anettrolikova

[anettrolikova]

In working with many early-stage companies, the teams that go slow in the first year tend to have the best trajectories. The first year should be about customer research, ideation and hypothesis testing. 

When companies do the upfront work to talk to users, then ideate and iterate on the idea before breaking ground on the product, the chances of building a successful company increase.

Once you start building the product, it is hard to change course. If you point the product in the right direction from day one, your odds of creating a winner will be much higher.

“Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency and intensity.”

many startups engage influencers for product promotions, but they miss the opportunity to hire experts to stress-test products, give candid feedback and highlight areas of improvement that you might have overlooked internally. 

#startup #product #usertesting #early-stage

[anettrolikova]

The other big difference between a real essay and the things they make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't take a position and then defend it.

That principle, like the idea that we ought to be writing about literature, turns out to be another intellectual hangover of long forgotten origins.

Good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing. 

When I give a draft of an essay to friends, there are two things I want to know: which parts bore them, and which seem unconvincing. The boring bits can usually be fixed by cutting.

But I don't try to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. I need to talk the matter over.

Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt.

An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.

Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising.

#essay #writing #advice #writing advice #dont fix ur essay with more arguments #explain the boring parts #dont persuade #explain

[anettrolikova]

Failure should punctuate a strong track record A rich person says, “I struggled a lot. Now, I’m here doing this cool thing.”

A broke person says, “I struggled a lot. Actually I’m still struggling.”

One makes you think, “What a rags to riches story. I’m so inspired.” The other makes you feel sad. You don’t want to be vulnerable at the expense of your ultimate goal, which at work, is generally about inspiring confidence in your abilities—so your startup gets funded, so you get hired, so your manager trusts you more.

Let’s say you’re a candidate interviewing for roles. Over-emphasizing failure makes you seem like a risky hire. The hiring manager thinks, Wow, I appreciate that they shared this, but it was kind of a poor judgment call, they missed obvious signs, and the expensive mistake probably could have been avoided altogether. Maybe we should pick another candidate who has better judgment. Failure can be perceived as a pattern match or a pattern break. Startups have to tow the line between simultaneously playing up aspects that make them the underdog (because they’re clearly not Google and can’t hide this) AND playing up that they are proven, trusted, the go-to, reliable, stable, etc (elements of the favorite) so customers are willing to take a chance. If you’re the challenger, not the default, you’re already deemed risky. When in doubt, show why you're the winning team to counterbalance.

People want to read about your failures if they deem you a success. If you’re talking about failure, remember to share a few points of credibility, so you give folks a reason to want to learn from you. If you're going to share widely-make sure you're sharing from your scars, not your open wounds. Love Warrior is intensely personal, but it's not a diary.

I started turning it into a memoir two years after it all happened, and I had enough distance to look at all of it somewhat objectively. 

If you’re still in the midst of struggle, talking about your failure can look like a cry for help. And most companies don’t want to hire a content marketer or product manager who seems like they’re in the middle of crisis.

#failure #succession #share stories #overview #share scards not open wounds #substack #sum up

[anettrolikova]

The feeling we get around a crush, or when a crush is starting to form, is actually quite similar to the feeling we get when we define a new goal or set a new aim that really excites us. Like signing up for a marathon, or trying to get into medical school, or meeting someone doing exactly what we want to be doing.

Crushes can be a window into something we feel we don't have, something we feel we are lacking, something we want someone else to fulfill—some ambition we have for ourselves.

Ambition is really just another way of saying that one has "an aspiration to be excellent". Excellent at anything. This can be excellence at work, professionally. It can be creative excellence.

Ambition just means that you want more from yourself than what you are now.

crushes are such a perfect container to encapsulate this desire for more. Because you can see someone right in front of you, living out that ambition that you have

need to think that the person understands something that I don't. I need to feel like I can learn from them. Like I can learn a lot from them. They need to be someone I need to work hard to understand. Someone interesting, dimensional, layered. A thinker, usually. I like people who think hard.

Who have beliefs, and who have reasons for those beliefs, but are open to letting go of those beliefs if their reasons for believing them are proven to be untrue or wobbly.

The idea of having to peel back layers to completely understand something or someone is what excites me.

These crushes just represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of.

#ambition #goal #relationship #frienship #set an ambition #deep thinking #peeling layers #humans #psychology

[anettrolikova]

It’s the quality that’s most important to me, somewhat in other people but mostly in myself. The ability to distinguish between what’s outside and what’s inside, and also the ability to keep the two separate.

thinking before talking. Regulating your most extreme emotions. And summoning the will to grit your teeth and do the thing you have to do. Containment sometimes demands passivity (keeping a secret, listening instead of talking, suppressing an outburst) but I think it also demands activity (doing your chores, apologizing first, holding on, letting go). It’s a willingness to stomach unpleasantness, to control yourself for the sake of self-respect.

accepting that you are not always going to get the last word, or be able to confess your sins to someone else. The dating advice I most consistently give friends: you only need to know what’s happening, you don’t need to know why. Closure is sometimes given, but never summoned.

#self respect #thinking before talking #read

[anettrolikova]

I like to travel, but familiar environments enable process better than anything else. I like to walk my dog in the morning, get the same cold brew and the same trout toast, putter around and do the same domestic tasks, sit down at my dining table (which is mostly used as a second desk) and write for a few hours. The morning routine is a kind of incantation. It clears up space to think.

I think of process as the alchemy that allows work to happen, life to happen. I sit down and I write. My body knows what to expect. Some days are better and some days are worse. I’m used to that by now. Some days I sit there trying for an hour or three, and then delete it, and at the end of the day I have nothing.

I’m trying to work out a particular vantage point. You can’t write a story if you’re too close up. You can love a person if you don’t understand them, but maybe not successfully. Good art is a matter of how you see something as simple as a chopping board and a head of lettuce. Everything is interesting if the perspective is right.

Writing takes time, and sometimes that frustrates me. I want everything to happen right now.

There is something important about developing right kind of patience: working diligently, but understanding timing. Holding on for long enough and then letting go. Distinguishing between what feels alive and what doesn’t.

We are always building off the experiences we’ve already accumulated. This year I am learning that I have to respect other people’s processes as well as my own. To love someone is to love their patterns, their rituals, the things that already take up space in their life. To love someone is to work with who they already are and decide if you can accept it.

If you find someone who loves the way you think they will have respect for your process. Because they understand that the writing comes from the thinking, the action comes from the seeing. You don’t get to pick and choose different parts of other people: every quality is connected with every other quality. To love a person is to love a complex ecosystem.

#respect #process #writing #decorating #friends #enviroments

[anettrolikova]

people in this city are also the people who make the small glowing devices, the social media platforms, the subscription platform services, that other people criticize them on. Life happens on the Internet now.

#San Francisco #longer read #tech city #friends

[anettrolikova]

One of the benefits of getting older is perspective: the more change you experience, the more you can put that change into context and understand the impact it’s had on your life and on the world around you. Technology evolves pretty quickly these days, and by now I’ve experienced a couple of technological revolutions.

On the flipside, there’s growing backlash against some forms of modern technology, especially social media and big tech firms. Some prominent scholars feel that the pace of technological innovation has slowed considerably.

There’s a fallacy in technology where it’s easy to believe that something faster and sexier, with better specs and more features, is always a good thing. But this isn’t always true. Doctors still like using pagers because they’re simple, reliable, indestructible, have very long battery lives, and don’t drown you in ads and notifications. In other words, they just work.

This is the same reason that I prefer running with a GPS watch rather than my smartphone, and I prefer reading a book on a Kindle rather than on an iPad. These devices all do one thing, and they do that thing very well.

#technology #overview #life is changing

[anettrolikova]

As you acquire better technologies, your power increases. For example, if you’re a farmer with a basic scythe, acquiring a combine harvester is going to dramatically improve the rate at which you can harvest your produce. If you’re a soldier with a spear, acquiring an assault rifle is going to significantly increase your ability to kill your enemies. More tech = more power.

AI is a technology that can significantly enhance the power of governments and thus push them further towards authoritarianism.

Whatever is legible to the state can be controlled by the state, and when everything becomes legible, everything can be controlled by the state. AI will make everything legible, which is why it’s incredibly dangerous even if we could keep it under human control.

is also a technology that heavily advantages state-level actors over individuals. Let’s make four assumptions:

The more compute time you use in training an AI, the more intelligent it is.

An AI with higher intelligence is almost always better than an AI with lower intelligence, even if it was slower and/or more expensive.

Having a better AI increases your productivity in all areas.

A government has vastly more resources compared to individuals and even gigacorporations within the borders of the polity it governs.

Using these assumptions, we can make the following argument:

A government can easily become the owner of the most computing power in its polity, due to the immense resources it commands.

Therefore, it can become the owner of the most intelligent AI in its polity.

Therefore, it can become the owner of the best AI in its polity.

Having the best AI makes the government the most productive at AI development.

Therefore, the government not only can have the best AI but also can improve its AI the fastest, ensuring that it will maintain its lead. is also a technology that heavily advantages state-level actors over individuals. Let’s make four assumptions:

The more compute time you use in training an AI, the more intelligent it is.

An AI with higher intelligence is almost always better than an AI with lower intelligence, even if it was slower and/or more expensive.

Having a better AI increases your productivity in all areas.

A government has vastly more resources compared to individuals and even gigacorporations within the borders of the polity it governs.

blockchain and cryptography are part of the group of rare technologies that empower individuals more than governments.

Crypto is both radical and conservative. It’s radical for people already living under authoritarian regimes, since it enables radical change towards a more liberal society. It’s conservative for people living in liberal democracies because it protects their existing way of life against growing authoritarianism. Ordinary people living in the West will one day need to use crypto just to live and breathe as freely as they do today.

We need to build more financial tools and attract economic value into crypto so that if and when we need to organize against the encroachment of authoritarianism, there will be enough censorship-resistant capital at our disposal. We need more private communication tools to ensure that our private conversations stay private. We need more private blockchain networks to make our smart contracts illegible to governments. The more people participate in an economy illegible to the government, the less control the government will have, the further away we stay from authoritarianism.

#crypto #politics

[anettrolikova]

people in the blockchain world talk about “ossified protocols” a lot, but why is that an apt metaphor? What about protocols is, or can become, bone-like? I think it has to do with how protocols exist in time.

we can’t predict most things about the future, but some things we can predict with an eerie amount of confident precision. For example, I am pretty confident that this time 5 years from now, whether or not the US exists as a country, and whether or not zombies or aliens have taken over, we’ll still be driving on the right-hand side of the road on this continent and using 110V electricity. That’s because road rules constitute a pretty ossified protocol and are part of the bones of time. The electric grid is built around a set of standards and protocols and is also part of the bones of time. These social realities seem to have a preternatural stability across the fan of possible futures, and a kind of inflexible hardness we normally associate with the natural laws of physics.

One of the reasons the pandemic felt like such a dramatic disruption of life was that several foundational protocols of life, like shaking hands and smiling, got broken.

Protocols create artificial “vertebrate” time out of natural “invertebrate” time.

The same lens can be applied to the past. We structure our understanding of the past in terms of bone-like procedural social realities that don’t change easily, and induce a certain hard-edged quality in event streams. We have histories of the United States, China, the Catholic Church, and railroad technologies in large part because those entities enjoy an ontological stability that emerges out of the protocols defining their ossified social realities.

Protocols are a bit like laws of nature in this regard: defined by stable symmetries and conservation principles that limit the space of possible futures and pasts.

That they are the product of social contrivance and technological artifice doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they endure for long periods while changing slowly or not at all. They may be made-up and arbitrary, but they create persistent laws of social reality.

#bones #protocols #standards #structures

[anettrolikova]

NFT Canon

go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, corporations and institutions, communities and other organizations seeking to understand or do more with non-fungible tokens.

It’s a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs (inspired by the a16z Crypto Canon), and is organized from the big picture of what NFTs are and why they matter to how to mint, collect, and do more with them — including FAQs, ecosystem overviews, and various applications such as art, music, gaming, social tokens, creator DAOs, and others.

#nft canon #nft #readings #library #nft reading

[anettrolikova]

Rotations are commonly used in software engineering to fairly distribute undesirable duties among team members. They suck but they work!

As an engineer on this rotation, you felt like you were fighting fires. You didn't have the time or knowledge to actually fix root causes.

the rotation served its purpose because users' problems got solved.

the purpose of the rotation was to resolve users' issues. An engineer on rotation had one job: resolve as many issues as possible. This approach was so simple and effective that the organization never adopted the rotation as a driver for change. Ironically, treating users' problems as mere symptoms of an underlying problem and then solving the root causes would have reduced the number of problems in the long-term.

The metrics incentivize counterproductive behavior and, over time, develop into a self-perpetuating culture. This is corruption.

We can carefully design our metrics and think critically about the behaviors we expect them to incentivize.

We can extend self-awareness and critical thinking to all decisions made within an organization.

We can look beyond metrics by qualifying success and failure.

#success #company #product management #rotation #thinking

[anettrolikova]

The hard part of writing isn't stringing words together or coming up with a good-sounding paragraph or two. Like in other creative mediums, writing is about better understanding yourself, how you can work with language and how much work you can handle without going crazy.

if I were suddenly gifted the entire world's time to focus on writing, I'd totally want to dostoyevsky myself into a new universe. I'd start grand - epic with no end in sight. But from my experience as a blogger, I also know that this is as unrealistic as it is foolish. I'd go crazy because if you practice the craft, you know how unhappy one can be with a formerly written paragraph read with fresh eyes. Editing cannot go on forever.

Writing it's achievable through regular publishing, and it's why this website's called "Proof in Progress," as I've accepted my incapability of ever publishing anything definitive or comprehensive. "Proof in Progress" that's a website filled with articles mostly written in one sitting, with little time spent editing - it shows, but that's OK because I'm productive.

writing is power to transfer thought and ideas. It's permanence. Writing; that's daring to expose some intrinsic state of your brain into the atoms of the universe for everyone to observe. It has potential as performance.

Writing, as running, coding, working, and self-care: It's a habit that needs to be established through frequent practice.

#writing #power #mind extraction #ideas

[anettrolikova]

We're only a couple of years into the widespread adoption of NFTs, but there are early indications that:

NFTs can be used for any form of digital media

NFTs make it easy to track the provenance of media

People are willing to collect NFTs

People are willing to collect things that are relatively unknown

People are willing to pay a lot to collect

NFTs have allowed creators in art, photography, music, and video to earn more than they have in their social media lifetimes. Often, relatively unknown creators are creating work that is paid many times what they would earn from clicks, views, or sponsorships. While creating something worth collecting requires more work, it can be worth it. It's more feasible and enticing to create work that's worth collecting instead of things that will hack the click. In fact, creators may incentivize both, but it's now more lucrative to convert clicks into collectors by creating something perceived as great. NFTs give creators provenance tools, making it easier to follow proven sources of high-quality information and harder for misinformation or spam to be profitable pursuits.

In a few years, we should see a fundamental increase in the taste and quality of content that dominates our feeds. We can move from an ads-dominated internet to an art-dominated internet. Wanted to save this part

#nfts #nft #collectible #clickbait #media #provenance

[anettrolikova]

When you hate the world, you need to eat. When you think the world hates you, you need to sleep” -Liam Hinzman

https://www.ansonyu.me/advice

#motivation #quote #eat #sleep #advice

[anettrolikova]

hyperstructures are protocols that can run for free and forever without maintainance, interruption or intermediaries.

hyperstructures runs on protocols that run on blockchain

hypestructures creates whole new movement and incetivisation where we are creating organisation structures which are unstoppable. you create it once but it runs forever on its own without the need for degredation of itself.

hypestructures are maintantance free - they run as it goes, this can be hard to approach as humans dont work for free and it’s hard to make people do something for free. 

Hyperstructures are made to power millions of interfaces, not just one, ensure it’s as generic as possible.

Use fees as a way to expand the ecosystem, not extract from it: the broader opportunities that come from a diverse platform ecosystem on top of your protocol.

Take a protocol-first building approach: focus on developer adoption, to create as many integrations as possible—an important network effect and cementing the Hyperstructure as the default.

Building liquidity: onchain liquidity makes it beneficial for other entrants to join the ecosystem, and benefits everyone else. This is a key network effect and also reduces the ability/incentive to fork.

Ownership where possible, governance where only necessary: create ownership and governance where only absolutely necessary. Too much of either and you may find that the Hyperstructure gets skewed incentives, or at risk of attack.

There is a long build cycle: deploying protocols in this manner is much more akin to creating hardware than software. There are long design periods, high friction migrations and a high bar for deployment.

#hyperstructures #zora #article #extracted #protocol #free

[anettrolikova]

Positivity

I want people to know that I’m here. I never left and I want to be there for frens to help feel better.