#startups

Thanks to artists like Beeple and projects like CryptoPunks, NFTs have been the main character of crypto news in 2021. This has led to an avalanche of NFT sales by artists and celebrities all over the world. Despite the heavy focus on people with clout cashing in on their social capital, I think NFTs will have an even bigger impact on artists emerging today.

A common anti-pattern in the world of software development is the over-operationalisation of the research and development process. In moving away from traditional ways of working, companies will spin up long-lived teams, working to sprint cycles, but still find a way to cram an inordinate amount of upfront planning into the system, causing a significant amount of waste. This can feel like a big step in the right direction but often comes with very little benefits compared to the old way of working, as the way the team works doesn’t change.

The world of work is rapidly migrating from physical space to the internet and this newly dominant medium for work is going to significantly change how we structure society. This may sound dramatic, but it is inevitable that industrial-revolution era systems, legislations and structures will eventually be superseded. I think, in the crypto community, we’re already seeing the structures of the future emerge.

A playbook I’ve used to describe the responsibilities of a software engineer for hiring and professional development purposes.

In much of the world, industrialisation has led to the abundance of calories, often in very unhealthy forms — a novel state for a creature that is accustomed to subsistence. This has posed serious challenges for society (e.g., how do we provide large populations of people with healthy food?) and individuals (i.e., how do I eat healthy food in reasonable amounts when millions of years of evolution has instilled a nature of scarcity into me, that drives me to consume all I can find?). Growing up in the 1990s, the golden age of the fad workout plan and diet, the public debate regarding the dangers of junk food was prominent. The parents of many kids in my generation changed their attitudes towards sustenance significantly throughout our childhoods. Abundance, while positive in so many ways, comes with challenges.

On August 25th, Identify and Disrupt passed both houses of the Australian parliament with support from both major parties, just one day after it was first debated. Officially dubbed Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021, the bill empowers the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) with three new and egregious powers when investigating federal crimes, or state crimes with a “federal aspect”.

To make effective decisions when developing products, engagement with customers is critical. Building this into your way of working should be the priority of any product leadership. Along the way, data should be captured and analysed.

Today, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the standard business model for monetising business-to-business software. In the SaaS model, software is licensed to customers through an ongoing recurring subscription (e.g., a customer might pay $25 per month for continued access) or another form of operational monetisation (e.g., transactional fees on application usage) which also includes customer services.

I am an advocate for simple and collaborative methods for defining strategy for a team, department or company. Many strategy frameworks are too complex and while they may seem democratic (by embracing voting, for example), they usually lead to the middling harmony of sticking to the status quo. Instead, your collaborative process should encourage rigorous debate to overcome the mediocrity of concensus.

Many people say they don’t care about what data Big Tech is collecting on them. “I’ve got nothing to hide” is a common explanation for this. But, just because you’re comfortable with the ways your being tracked today doesn’t mean you will be in the future, when more data points are available for aggregation.

I talk a lot about regulation. But, let’s put this aside for a minute. Let’s talk about what Big Tech <em>should</em> do. Not just for shareholders (though their needs should obviously be a priority), but for the broader technology ecosystem.

Last week, House lawmakers announced their bipartisan legislative agenda to regulate Big Tech, led by Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David N. Cicilline. This agenda consists of five bipartisan bills tackling Big Tech from multiple angles. While some proposals seem fair (i.e., updating filing fees for mergers for the first time in two decades), others, as is often the case with tech regulation, will likely come with unintended consequences.

Over the past decade, many of the big software suppliers in ecommerce have been moving towards an “all-in-one” strategy, with seemingly everyone trying to become the one-stop-shop for retailers (i.e., inventory management systems adding order management capability, order management systems adding inventory management capability, marketing apps adding storefront functionality). The result has been the emergence of broad platforms that have a lot of features, but don’t do anything great (jack of all trades, master of none; wide but not deep).

Google has been a focal point in the ongoing Big Tech anti-trust conversation, having achieved what many describe a monopoly in general search. Their defence? The “competition is one click away”.

Big Tech in-fighting has highlighted the tension between privacy and digital marketing. While I’m undecided on where we should draw the line, here is a summary of how I see the current situation.