilot for all knowledge workers. We think we’ll get there by building for one persona at a time. And getting faster with each n+1 persona. We’ve developed a playbook to do it.
🎨 Taylor Swift and the good girl trap - Anne Helen Petersen,
Women and women of color in particular reach this point of “over-saturation” much faster than men, which has everything to do with how society understands who should hold our attention and for how long.
📊 contract benchmark report - Common Paper
Design partners are often the first users of a startup’s product. Design partnerships are a two way street.
72% of design partner agreements include regular feedback participation. Of these, the most common schedules for feedback participation are twice monthly (46%) or once monthly (36%).
💡 cracking the consumer investing code - Janelle Teng, Bessemer,
The risk-reward profile for consumer investing is simply different from that of enterprise investing, and this may not appeal to all investors. Within the consumer cohort, the top company alone represented 52% of value versus the top B2B company only representing 11% of value.
💛 making friends online - Ava,
I’ve written thousands and thousands of words about myself on the Internet. Having so much of my brain accessible to others has been incredibly helpful. If someone wants to be friends with me after knowing that much about how I think, we’re probably going to get along.
🤖 40 hours with the vision pro - Tim Urban, Wait But Why
It’s very crude right now, but it’s a primitive version of something we’ll probably all be doing constantly in the 2030s. It’s the next step in a centuries-long human mission to conquer long-distance. First there were letters, then phone calls, then mobile phones**3** and video calls. The next step is VR hangouts.
The best way I can describe how I feel about the Vision Pro is a strange combination of utterly thunderstruck and mildly underwhelmed. The first iPhone left me feeling the same combination of blown away and bored.
There was no app store yet, it dropped calls constantly, and the cellular internet (which you couldn’t use while on a call) was painfully slow. The iPhone wasn’t a world-changing device yet. It was the seed from which a world-changing device would grow.
I see you, I love you, happy Valentine’s Day,
H