Issue #20: Quarks, Jaguars and Skin in the Game.
Random but not-so-random musings this week. I hope you enjoy.
I’m reading Nassim Taleb and his ornery old man schtick has seeped into this week’s newsletter. So bear with me.
‘Skin in the Game’ by Nassim Taleb focuses on our culture of ’punditry/predictions without consequence’. I’ve always been wary of predictions but I have a knack for seeing around corners (in business) and also have a strong desire to share that. So I write narratives instead.
Narratives = Insights from past + Systems Thinking + Futurecasting
A year ago I wrote a narrative about Amazon, Ring and the killer app for the connected home. Even then it was easy for me to see that Ring’s acquisition ( by Amazon for ~$1Bn) was inevitable; only 3 use cases exist for the connected home and Ring had nailed, and was scaling, the most important one.
Some of my consulting work for PE/VC firms involves sharing insights about technology marketplaces. Power2switch (the company I founded/sold a few years ago) was a marketplace and all marketplaces are not created equal [Bill Gurley, 2012]. Where a broker exists, and with enough friction between two sides, an entrepreneur can create and capture enough value with a simple platform [’Platform Revolution’ by Parker, Alstyne, and Choudary].
The last time Nassim Taleb shifted my thinking was with ‘Antifragile’. It shifted my thinking so much I went ahead and wrote an ebook about the ‘Antifragile power Grid that we need to build’. I got positive and negative emails from within the power industry but recently National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), an elite research lab, validated the premise of my ebook [PDF] with their white paper. Fringe stuff eventually becomes mainstream.
We live in a world where even if I made predictions for a living, I would face no consequence. Capable people make wrong predictions all the time [’The Signal and The Noise’, Nate Silver]. Predictions are our way of making sense of the world [Morgan Housel, 2018].
Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos showed up on the cover of a few magazines and, even more permanently, in books like ‘The Creators Code’ by Amy Wilkinson. Now we know she lied. Will the editors of the magazines or author of the book update their stories? Nope. In a world with little consequence, there is also little accountability.
My narrative of the flaws in Uber’s (marketplace) business model was my most widely read article of the last few years. But also the one that got me the most vitriol from Kalanick lovers. I got a similar response to my narrative questioning Tesla’s approach; attacks from Musketeers. Granted, the title was me at my click-baiting best. I’d focused on the businesses but the fans read it as me insulting their heroes. Our collective blinders are now fully on when it comes to technology entrepreneurship.
This idol worship and Hollywoodization of entrepreneurship and tech founders is not even new. This article from 1999, calling out the same culture, could have been written yesterday. History rhymes.
Looking at the world through systems lenses makes it pretty easy to write narratives that end up seeming prescient. It’s easy because all complex systems tend towards failure [’The Systems Bible’ by John Gall] hence my view that by 2025 only ~15 of the ~3000 US utilities will still exist. Folk in the industry think I’m blasphemous. History suggests I’ll be right.
Between reading ‘The Master Switch’ by Tim Wu and ‘The Quark and the Jaguar’ by Murray Gell-Mann (the Nobel prize-winning physicist who had Stephen Hawking as an admirer) you can confidently craft a narrative for where your industry is going. You just have to remember that every single industry bundles and unbundles.
And once you’ve decided on a prevailing narrative how do you ignite/reignite your personal ’Spark’? Or, if you’re building a business, how do you take what you’ve gleaned about the future to create innovative products or business models? [’Competing Against Luck’ by Clayton Christensen, Karen Dillon].
Have a great week! Do send any narrative seekers, investors in Ring and recovering Musketeers my way.
Best
Seyi