Tag: interview

Shopify interview

You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when I worked for… well, I can’t talk about the broader company, but a specific part of Siemens, in a specific office. The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it’s almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world. So that was really, really helpful.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren’t dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

They really taught everyone that, regardless of your gender, creed, or background, you should basically emulate the same 60-year-old lawyer in persona. Effectively, your career was dependent on whether you got this right, and to me, that just seemed insane. This is infantilization, but the funny thing is that they call this professionalism. To me it is the exact opposite. It’s infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don’t trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

Dopamine fasting

The name — dopamine fasting — is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a stimulation fast. The purpose is so that subsequent pleasures are all the more potent and meaningful. “Any kind of fasting exists on a spectrum,” Mr. Sinka said as he slowly moved through sun salutations, careful not to get his heart racing too much, already worried he was talking too much that morning.

Uber chaos

If this book creates an entire class of shitty founders, you’re welcome to call me up in a year and tell me that I failed. I hope that’s not the case. In general, I like to give young founders a little more credit. I have a lot of criticisms of the Valley, but I think people generally recognize what went wrong inside of Uber now, and have a sense of wariness around how they want their own company to grow. Uber is a case study in going totally off the rails. I hope folks learned from that and I think that’s already kind of happening. I don’t see folks holding up Uber as the ideal. There are some Kool-Aid drinkers that were early in Uber that still fiercely defend everything that they did, and I think it’s going to be harder for them to defend that as time goes on.

Yang Bid Very 21st Century

In the history of politicking, few politicians have publicly declared what to do about America’s crumbling malls, or how to provide free marriage counseling for all, or how to make filing taxes fun. But Andrew Yang, who’s gunning to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, certainly has—and those are the more minor concerns among a dizzying list of 80 policy positions on his campaign website.

also has geoengineering, UBI and many other things.

Ibiza

Aptly named Ibiza, the film follows 3 American girls (who struggle to pronounce Ibiza correctly the entire film) as they travel to everyone’s favorite clubbing paradise and if luke-warm rom-coms are your thing, then you’re in luck. The lead character falls in love with an EDM DJ and absolute hilarity ensues (it doesn’t). We spoke to the director Alex Richanbach, who has never even been to Ibiza, about how he made the film, his influences and his take on glamorizing drugs. This is perhaps the most awkward interview we’ve ever done.

Louis Theroux interviewing technique

Louis Theroux’s ability to establish a rapport with subjects is legendary, even with people who are aware that he may be, from their perspective, implicitly hostile. His affectation of ignorance and naivety is part of it, obviously, but it’s more than that: he lets subjects take a position of superiority, remains emotionally detached, yet exposes himself to scrutiny.

Iain Banks

The Culture represents the place we might hope to get to after we’ve dealt with all our stupidities: find and isolate/destroy the genes that code for xenophobia, should they exist. Plus we’d have to develop AIs and let them be themselves; another big task.

2018-02-07:

Banks’s conception of the Culture is driven by 3 central ideas. First, there is the thought that, in the future, basic problems of social organization will be given essentially technocratic solutions, and so the competition between cultures will be based upon their viral qualities, not their functional attributes. Second, there is postulation of Contact as essentially the reproduction mechanism of the Culture. And finally, there is the suggestion that the operations of Contact serve not just as an idle distraction, but in fact provides a solution to an existential crisis that is at the core of the Culture. This is what gives the Culture its ultraviral quality: it’s only reason for existence is to reproduce itself.

An update on Snowden

i wonder why we haven’t seen more snowden reveals in a while.

THE MESSAGE ARRIVES on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. “Change in plans. Be in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 13:00. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.” ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world. For almost 9 months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak 100Ks of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government’s domestic surveillance programs?