1/ Lately, I've been reading books from VCs, trying to fill in more areas of my Silicon Valley ecosystem mental map. Most recently I read The Hard Thing About Hard Things (@bhorowitz) and Secrets of Sand Hill Road (@skupor), since @a16z seems to win the most.
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2/ One heuristic that keeps popping up: "[N]ew products won't succeed if they are marginal improvements [...] They need to be ten times better or ten times cheaper than the current best in class to compel companies and consumers to adopt (p.49,
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3/ Setting aside the implicit high growth needs of VCs and the founders who approach them which do color this statement a bit, it seems like a pretty sound product heuristic. (Fuck, up until recently, I was still using Dotster for my domains because of switching costs to my AWS!)
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4/ Meanwhile, I'm a sophisticated computer user who thinks endlessly about the harmful interactions between social media, surveillance capitalism, and the attention economy. I care about privacy — my own and everyone else's. And...I still use fucking Gmail.
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5/ Spoiler alert: I can't imagine strong privacy as anything other than a perceived marginal improvement, if it's even perceived as an improvement at all.
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6/ I have so many smart and passionate friends working on solutions to the problem of privacy but even in the era of endless mass data breaches and intentional exploitation, people express the same kind of concern for it as they do for alternative Alternate Side Parking rules.
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7/ Again, I *want* privacy advocates to win — I am one of them! But privacy-first design seems like an exercise in futility *if the goal is mass adoption.* And, if that's not the goal, then you're just selling a luxury good which is a far less useful thing to advocate for.
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Replying to @generativist
Transaction costs are wildly under appreciated imo. Including ALL the little annoying switching costs.
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Yea. For me they dominate all the time. (Finally switched only by rotating each one near expiration date, since it amortized the cost.)
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