You should probably mute me now. This is going to be a rambling thread.
I’m not sure if it’s possible to blame Thatcher for this, but I think it happened on her watch.... whats worrying me is a kind of cultural/social ‘way of seeing’ that could actually sit behind....

...a majority of our problems -social and political... even our mental health. It’s what we might usefully term the ‘Doctrine of Excellence’. The basic idea is that your aim and target in everything you do is to be the best, that striving for the exceptional is the only path.

It appears most egregiously in the language of business... the kind of ‘Always Be Closing’ ‘Lunch is For Losers’ ‘Greed is good’ narrative that Trump articulated in his own ‘Mein Kampf’ The ‘art’ of the deal. It finds the intellectual scaffolding it requires in the ...

... entirely bankrupt notion of ‘Trickle Down’ economics.
But it didn’t necessarily start in business. Business ‘thinkers’ love to co-opt the language of sport... the constant metaphors for winning, losing, competing with passion and the devastation of failure...

But it probably didn’t start there either. Sports people use metaphors of battle. Death or glory. Winning no matter what the sacrifice.
Now... and I suppose this is where Thatcher and Regan come in... its the language of politics. There is no diplomacy, only winning.

1/ I am seeing more and more founder secondary in venture rounds (Secondary = founders selling some of their shares before some other shareholders are able). Series B-D. I see both as an investor and through entrepreneur circles.

2/ I like secondary for entrepreneurs. Moderation is key but in a lot of situations I think it helps accelerate the co. Lots of very smart investors disagree. Here are my thoughts.

3/ Magnitude: My basic rule of thumb from what I see is market is 4+ yrs and up to 10% of founder’s equity stake with some $ cap that makes sense given stage etc. (typically <$10m)

4/ The entrepreneurial journey is brutally hard. Giving some financial relief helps remove one piece of pressure. I don’t think that secondary in the magnitude mentioned impacts the drive/persistence of great entrepreneurs.

5/ That secondary means they will be able to just sleep knowing they can pay their kids’ tuition. Secondary will make most founders better at their jobs, thus accelerating the co.

So, us social media strategists, according to @Brandwatch Audiences Convesation data also talk about BBC programmes, SEO, Guardian articles, museums and martial arts. Ummmm...yep. I’m guilty! #NYKCONF

...but I think that @wadds might have single-handedly skewed the high usage of the Martini emoji! 🍸

I’m hoping @DrJoeAbah and @segalink will chip in on this discussion I’m creating on the steps to fixing problems and how tolerance is crucial. THREAD

@segalink 1. To get a solution to any type of problem, you need at least 4 types of skills:
a.Problem identification
b.Problem analysis & understanding (historical/circumstantial)
c.Solution design
d.Solution implementation

VERY UNLIKELY all 4 skills will reside in a single individual

2. Imagine that all 4 skills reside in 4 different individuals, it is therefore a 5th skill and perhaps, the most important, to be able to bring these 4 people together and give the direction and purpose.

This is what leadership is

3. If these 4 skills reside in 4 individuals and they are in a team, the characteristics of the person with skill (a) will be that he only sees problems. He will be labeled as “negative” but we must understand how to embrace this important skill and use it effectively.

4. Skill (b) will be the “over-analysis” people; the “you think too much, you analyze too much, over thinker”. These are the people who will want to give you a lecture on why and how things got to where they are and again, this skill is absolutely crucial for the next person.

Kimi Raikkonen - often a man of few words, but he makes them count 😂

Think you can come up with your own #F1Haiku? Give it a go! 📝

#JapaneseGP 🇯🇵 #NationalPoetryDay

Here's an example to get your creativity flowing...

Gloves and steering wheel
someone tell him to give it
to me. COME ON! Move!

#F1Haiku #NationalPoetryDay

Hey @F1 you still have something special in your archives - Kubica's onboard from Q3 recorded during Japanese GP in 2010. Maybe it's a good time to release it? 🤔

Raw sewage leaking into tents where children sleep. Moldy food. No hope. This is how Europe is caring for thousands who fled war and persecution. @PatrickKingsley takes us inside a camp built for 3000, that is holding 9000 people. This is Europe?

"Link building isn't natural." Yeah, nature hasn't built any search engines. The whole fucking thing is unnatural. Links don't just magically appear because we breathe deeply and trust in the cosmos. Someone always makes them.

Yes, that was ranty. I'm going to eat lunch now.

Seriously, I get the intent but I hate the line in the sand, as if it's nearly that simple. If you write a book, you don't just lay it in a field and hope people read it -- you tell them you wrote a book. Same with content.

It's not unnatural for me to say "Hey, I've got a great piece of content that's relevant to your audience." That's not in the same bucket as buying a link on Fiverr.

Starting to think this thing ends with false statements prosecutions and disbarments.

More notable than ever: Bromwich had to quit his firm to join the Ford team because his partners wanted nothing to do with it.

They're lying. How do we know? Because not a single one of them mentioned anything about it until now. And they're hiding behind the fact that the proof that they're lying is confidential.

1/ People often ask if it's worth it for companies to have an HQ in Silicon Valley. Real estate is crazy expensive here, salaries are astronomical as a result, there's heavy rush hour traffic, and so on. Why do companies put up with this??

One answer: an abundance of top talent.

2/ To take a data-driven approach, I used LinkedIn to count the number of people with different job titles in 4 metro areas: Houston, Atlanta, Toronto, and SF. Each of these has roughly 6 million people, so I would expect them to have similar amounts of tech talent.

3/ Caveat: a) this is not *super* scientific and b) these are searches from my LinkedIn account, so maybe the numbers will vary for different users. Regardless, I believe the numbers paint a strong picture.

4/ HOUSTON
DevOps = 270
VP of Engineering = 798
Customer Success = 294
iOS Developer = 71
Sr Data Scientist = 73

5/ ATLANTA
DevOps = 924
VP of Engineering = 657
Customer Success = 1232
iOS Developer = 214
Sr Data Scientist = 125

Everyday when I look at my messages across platforms (DMs, SMS, WhatsApp, etc) and I see requests from the very ridiculous to the not so urgent ones marked urgent, I wonder if things will ever get better having responded to such dutifully for 3years running. I however learnt...

...with the tale of a man who found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat & watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Until it suddenly stopped making any progress and looked like it was stuck.

So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily, although it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

The man didn’t think anything of it and sat there waiting for the wings to enlarge to support the butterfly. But that didn’t happen. The butterfly spent the rest of its life unable to fly, crawling around with tiny wings and a swollen body.

Despite the kind heart of the man, he didn’t understand that the restricting cocoon and the struggle needed by the butterfly to get itself through the small opening; were God’s way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings.

And there it is. The next step in this lunatic Democrat scheme to stop Kavanaugh: throwing the FBI under the bus & attacking the agency for hiding monster Kavanaugh's *real* past.

Dems claim FBI knew the truth about alcohol/sex abuse all

The Democrats on the committee - minus Klobuchar and Coons - are claiming the FBI background file on Kavanaugh contains EVIDENCE of sexual & alcohol abuse and this is from BEFORE the latest background investigation this week.

This is literally the last lying gambit the Democrats have to try to force a delay of the vote - claiming there is info in Kavanaugh's background file that can't be shown to the public that demonstrates he shouldn't have passed the 5 previous investigations.

It's absurd.

This letter is claiming the FBI has had this evidence all along that Kavanaugh is some kind of raging drunk sex predator and they've sat on it and approved him anyway.

Make no mistake: this is the Democrats throwing the FBI under the bus.

And Orrin Hatch's office wastes no time in calling the Dem's out on this:

diving into Tencent Music's IPO filing, and one huge takeaway for me—which I've sensed from Asia's wider entertainment-tech scene too—is that Spotify's long-term vision of a "two-sided marketplace" for artists and fans on streaming has already been happening in Asia for years.

AND GET THIS: In Q2'18, "social entertainment services" (e.g. virtual gifts, tipping) accounted for 70.4% of Tencent Music's revenue—but only 9.5M users out of 800M total paid for those services. this means that 1.2% of Tencent Music's users accounted for over 70% of its revenue.

^^those sound more like the stats for a mobile free-to-play gaming app, not like your standard music subscription service as we know it today. says a lot about where the future of music consumption may be going...

🚀 Just launched TimeKeeper on @ProductHunt!

https://t.co/x7XoXFiOM1

👩‍💻 Track your working time per project

☕️ Track your breaks

💰 Easily view your earnings per day and per project

🗒 Every session is logged for future reference

Check it out✌

https://t.co/6wEufb3Ys5

It my first mac app so its likely to have some bugs, be sure to message me if you found any and I'll update it asap 😚

I always used my phone's stopwatch to track the time I have worked on freelance projects and got inspired by @AndreyAzimov's Progress bar to create a simple menu bar app for it. It doesn't have all the unnecessary features, only the ones you need.

🧙‍♂️A magic ranking algorithm for news boards/upvote based communities
📈 Score = (u-1) / (t+2)^g
u = Upvotes (-1 to cancel out the point of the original submitter)
t = time
g = gravity (a gravitational constant, to make the post decay)
🏆Posts are ordered by Score

This was used in the first versions of Hacker News.
📉 Here are some sample plots

And a @paulg comment that shows a lisp implementation of this