1. Business model innovation is probably more disruptive than technical innovation.

2. There were more innovations from the wave of desktop computing -> web than the one of web app -> mobile apps. The previous brought a lot more of business model innovations while the later mainly strengthened the big players.

3. Similar to the transition from desktop>web, Crypto based business will unleash a huge amount of business model innovations.

4. Specially, a lot of business model innovations can happen in user generated content applications, by awarding creators/users token incentives.

5. It hasn’t happened yet because there wasn’t a mainstream wallet to store the crypto-assets.

6. Libra will change this.

(Notes after reading a Fred Wilson blogpost)

Marc Andreessen在与Stewart Butterfield的谈话中说到的两个科技周期: 5年，和25年。

25年大约是一整代人的更新换代周期。当新科技应用被创造出来时，那些位高权重的前浪，并不想采纳也更不愿改变。需要这整代人退出历史舞台后，那些在这个新科技陪同下长大的后浪才能有机会冒出头来。

而5年是个startup的证明周期。因为25年太长，几乎没有人会有这个时间验证某个idea成不成。但5年的startup runway会有两个问题。一是士气问题，5年后如果startup还不温不火，大伙总会丧失士气，不免分心想追逐其他机会。二是架构问题，你的产品几年前开始的时候可能就搭建在一个前代的技术栈上。试想想在2003年时即使你赌对了移动，并一直熬到了2007年的iPhone诞生，但整个系统从开始就用的Java。

而且如果founders在第一个5年并没成功，还可能会有心理后果 —— 他们会变得bitter或是犬儒。以至于后来的第二代或是第三代的enterpreneurs再尝试这样的idea，他们便可能会冷嘲热讽：这东西我早尝试过了，做不成的，是这样这样的理由。

对于VC来讲也是巨大的矛盾：本应交给这个领域最有经验的VC来做决策，但同时最有经验的也会因为之前的失败过而对这个idea变得先入为主的严苛。这样的机会反而释放给了一批比较天真缺乏经验的VC。

I’ve found so many designers being caught up in the definition of their job description – they are only supposed to craft stuff, graphical stuff. Sometimes they are trapped by people’s stereotypes, and sometimes they trap themselves.

I classify myself as a rebellious designer – I am a designer, and I am not either. I love to deal with some parts of the world that I don’t necessarily need to deal with. And I find pure intellectual enjoyment out of it.

We are not bees.

Anthony Bourdain wasn’t just a great chef – he infused the cuisine into thoughts of human condition and cultures of the “Parts Unknown”. Allen Iverson’s college football coach said he could have been much more stellar if he chose football over basketball. Bruce Lee is a striking philosopher and martial artist. Leonardo da Vinci was a phenomenal painter, scientist, musician and much more.

I am not talking about the T-shape. I am talking about “T-T-T-T”-shape. No one can be good at everything, but can definitely be relatively good at various things. One gets to find out what these various things are and things they are not that good at. We are capable in multiple areas, and the most capable ones can think laterally to make connections. Specializing generalists will be more welcome in the future.

Higher education only takes 4 years or less to train someone ready for a professional. But we don’t just have 40 years, and it means we can pursue 10 more professionals in our life span.

(P.S. Thoughts after listening to Joe Rogan’s interview with Naval Ravikant)

有人问Blue Apron的存在价值是什么：不就是生鲜delivery吗？菜谱都给了为什么不炒好再送来？还有人回答类似“做好的菜送到了不就凉了”。我实在忍不住回复：

“就像问：’人类为什么还要吃各式美食，天天喝soylent不就行了吗？简单快捷又营养齐全‘。

做菜本身就是极大的需求：和亲朋好友间活动交互的社会性需求、按照菜谱把一顿菜’从无到有‘的被empowered的自我实现的需求、能更方便接触碰到异国风情食材的探索性的需求。”

我对这些人很容易失去耐性：他们在tech里扮演着重要角色、是tech产品的缔造者之一，但他们“永远get不到”。大概就像Jobs说的当时Xerox公司里的“Toner-Heads”：他们对什么是好的和坏的没有概念，他们对产品缺乏（敏锐的）感受力。

I don’t want to live in a world where the product is only built by these people.

You might object that the AI would thereby kill serendipity and lock us inside a narrow musical cocoon, woven by our previous likes and dislikes. What about exploring new musical tastes and styles? No problem. You could easily adjust the algorithm to make 5 percent of its choices completely at random, unexpectedly throwing at you a recording of an Indonesian gamelan ensemble, a Rossini opera, or the latest K-POP hit. Over time, by monitoring your reactions, the AI could even determine the ideal level of randomness that will optimize exploration while avoiding annoyance, perhaps lowering its serendipity level to 3 percent or raising it to 8 percent.

– 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval在21 Lessons for the 21st Century书中所描述的Serendipity另我沮丧 – 本以为人类应当引以为豪的serendipity，可能也只是被上帝操纵。想跳出算法给你制造的filter bubble并非难事，通过调整randomness比即可，甚至存在最优比率：serendipity比率太低，人类的confirmation bias就越积越深不再探索；serendipity比率太高，人们便失去乐趣以至丢弃。

这让我想起California Roll加州卷的来源：上世纪70年代美国人因为吃不惯纯正的日本刺身寿司而创造出的”混合物”：米饭里包着紫菜、蟹肉、牛油果、mayo的、带有脂肪般口感的加州卷。给老美带来类似chicken nuggets感受的拓展食物。

人们大致不会喜欢完全exotic的东西，除非它的”exotic的程度“被控制在一定的范围。而人们”喜欢“一定程度的exotic，或许只是feel good about themselves.

It continues to be true that “software is eating the world”. And most of time, the existence of hardware is to preserve the power of software.

Fitbit is the minimum amount of hardware needed in order to bridge the physical world into the software’s. You might be paying a hundred bucks for the Fitbit wristband from the merchants, and the software coming with it seems free. But think about it – would you pay $100 for wristband without a dashboard, or would you rather pay $100 for a dashboard (with all the same fitness data of your own) without wearing a wristband? You may be hesitant to pay a mobile App that costs that much – consumers today are indulgent in the world of free softwares. But a wristband without a dashboard is useless for sure.

So one strategy is to make hardwares as minimal and invisible as possible, in order to preserve the power of software.

Well there’s one exception – hardwares as status signifiers. These will be all luxuries like shoes, bags, and jewelries, as well as gadgets that signifies status or styles – iPhone, Beats Headsets, and more.

P.S. I wrote this to mourn two of my favorite hardware companies: Anki and Jibo, which created unprecedented innovations yet failed.

Tyler Cowen once said in an interview that San Francisco / Silicon Valley is a “diverse monoculture”. It’s the “diverse” part that gives its creativity, and the “mono-culture” part that gives it efficiency. That’s the benefit of being diverse monoculture. And that’s what makes Bay Area, Bay Area.

This also infers a good chance that next century will be less innovative than this.

Because a lot of innovations and ideas come from intense cultural interchange and connectivity. But in the continual open system, eventually the stronger culture will absorb the weaker, or both cultures become a well-mixed one, until it can’t. Whatever the most creative clusters, like the one in San Francisco Bay Area, are in the process of “cashing in” the creativities which benefits from the open system, until it can’t.

In order to have a sustainable “creativity” to cash in, some sort of insulation matters. Insulation allows a culture to grow and realize its own unique form without distractions from the other frameworks.

That’s why Madagascar has its unusual types of wildlife because the island is so isolated from the rest of the world that it can evolve its eco-system. That’s why we should have the annual fishing band period to preserve organisms so they have time to grow before fully exploited.

“I think you’re a uniquely brilliant, twisted, inward-looking, diverse monoculture, and I’m very glad you are. 😜 ” – Tyler Cowen

今天下午和Tianyu讨论到抖音的前身Musical.ly（抖音的“首屏即为播放视频”的范式是来自Musical.ly）。其中最为intriguing的是当他说到Musical.ly的负责人Alex Zhu在一场分享里提到的“本我”与“超我”。

很多内容类应用在一开始onboard用户是这样的：让用户去pick一些用户自己认为感兴趣的品类，譬如说化妆、时政、烹饪等等，目的是为了以后的“个性化”推荐。类似的应用例子有太多，譬如是Flipboard, Google +, Facebook Paper, Feedly, etc. 但Alex Zhu说这根本不work，因为这是“超我”在作祟，而“本我”在压抑，即使无人在场。

你以为你喜欢的并不是你真正喜欢的。算法比你更懂你。

这故事让我想起张小龙为什么抗拒在微信的启动画面植入广告，即使十有八九的应用的启动画面都被广告占领，即使这样本可以对微信增加丰厚的收入。

张说，想象一下你见到家人朋友同事，每次能聊天之前，他们的脸上总贴了一纸广告。

Last week on Facebook’s F8 Keynote it was said that “Over the next year, we plan make messenger the fastest private communication app on the entire planet”.

Why being fast?

Memo leaked that Evan Spiegel wrote about to make Snaptchat the fastest way to communicate. Evan pointed out the much older version Snapchat ran on iPhone4 is way faster than the latest on iPhone X as more features are introduced along the way. This also explains why when you open Snapchat you go directly to the camera as the first screen. Maybe more importantly, “faster” means talking with images is faster than communicating or documenting in texts.

In the heat of competing being the fastest in communication, Mark even wanted to invent some wearable with “brain-computer interface” that can get the information from your brain out into the world, which undoubtedly is the most fastest way to communicate – “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain about 5x faster than you can type on your phone today.”

After almost 25 years from Steve’s interview, it is still true in many ways for many things:

“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

“I am saddened… by the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. Their products have no sort of spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian.”

“And the sad part is that most customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either. But the way we’re gonna ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it to around everybody, so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft’s just McDonald’s. So that’s what saddens me. Not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display more insight and more creativity.“

Note that I am not specifically talking about Microsoft; ironically I think MS has done a much better job in recent years by infusing their products with design and insights.

Thanks Steve by taking the best and spreading it around our species. The world wouldn’t have been a better place without you.