Stealing Signs - Issue 05 (12/19/19)
Digital Health, Beginning of the Internet, ML for Baseball Scouting, and TikTok
Worth Reading
Computing at Cornell and the Internet
Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft
“the Internet “fad” that is so prevalent in the commercial computing environment is nothing new at universities. In fact, the people I spoke with were even smug about it, with somewhat of an I told you so attitude. The phrase “Internet” has been part of university computing for at least 10 years and all indications are that each day more and more applications are being designed assuming the presence of this network.
A riveting memo from Steven Sinofsky, Bill Gates’s technical assistant at the time (1994), on how Cornell got the internet and what Microsoft can learn from the way the university and its students adopted it. I particularly enjoyed the parallels he highlights between Cornell and Microsoft in the behaviors that emerge in response to technology - public discussions about technology inefficiencies, login ID change-overs etc, sticking floppys into computers to check emails since the servers deleted emails older than 60 days, etc. His call out of online chat as a trending new means of communication was an eerie moment for me while reading - he identified a cultural and technological revolution in real-time at Cornell and boy did he get it right. Pretty cool.
On the Digital Health Conundrum (Part II)
Neal Khosla, Curai
“...you can drive change in healthcare if you’re willing to think about how the parts fit together. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding when people say health care is slow. Yes, the timelines are slow due to healthcare’s local nature and natural rate of change. The reality is when disruptions come to the healthcare system, they come fast.”
The second piece in Neal’s two-part series on the current state of digital health ecosystem (there’s a nice tl;dr of part one included in the intro). It’s a great breakdown of healthcare’s relationship with technology and what causes real change and adoption in the industry. Neal urges healthcare systems, entrepreneurs, and investors to think outside of the box and avoid incremental thinking.
Also - neat chart in here that shows EMR adoption among non-federal acute care hospitals from 2008-14: from 0% to ~70% in 6 years!!
Sherlocked by Apple
Savannah Reising, Astropad
“Over the past few years, Apple routinely invited us to demo our products at their headquarters, and offered to help us out with whatever business and engineering challenges we faced. They also ordered thousands of dollars’ worth of our hardware, and we naively thought it was because they were interested in our product. It turns out that they were… just not in the way we were thinking.”
Love this candid piece from Astropad - creators of an iOS app for designers - about how they were courted by Apple under the guise of a platform (Apple) helping a small developer (Astropad), only to see Apple copy much of their product and include it as a native iOS app months later. The lessons identified in the article are worth internalizing for anyone building a business or managing a product/division within a company - be flexible and nimble, know your competition, and establish a deep understanding of your differentiators and then hyperfocus on them.
Programmer Moneyball
Dan Luu
“By going after people with the most sought after qualifications, TrendCo has narrowed their options down to either paying out the nose for employees, or offering non-competitive compensation packages. TrendCo has chosen the latter option, which partially explains why they have, proportionally, so few senior devs -- the compensation delta increases as you get more senior, and you have to make a really compelling pitch to someone to get them to choose TrendCo when you're offering $150k/yr less than the competition.”
A very well-written piece on the common startup practice of hiring “trendy” candidates and the inefficiencies in the hiring market. Ties in nicely with the Funding Weekly section from Stealing Signs Issue 03 on alternative hiring marketplaces and mediums to display one’s skills. It seems critically important to optimize candidate evaluation so that we can hire candidates before they get to Google. Keeping them got the long-term is a different story, but it starts with getting them in the door.
<stuff> Weekly!
LOL Weekly - “I’m like a Bird”
I mean what is going on here lolllllllllll. Truly the cutting edge. I’m so, so here for this.
Funding Weekly - Chatbot for Bored Teens
“The company first built a mobile app that let you chat with an artificial BFF, a sort of chatbot for bored teenagers. More recently, the startup released an open-source library for natural language processing applications...Hugging Face’s open-source framework Transformers has been downloaded over a million times. The GitHub project has amassed 19,000 stars, proving that the open-source community thinks this is a useful brick to build upon.”
A chatbot for bored teenagers that detects users’ emotions and adapts answers based on feelings. We’re in the golden age of technology.
Baseball Weekly - Draftpoint: Making Sense of Scout-Speak
“Draftpoint provides the next level in scouting and with complex algorithms can do things that humans can’t—pull out key words, phrases and similarities in scouting and provide comps to similar players,”
Seems quite interesting. The issue here, though, is that this technology is just a layer on top of the already inefficient old-school scouting methods. In other words, this tech is still reliant on the eye-test, which is extremely inconsistent. So, Draftpoint is cool and probably really attractive to MLB execs because it’s parsing “known” data, but it doesn't appear to actually enhance player evaluation. It’s cool, but eh 🤷
Art Weekly - Senem Oezdogan
As I get into exploring the art world a bit I find that I often can’t articulate why I like certain pieces. It’s an unusual feeling.
Chart Weekly: Tik Tok on 🔥🔥🔥
This survey suggests Tik Tok is more popular than Facebook for kids under 16. It’s really the first generation growing up without Facebook as the primary social media platform. There’s a significant culture shift in progress. I have doubts about the staying power of new age social products. There’s more here, but I don’t think Tik Tok will have anywhere near the cultural relevance it has today in 2 years, whereas Facebook dominated for 8-9 years (and is arguably still dominant).
A framework I’ve been thinking a lot about recently (outlined in this Acquired episode on TikTok): Curation method and content type as drivers of the culture shift in social products. Tik Tok and Facebook are polar opposites. Tik Tok auto-curates content from anyone, anywhere in the world based on what’s hot and trending (auto-curation/unknown content). Facebook relies on users to curate their network (friends) and which informs the content they see and expect (manual curation/known content). So, the culture shift is from expected and known networks of people and content to entirely random and unknown networks. It think the auto-curation/unknown content model can be more effectively monetized, too, which means I think we’ll see more social products leverage it in the future.
