Sunday Reads #109: How to Gain Super Powers
Plus a parable on using cranes to lift buckets, a book you should NOT read, and other link love.
Hope you and yours are keeping safe (and sane).
I'm back again with the most thought-provoking articles I've read in the week.
If you’re new here, don’t forget to check out the compilation of my best articles: The best of Jitha.me. I’m sure you’ll find something you like.
And here’s my newsletter from last week, in case you missed it: Sunday Reads #108: Cargo Cults, Startups, and the Myth of the MBA CEO.
This week, we start with an engineering parable. A toothpaste factory has a critical assembly line problem - they sometimes ship empty toothpaste boxes. How do they fix this?
Next, dispatches from an anonymous luminary of the startup world.
And third, updates from the world of COVID-19. How to gain super powers. And a book you should definitely NOT read.
Here's the deal - Dive as deep as you want. Read my thoughts first. If you find them intriguing, read the main article. If you want to learn more, check out the related articles and books.
[PS. If you like what you see, do forward to your friends. They can sign up with the button below.]
1. Using a crane to lift buckets.
I read this wonderful engineering parable a few days ago: A Short Story for Engineers.
It's a 2 min read, about a toothpaste factory that sometimes shipped empty boxes by mistake.
The CEO spent $8 million to fix this issue, with a full engineering project with an external consulting firm.
After a lot of deliberation, the team solved the problem with a high-precision scale that weighed every box on the assembly line.
Job well done and money well spent.
Right?
Turns out they could have solved it with a $20 fan that blew empty boxes off the line.
Like all good parables, this isn't a true story. Like all good parables, it has a strong kernel of truth.
Very often, we think of over-powered solutions to fix simple problems.
Asking senior staff to do admin tasks, because you "can't trust the juniors".
Running a 1000 person survey and 10 focus groups to find out whether your startup's value proposition works.
"Using a crane to lift buckets".
I first saw this analogy in this Quora thread. Previously, whenever I noticed this mistake of deploying over-powered solutions, I'd call it "using a nuclear fusion-powered chainsaw to cut a tree". Which was a far more unwieldy metaphor (kinda like a fusion-powered chainsaw 😝).
The above parable also reminded me of the story of Juicero, a Silicon Valley juicer startup that raised $120M from top-tier investors including Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, and shut down 16 months later.
Juicero built a high-tech juicing machine with 400 custom parts and juice press plates that wielded four tons of force (“enough to lift two Teslas”). The juicer retailed at an introductory price of $700 (!), later brought down to $400.
But as Bloomberg showed in a funny video in Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze, it turned out users could squeeze Juicero's proprietary juice packets just as easily… with their two hands 🤦♂️. No Tesla-lifting press plates needed.
Speaking of Silicon Valley excesses...
2. The World of Startups: Startup L. Jackson Edition.
Back in 2011, a Silicon Valley VC created an anonymous Twitter account, to parody Silicon Valley and venture capital.
He named it Startup L Jackson, and proceeded to deliver pearls of wisdom and hilarity (in the style of Samuel L Jackson reciting Biblical verses in Pulp Fiction).
The tweets are timeless and always fun to read. Some of my favorite ones:
There was a lot of wisdom in those tweets as well, as Tren Griffin says in A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Startup L. Jackson About Venture Capital Investing and Startups:
Do check out the Twitter handle - startup wisdom, with great entertainment value too.
3. The World of COVID-19.
How to Gain Super Powers.
Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution puts a new spin, for people afraid of taking a COVID-19 vaccine when it comes out (because it's not proven yet, etc.):
Imagine that you were offered the superpower of being immune to bullets. Bullets just bounce off you like Luke Cage. That’d be pretty cool, right? Even partial immunity to bullets would be a great superpower! I’d be willing to pay a lot for that superpower, even undertake say some mildly perilous journey.
So I am puzzled that some people say they don’t want a COVID vaccine. What??? That’s like rejecting a super-power, the power of immunity! Indeed, COVID has killed far more people this year than bullets, so virus immunity is a much better superpower than bullet immunity. Sign me up!
Always a good idea to remind ourselves of the power of vaccines.
Here's the infographic from Our World in Data, that I shared in Sunday Reads #101:
It’s clear. Vaccines are a superpower.
PS. Masks are a superpower too. Maybe more so than vaccines - like true superheroes, they help others more than they help the wearer. WEAR A MASK.
PPS. Tabarrok has a habit of putting a new spin on things. He also has a subversive interpretation of the Oscar-winning movie, Parasite - check out at The Gaslighting of Parasite. Be warned: there are spoilers.
A book you should NOT read.
The first piece of COVID-related fiction is out… and it's a "steamy viral-erotica" named Kissing the Coronavirus.
From the cover image, it looks like COVID-19 has a Hulk thing going (continuing with the superhero theme).
I won't quote from the book (quite NSFW), but it's HILARIOUS. Check out the first Goodreads review here (by a reviewer named Phuong) for some choice quotes.
Wonder why the author M. J. Edwards has hidden her first name. It could be for plausible deniability ("Who? Me? I didn't write any of this smut!"). It could also be to emulate the success of one E. L. James.
[HT to Chandrima Das - found this in one of her tweets].
And to end, let's celebrate the 35th birthday of two institutions.
Last month, two cultural institutions that shaped the last few decades turned 35.
#1: Super Mario.
The unassuming plumber and his faithful brother Luigi made their debut in September 1985. Who could have guessed that 35 years later, the moustachioed men would have sold a staggering 373 million games across the world!
More in Mario at 35: ‘The little plumber who defined a genre’.
#2: Microsoft Excel.
That's it for this week! Hope you liked the articles. Drop me a line (just hit reply or leave a comment through the button below) and let me know what you think.
See you next week!
Jitha