Not Boring by Packy McCormick - Not Boring AMA
Welcome to the 752 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since Monday! Join 58,823 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: 🎧 To get this essay straight in your ears: listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Composer I love analyzing and investing in companies, but I don’t have the time or skill to manage my portfolio day-to-day like a professional with custom-built algorithms. That means I’m left with a bunch of bad options: hand my investing over to a robo-advisor, buy index funds, or buy and hold until I decide to adjust or sell. Composer makes investing creative. It’s a no-code tool that lets anyone create and set custom automated strategies and then hands over the reigns to the algorithms takes care of the rest. It’s the best of both worlds: I pick my assets, design the strategy, and backtest it against benchmarks, and Composer handles all of the details to optimize my portfolio. Plus, it’s just beautiful software. Composer is starting to bring customers off its waitlist. Not Boring readers get their first month of Composer free at the link below. To get every month free, go work at Composer. They’re remote-first and hiring developers. Hi friends 👋 , Happy Monday! I’ve thrown a lot at you over the past few weeks. In June alone, we covered: The Cooperation Economy, Cityblock Health, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Cometeer, Scale, and NexHealth. We’re talking nearly forty thousand words, across a pretty wide range of topics. Today, I want to switch things up and try something a little lighter weight for three reasons:
Consider this a pre-holiday-weekend palette cleanser for all of us. If you enjoy this format as an every-once-in-a-while thing, let me know in the UserLeap survey at the bottom and we can do more. Let’s get to it. Not Boring AMAInstead of a full essay this week, we’re trying something new: an AMA. AMA, which stands for Ask Me Anything, is based on the popular Reddit format of the same name. Or, if you prefer, this is my version of Bill Simmons’ Mailbags. Either way, it’s the same: you ask, I answer. On Saturday, I asked you for questions on Twitter... ...and you asked 127 of them. There were way too many great questions to answer, and many of them are rich enough for full essays of their own, like web3 vs. fintech and the rise of 15 minute grocery, so those might show up in your inbox in the coming weeks and months. For now, here are ten of the most popular, most representative, or just questions I wanted to answer the most. Looking back at the past year, what have you been most wrong about? Or what has been your worst prediction? How has that changed any of your mental models?Let’s kick it off with some misses! Because I’ve written a bunch about public companies and crypto, which come with real-time scoreboards, it’s easy to track what I’ve been most wrong about from a pure numbers perspective. Even after tech stocks began cooling off earlier this year, this biggest loser is… shorting bill.com. The easy answer to how that changed my mental models is that it actually just reinforced my natural bullishness. Never short, especially in a bull market! But I don’t think that’s the right takeaway. There are three bigger lessons:
Where I’ve been wrong more generally, beyond Bill, largely stems from that last point: it’s really easy to extrapolate from my own experience and viewpoint and make generalizations. I’m trying to actively bring in other points of view and perspectives to my writing process to try to counter that, but it will always be a work-in-progress. Beyond specific companies, I think it’s too early to tell what else I’ve been most wrong about. I try not to make predictions about what will happen next week, next month, or even next year, because either no one really knows or it’s already priced in. The areas where I could be proven most wrong long-term include:
The one big thing I’m figuring out is less on the mental model side and more on the presentation side: I remain hyperoptimistic about the future and technology’s impact on it, but as Not Boring’s readership grows, I need to be a lot more measured in how I present my bullishness. It’s never investment advice, and I’m never the expert. I’m learning in the open and willing to be wrong, but need to be sure that people understand that and don’t ape into anything just because I wrote about it. Do you think we're going through a Gartner hype cycle for MS-paint style hand-drawn diagrams of extremely complex strategies? Are we about to launch off the peak of inflated expectations?Short answer: no. MS Paint is older than I am. It was first released in 1985! Back then, for the first decade of its life, it was actually called Paintbrush, but by the time I had to learn how to use it in a high school art class, it was MS Paint. MS Paint was the Technology Trigger that ignited the whole digital hand-drawn versions of complex concepts revolution. Craig Wallace was the MS Paint King of my high school class. He could make anything funnier with MS Paint. In those halcyon days, we thought that everything was going to be MS Paint. “All other types of illustrations are dead!” people exclaimed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire World Wide Web ended up being a series of MS Paint drawings,” predicted others. It was the glory days for MS Paint. But we hit the Peak of Inflated Expectations and, as always happens, fell off it hard. “These images are kind of terrible,” yelled the naysayers. “This is too cartoonish to take very seriously,” scoffed serious business people. We were, of course, in the Trough of Disillusionment. Things were touch and go for MS-paint style hand-drawn diagrams of extremely complex strategies. While we were in the Trough, the hardcore illustrators kept illustrating. This happens in every trough. The weak hands are shaken out, and only the truly passionate remain. See: Crypto Winter in 2018. In this case, the passionate builder in question was NASA Roboticist Russell Munroe. In 2005, he posted his first comic to xkcd: Over time, Munroe’s cartoons evolved to explain more complex things than a boy floating in a tub. Many of today’s illustrator/writer/complex-thing-explainers can trace their lineage back to Munroe. All-in-all, though, the early 2000s were the Dark Ages for MS-paint style hand-drawn diagrams of extremely complex strategies. Then in 2013, a savior emerged: Tim Urban, the author/illustrator behind Wait But Why. On July 8, 2013, Urban lit the world of MS-paint style hand-drawn diagrams of extremely complex strategies on fire with his first post: 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook. As if to announce that shitty drawings to explain things were back, before the very first word, Urban dropped this gem of a painstakingly and lovingly handcrafted illustration: Urban was the first in the recent wave of amateur illustrator/writers… or that’s what they’d like you to think. See, when you Google “When did Wait But Why launch?” Google confidently returns “2013.” When you Google “When did Stratechery launch?” Google gets even more confident, returning both a month and a date: April 2014. BUT WAIT. Look at the date on Ben Thompson’s first Stratechery post, “Welcome to Stratechery.” MARCH 25, 2013. What the fuck. But wait again, it gets weirder. What do you think Thompson slid in right after the unassuming opening sentence, “I don’t know much about sailing. So perhaps it’s not the best analogy with which to launch this blog. But here goes…” You guessed it… This absolutely gorgeous illustration of two sailboats, signed by the artist himself, clearly brought to life on a brand new iPad app called Paper… To read more about the MS-Paint Hype Cycle, and for eight more answers, including how I research and how Not Boring might fail…Thanks to Dan and Puja for editing, and to all of you for the great questions! How did you like this week’s Not Boring? Your feedback helps me make this great. Loved | Great | Good | Meh | Bad Thanks for reading and see you after the Fourth! Packy If you liked this post from Not Boring by Packy McCormick, why not share it? |
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