Medley 198: Handshakes, Tails, Differences, Schedules, Freebies, Paper, Equality, Management, 25, Fights...

This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Happy Monday!

The team behind Roam made an exciting announcement this week: They're going to give $100 in free Roam credits to anyone who goes through my course! I'm going to keep the course at the current price till the end of this week for anyone who wants to get in on that deal, since it effectively makes the course free if you stick with using Roam.

And this week I added my notes on "Never Split the Difference" to The Brain. It's a phenomenal book on negotiation, and everyone should read it. Much more actionable than Getting to Yes.

The World of Sponsorship

πŸ“† This Medley is brought to you again by Woven! One thing I've been loving about switching to Woven is how seamless inviting other people to things is using Templates and pre-selecting a few time options. This gives it way more flexibility than a normal Calendly link, and has helped me get more control over setting up meetings without losing the convenience of sending people a scheduling link. I know it can be an adjustment to switch off GCal or another calendar app, but I've been very happy with this move.

The World of Covid-19

🦒 Marc Andreessen has been sharing some good info on Covid-19 (official name of the new Coronavirus) on Twitter the last few weeks. I know the popular narrative right now is that it's nothing to worry about, but when so many people who have made their fortunes off understanding tail risk are worried about something everyone else is calling unlikely... that's a good enough reason to worry for me.

😰 First, he shared this small research work on how Covid-19 might be contagious while being asymptomatic. This would suggest you can be infecting other people for as many as 24 days before ever experiencing symptoms, and even after might not develop noticeable symptoms. Somewhat alarming since it suggests you really can't trust anyone to not be infected once a region reaches a certain infection level.

🀒 He also shared an interesting theory on Covid-19 being transmittable via human fecal matter, similar to SARS. This would explain some of the continued transmission within the quarantined cruise ships, since, well, cruise ship bathrooms aren't the most hygienic systems:

"the drain on the bathroom floor of many cruise ships may not have the S-shaped liquid-and-odor catch that one typically has in homes; this can occasionally cause the gases from a ship sewage collection tank to waft into the passenger compartment... there are usually no bathroom vents to the outside, so what happens in the bathroom, in terms of gases, stays in the bathroom and cabin. Ship-wide air ventilation, or lack thereof, would also play a role in transmitting infection to others, via the respiratory or intestinal route." Yuck.

πŸ•΅οΈβ€β™‚οΈ Then there was this whole back-and-forth between Balaji S Srinivasan and the editors of Recode about their piece about Covid-19 and how the tech industry is "over-reacting" to it. This is one of the best examples I've seen of someone publicly destroying a piece of journalism, and a good example of how you need to read the news these days. There aren't any great publications to trust as arbiters of truth, so you need to do your own research and decide what's true or not.

The World of DTC

πŸ’΅ Outdoor Voices had a big shakeup over the weekend with the CEO being surprise fired(?) on Friday. The craziest thing from that article: they were losing $2M a month on $40M a year in revenue. C.R.E.A.M.

πŸ€‘ As a great counter example, the founder of Native Deodorant shared this stat: in the last month before they were acquired, they made just shy of $900,000 in profit. That's a lot of deodorant!

The World of Research

πŸ“ A team of researchers have discovered a massive "Paper Mill" of fabricated scientific research being churned out, passing peer review, and being published in reputable journals. This is even worse than the Replication Crisis since this is completely fabricated, not just failing to replicate, and it's still being published. Something is seriously wrong in Academia, and it further reinforces the idea from above that you need to make some of your own decisions on what to believe, the old gatekeepers aren't completely trustworthy.

βš–οΈ And here's some interesting political / philosophical research: people don't really want "equality," they want "fairness." I find that premise intuitively compelling: you can't have true equality without a massive totalitarian effort (freedom and equality are opposed), and no one wants that. They just don't want to feel unfairly treated.

The World of Management

πŸ•― I've really been enjoying the Lighthouse blog. Management in general is an area I think I need to improve in, so it's been helpful to find a good site to start digging into all the resources on.

πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» First up, this article on managing remote employees had some good tips for staying in touch better when you're not in the same place most of the time.

πŸ›  I also enjoyed this piece on how "everything breaks" at 25 employees. I've heard similar complaints from a bunch of sources about how things fall apart somewhere around 10-30 employees, and I can see where we're starting to run into some of those challenges at Growth Machine so I'm trying to prepare for and prevent it as much as possible.

Just for Fun

πŸ€Όβ€β™‚οΈ This is a great analysis of why the DCEU movies are so much worse than the Marvel ones. There's definitely more to it than this, but this analysis of the action and tone was very compelling.

End Note

As always, if you're enjoying the Medley, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I try to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.

If you want to support the Medley and my other writing, there are many ways you can do that here.

And should you come across anything interesting this week, send it my way! I love finding new things to read through members of this newsletter.

Have a great week,
Nat

Enjoyed this? Be sure to subscribe!