This is really cool! “Imagine an invisible button between your thumb and index fingers – you can press it by tapping your fingers together. Or a Virtual Dial that you turn by rubbing thumb against index finger. Imagine grabbing and pulling a Virtual Slider in thin air. These are the kinds of interactions we are developing and imagining.” | learn more
New site where best direct-to-consumer companies are listed for free.
Stephan Aarstol, the founder of Tower Paddle Boards (backed by Mark Cuban), created NoMiddleMan.com to try and remove the need for d2c brands to pay a big portion of revenue to Amazon and Google for the privilege of reaching customers. | learn more
Google wants to kill the URL.
“Whatever we propose is going to be controversial. But it’s important we do something, because everyone is unsatisfied by URLs. They kind of suck.” | learn more
What does ‘run the traps’ mean?
I recently googled it to find out! The phrase originally comes from hunting. | learn more
Spiders fly across Lake Michigan.
While visiting the Willis Tower for a meeting this week, I heard a story of spiders flying across the lake from Michigan and attaching themselves to tall buildings. My skepticism alarm went off right away and I had to google it. | learn more
Profile of Spotify and its founder Daniel Ek.
“How CEO Daniel Ek plans to beat Apple, Amazon, and Google at the music game.” | learn more
Measure What Matters
Author: John Doerr
John Doerr is the legendary venture capitalist who invested in (among others) Google, Amazon, Compaq, Intuit, Netscape, Symantec, Twitter and Zynga. Seriously this guy is an OG in the venture world. He started his career at Intel where he learned the system of OKRs (“Objectives and Key Results”) developed by Andy Grove. He’s been sharing it with the world ever since, it seems.
The OKR system helps organizations focus the talents and efforts of groups of people to accomplish incredible things together – from “making the trains run on time” to moonshot goals.
Shortly after Doerr’s firm Kleiner Perkins invest into Google, he showed up with a slide-show to pitch Larry & Sergey on OKRs. He presented it as an operating system for their business. They signed up, and have been using it ever since. This book includes excerpts from Larry Page and other founders/execs telling their story of OKRs.
I loved reading this book because I am a believer in goal-setting generally, and goal-setting processes for teams specifically to improve outcomes. Goal-setting and measurement are, for me, permanently intertwined. At eComfort, we used a similar methodology to set goals and metrics for each individual, and I was thrilled with the results. It was a bit rougher than OKRs, so the next opportunity I get I think we’ll migrate over to this instead.
Bonus: Google’s OKR Playbook
AI reads eye scans as well as humans.
“Doctors at a U.K. eye hospital are getting algorithmic help interpreting the results of 3D eye scans, using a system developed at Google’s DeepMind that can identify more than 50 eye problems and recommend a course of action with human expert-level accuracy.” | learn more
China and the race for AI dominance.
Here’s an interesting perspective from Wired UK that’s heavy on quotes from Kai-Fu Lee, one of the most famous technologists in China (he’s been an exec at Apple, Microsoft and Google). The author thinks China will win the global race. I think the jury’s still out. | learn more
Frank Abagnale gave an amazing talk at Google.
The real-life person who inspired the Leonardo DiCaprio movie “Catch Me If You Can” is exactly as interesting as you might imagine. He told his story first-hand at Google, and luckily it was recorded and published for the rest of the internet to enjoy! | learn more