Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood on everything from deflation to Elon Musk Financial Times (reading time: 32 minutes)
I’m a huge Cathie Wood fan. She’s the poster child for technology innovation in the public markets. Yet, her fund Ark Invest has struggled mightily over the past year. Her once amazing results are now looking bleak. This post in the Financial Times dives into how Ms. Wood got the idea for her fund and the subsequent rise. They are interesting insights into how rising interest rates will impact technology valuations in the short term.
Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work Microsoft (reading time: 28 minutes)
I was impressed with the quality of the research and insights from this Microsoft article. Looks like they upped their content game. The hybrid work debate still rages and will likely continue for the years to come. This post offers some interesting insights into what employees are looking for and how leaders can take action. I would pair it with this short post from consulting firm August on creating an inclusive culture.
The Future is Vast: Longtermism’s perspective on humanity’s past, present, and future Our World in Data (reading time: 15 minutes)
This is not a typical business article that I would share. It is a fascinating thought experiment. How many people will ever live? The article is based on research from two historians that estimate that there have been 109 billion people alive over the last 200,000 years. What’s interesting is how many people are yet to be born, the number is vast.
DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content Ben Thompson (reading time: 11 minutes)
There was an important development in the field of artificial intelligence this past week. The team from Open AI presented their new program that can take simple text entry and turn it into realistic images that have never existed before. What’s wild is the accuracy of the results, the software has been trained to understand the relationship between objects.
In this post by Ben Thompson, he discusses the potential impact of this breakthrough on social media and user generated content. My personal take, white collar jobs seem at greater risk than blue collar ones with this type of technology.
The mystery of the miracle year Dwarkesh Patel (reading time: 8 minutes)
An interesting pattern recurs across the career of great scientists – an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two.
This article caught the attention of many people on twitter this past week including Jeff Bezos. It points out an interesting pattern of great scientists and their miracle year. The author highlights the potential causes and what we should do to encourage more of these kinds of breakthroughs.
