Mike's notes.
Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path. How does someone make good decisions? There’s a lot of smart people talking about it and we’ve written about a number of them here. Michael Mauboussin, Nassim Taleb, Rory Sutherland, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Richard Thaler all come up on this blog. Part of what… Continue reading Ambiguity Aversion
I don’t check my home equity every day, goes a joke among the Vanguard-Buffett-DCA crowd, why should I check my stock portfolio? It’s a riff on the availability heuristic: if I think it, it’s important. ‘Home’ is super available. Vacation rentals, of someone’s home. A chunk of net worth is home. Neighbors move. During Covid… Continue reading Copying the Inflation Buster
A business succeeds by doing three things: creating something people want, getting it to them, and communicating the value. We call this: product, placement, promotion. Hey Siri, search ‘sandbag workout’. Workout sandbags are an interesting product because no one wants sandbags. The product is the sandbag but the JTBD is looking like this guy. Or… Continue reading Made up start up: Sandbags
Demand-Side Sales 101 opens with a foreword from Jason Fried, from his time selling shoes: “I noticed that when people browsed shoes on a wall, they’d pick a few up and bounce them around in their hand to get a sense of the heft and feel. Shoes go on your feet, but people picked the… Continue reading Demand-Side Sales 101 (book review)
Broadly there are 3 ways to spend a day online. – trends, the algorithm or human generated headlines – feeds, the self selected sources – search, the internet queries of Wikipedia articles, travel plans, and what-is-my-kid’s-teacher’s-email Articulating the ways helps distinguish when we are, or aren’t in a helpful place. On days when it’s time… Continue reading Curated Creativity
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Reading note, a bit over my skis on the banking culture here. Caveat emptor . Researchers looked at how ‘protected hours’ (Saturdays off) worked for investment banks in New York City. Analyzing 16 million taxi rides, researchers found that bankers worked the same total number of hours, but did have Saturday’s off. There’s a few… Continue reading Protected Hours
One way to change an experience, and all experience is subjective, is to change the framing of it. Our food takes longer because we make it fresh. Via a16z: “There has been some interesting work in the linguistics community asking if we should be using war as a metaphor for the virus. There’s a lot… Continue reading Framing as a Fire or as a Fight
Successful copywriting uses the customer’s language. Find out what, how, when, and why the customer thinks – and the words they use. One accent of customer language is certainty. We dislike not knowing. Not knowing feels risky. It’s why this bag of sugar is so sweet: 30 calories per serving. Diets are trends. Eat this… Continue reading Sweet words
The Waiter's Pad 