Trevor McKendrick - Optimism should be a verb

Hi all,

I’ll be @ Fintech Meetup this week - email me if you want to say hi.

Trevor

”In admiration of some of the best programmers I've worked with” (article)

This describes the superpower of choosing when to ask questions that will stop/prevent/slow what you’re doing.

“They can decide to do something and then go and… do it. No rethinking of the How and the Whether and the Are you sure? No second guessing. They decided to do it, so they’ll do it.”

Bret Victor launched an updated website

If you don’t know Bret, set aside an afternoon and start to go through his work. This greatly undersells what he does but I’ll call it “user experience” or design. You could start with this talk on YouTube called Inventing on Principle.

Hims 2023 shareholder letter (PDF)

I haven’t had the chance to read 100% of this in detail, but Hims is an interesting business to me because it was enabled by the creation of an “API layer” into pharmacies by a company called Truepill. Their cohort gross profit has improved dramtically since 2019 (see page 8)

The Hims <> Truepill relationship feels similar in important ways to banking-as-a-service:

• Tightly coupled initial partnership between BaaS provider and consumer retail brand
• Economics share moves in favor of the consumer company over time with scale
• Highly regulated
• Truepill/BaaS provider will ultimately have a few very large customers while the smaller customers go out of business
• Expansion retail products come from other partners or are done in house
• Both can win together

How to give actionable & super specific feedback (article)

Often in work conversations when someone is about to make a suggestion that feels in the weeds, they’ll use the word “tactical”. “Sorry if this is too tactical, but…”

IMO those comments are some of the most valuable things that anyone says at a company. They usually change the actual work product.

Sam Bankman-Fried sentencing memo written by his lawyers (PDF)

90 pages.

I’d hate to half the next X years of my life materially influenced by a 90 page PDF.

See also patio11’s tweets

Lenny asked his podcast guests their favorite interview questions (article)

Some of my favorites from here:

“Tell me about a time when you needed to disagree with your manager or fight for a position against higher leadership.”

“Tell me about a time something went wrong. What happened and what did you do about it?”

“What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?”

Final thought from a Michael Nielsen tweet

“Optimistic really ought to be a verb

“It's something you do, not some property you happen to possess. Sometimes it's easy to do, and sometimes it's darned hard, requiring imagination & determination”

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