Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
How Amazon Became Agile Steve Denning, Forbes (reading time: 12 minutes)
A lot of has been written about how Amazon operates and with good reason. The company continues to grow and take market share in multiple industries. This article shines a light on some of its core management practices. Even though they are not called “Agile”, there are directly tied to its core tenets: customer obsession, small teams, and functioning like a network.
Unpopular Opinions in Crypto Collaborative Fund (reading time: 10 minutes)
Bitcoin is back! The price of the digital currency is growing again and is at $15.6K at the time of this writing. This article highlights some of the key issues the Bitcoin community is debating, notably governance. While I can’t claim to be knowledgeable in the space, I find it interesting to lift the good once in a while to better understand the mechanics of the currency.
Slack a16z (reading time: 4 minutes)
Slack is the best and worst tool we have at the office. We use it constantly and is the backbone of our communication. They recently went public and this is a congratulatory article from their investor. The interesting tidbit here is that the company pivoted a few times before it found its market.
Robot Hiveminds & Network Effects Ali Yahya (reading time: 8 minutes)
This is a fascinating read into the world of robotics and network effects. The author is Ali Yayha who used to work on the Google X team (responsible for working on innovative R&D projects like robotics). His team applied machine learning to enable the robots to “learn” from each other. This is a bit of a technical read yet reveals some great insights into cutting edge research in the field of robotics.
Facebook’s Libra Masterplan Eric Wall (reading time: 10 minutes)
I’ve been fascinated with the recent announcement of Facebook’s own digital currency called Libra. This is the best article I’ve read on the subject that explains the evil master plan! With the massive network effects of its ~2.5 billion user app ecosystem, it has the potential to create the largest digital money platform that has ever existed, where it can record all purchases you make and market goods and services to you on a daily basis while leveraging the fact that Facebook already knows more about you than almost anyone else.
