I often blame my training as an undergraduate mathematician for seeing the world differently than most others. Case in point, the inefficiencies of the everyday stop sign, and the lesson that fails to teach us about other areas of society. Specifically, picture a busy intersection with a 4-way stop sign. Or better yet, picture a traffic light on a busy street on a day when the power has gone...
There is no higher God in Silicon Valley than growth. No sacrifice too big for its craving altar. As long as you keep your curve exponential, all your sins will be forgotten at the exit. It’s through this exponential lens that eating the world becomes not just a motto for software at large, but a mission for every aspiring unicorn and their business model. “Going viral” suddenly takes on a...
As much as I advocate for doing good by doing business, there are some problems of the world that can’t be solved by for-profit companies, or at least not completely solved by for-profits, which instead need government aid and philanthropists. The 2017 letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation showcases five areas where the foundation has made incredible progress: vaccines...
The Bolshevik Revolution is a root cause of income inequality in the United States. That seems too crazy to be true, but history is more connected than the stories they teach in school. The story begins in 15 years before Lenin’s Russian Revolution, in 1902, when Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company. This was Ford’s third car company, the first two failed from a failure to ship a working car...
