Stealing Signs - Issue 12
Cloud-Native Gaming, Counterfeit Food, What's Gone Wrong in Schooling, Lessons from David Chang, & Automated Pitch Classification
Counterfeit Food
Alex Danco, Former VC @ Social Capital
“Now you don’t even know who’s preparing [your food order] – it could be the restaurant you know, but maybe it’s a counterfeit; maybe it’s some illegal cloud kitchen, operating in a garage. The more layers you add, the more you have to just trust the label, but the more untrustworthy the label becomes. ”
A very interesting story from the food world about the long term impact of delivery apps as platforms: the emergence of fraud. He compares GrubHub and Seamless to Amazon (and other platforms) in the sense that all internet platforms experience fraud — Seamless and GrubHub with potentially fake restaurants and Amazon with knockoff goods. He also gives a nice overview of the history of fraud in the food world, largely centered around fake ingredients, and breaks down his framework for how the food industry has changed thanks to software, what he calls the “food cloud.”
If you’ve followed Stealing Signs you know I’m a huge fan of Alex’s — he’s a phenomenal writer and an entertaining Twitter follow. One of my favorite things about Alex’s work is the diversity of topic coverage — from cooking to car ownership to Angel investing — Alex covers it all. His work is exciting and refreshing. He’s one of the few “must read” writers out there imo.
What’s Gone Wrong in Schooling
Mason Hartman, Teacher & Education Researcher
“In order to rescue education, we must rediscover play, and we must learn to trust the natural inclination of children to guide their own learning — as natural scientists.”
Mason digs into an issue that has caught fire, at least from my perspective, over the last 3-4 years: the inefficiencies of our education system. I particularly appreciate the experiential learning thread Mason explores in this piece.
A huge theme in my life right now is business school — mainly, whether or not to attend. I’ve grown to know many current students and b-school grads, and it’s certainly the norm among those in the VC and consulting world. Every single one vouches for the experience — none of them would change it. It’s a bit more difficult to relate not having had the b-school experience, but I generally understand and agree with their stance. However, my current job is testing that view of the world. It’s slowly building a case against b-school via extremely effective experiential learning opportunities. I’m forced to learn on the fly, encouraged to be hyper-curious, and given more responsibility than just about anywhere else I could be working (unless I’d started my own company). I’m learning a ton via my optimal learning medium — doing things. It’s hard to imagine giving that up for the traditional classroom.
On the flip side, I’m currently auditing a Kellogg (Northwestern) class on innovation and building teams. It’s awesome. I’ve learned a few things we cover on the job, but the majority of the class is new content and perspective. One of the more interesting learnings from this experience is that I miss being in an environment where I’m purely learning — downloading new information with time to really digest it. More input, less output — it’s refreshing.
Business school is still very much on my roadmap, but the VC and startup world has definitely given me pause, if only for a moment.
I wasted $40k on a Fantastic Startup Idea
Tom Cleveland
“You can’t just create value for the user: that’s a charity. You also can’t just create value for your company: that’s a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you.”
What happens when you build a very useful product that no one will pay for. Tom’s account of his entrepreneurial journey is very entertaining and weaves in some very important lessons about company building. It’s a refreshing piece and a fun read.
The Promise of Cloud-Native Gaming
Jonathan Lai, Andreessen Horowitz
“Because the cloud offers unlimited data, processing power, and minimal client-server latency, fully dynamic characters and environments can be generated by AI in real-time… In the future, real-time content generation could fuel new, immersive story-telling methods. The next generation of “choose-your-own-adventure” might be a virtual world that adapts in real-time to your choices. And to monetize these virtual worlds, personalized, spontaneous ads may emerge, similar to the biometric ads in Minority Report. ”
This is a fantastic breakdown of how cloud technology will revolutionize game play and game development. I’m extremely excited to watch the MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) shift to Cloud-native MMOs and it’s impact on player behavior — Jonathan makes some very compelling points on this.
I’m also excited about cloud technology’s impact on game monetization. I think we’re closer to Minority Report than ever before, just not in the real world — video games will be the first frontier. I believe a huge business will be built around in-game dynamic ads — matching brands with games/specific story lines or characters, managing campaigns, tracking ROI, ad mix optimization, creating ads that are integrated with in-game objectives…
P.S. I haven’t seen Minority Report, but luckily Jonathan links to a clip of it in his article. My coworkers are going to give me a lot of schtick for this… Let’s keep in mind this movie came out in 2002 — when I was 7. I was probably watching Stuart Little 2 instead.
Lessons From David Chang of Momofuku Noodle Bar
Tren Griffin, Microsoft
“Cooking and gardening involve so many disciplines: math, chemistry, reading, history… Someone like Chang loves to learn. He actually has fun when he is learning, and that makes the worldly wisdom investing process enjoyable… Simply put, people like Chang who think very broadly and understand many different models from many different disciplines make better decisions.”
Tren breaks down 12 key business lessons he’s learned from world-renowned chef, David Chang. I absolutely love Tren’s blog — it’s up there with Paul Graham and Ben Thompson’s content for me. A gold mine.
My dad is a chef and has worked in number of very successful restaurants, including two of his own — one of which was a Chicago staple for 10 years. I think Tren pinpoints exactly why chefs like David and my dad are successful — second only to their love of being an entrepreneur is their love for learning. And not just learning, but seeking out new information from diverse industries and applying it to their craft. So, not just “this chef made x dish and that chef did y with their decor so let’s mimic it,” but “this musician did x with their music mix so let’s compose our menu this way,” and “truck drivers tend to behave this way so let’s order y today and z tomorrow.” For context, my dad’s currently learning how to deconstruct and rebuild MacBooks — i’ll be sure to update this piece when his learnings make their way into his cooking!
The key point in all of this is the constant learning, adapting, and pulling new information from broad sources to improve decision making. It’s hard to overstate the impact this can have on success and decision making — especially early on in a company’s lifecycle when people are wearing many different hats and have broad responsibilities.
<stuff> Weekly!
LOL Weekly - When you connect a treadmill to a PS4…
lol I love this — the internet is undefeated.
Funding Weekly - Spatial
Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch
“a “holographic” collaboration platform that people use to speak and work together in virtual rooms through the use of strikingly effective avatars”
Insanely cool. The demo on their site is awesome and feels like either a Black Mirror episode or what I imagine Criminal Minds episodes will look like in 2025. That said, I can’t see that becoming reality anytime soon — it’s just such a significant behavior change. The VR/AR market, while well-funded, seems to agree — only ~6M VR headsets were sold last year. It’s still so, so early. There will be an inflection point at some point in the future where this stuff really clicks, but I’m having trouble seeing when or via what application of the technology.
Another important consideration — I’ve seen a lot of chatter recently about how remote work tools are trying too hard to simulate office dynamics. I couldn't agree more. I don't think remote work should simulate in-office work nor do I think remote workers want it to.
Baseball Weekly - Pitch Classification
Sam Sharpe, Data Scientist @ MLB
'“When developing our new system, PitchNet, we hypothesized that a centralized network would help performance, so each pitchers’ network wouldn’t have to relearn the concept of a ‘fastball’. However, we still need some way to personalize the predictions for each pitcher. We use embeddings, a low dimensional vector representation, to model pitchers much like how word embeddings are used in modern natural language processing.”
Super interesting piece on how the MLB uses a trained neural network and machine learning models to classify pitches and their shift to automated classification in 2020. I particularly enjoy the new pitch discovery process using an unsupervised machine learning model.
P.S. - 🚨🚨🚨 IT’S OFFICIALLY BASEBALL SEASON. PITCHERS AND CATCHERS REPORT TO SPRING TRAINING IN 4 DAYS!
Art Weekly - Home Within A Home
Do Ho Suh
“a 1:1 scale replica of two houses the artist had previously lived in, one inside the other. Created in purple fabric, his traditional Korean home, where he lived in when he was a child, is enveloped and suspended within a more modern building, his first apartment building when he came to the United States, located in Providence, Rhode Island… The work is so massive, measuring 12m x 15m, that Suh had to use a 3D scanning machine for precision and detail.”
An incredibly cool piece on an incredibly massive scale.
