[Book Review] The First 90 Days

  

Organ Rejection Syndrome

New leaders do things to trigger the organization's immune system and find themselves under the attack as a foreign body. 

Managing Learning as an investment process

• An actionable insight is knowledge that enables you to make better decisions earlier and so helps you quickly reach the break-even point in personal value creation. 
• Effective Learning calls for figuring out what you need to learn so that you can focus your efforts. 

[Book Review] Range : Why generalists triumph in a specialized world

 Tiger vs Roger

1. Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
2. The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it.
3. Roger Feder is the counter example of late bloomer, someone who dabbled on multiple sports and only ended up specializing in tennis late stage. 
4. I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination. And I was stunned when cognitive psychologists I spoke with led me to an enormous and too often ignored body of work demonstrating that learning itself is best done slowly to accumulate lasting knowledge, even when that means performing poorly on tests of immediate progress. That is, the most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.

The cult of the headstart

1. Starts with the example of the Polgar sisters - the author of How to raise a genius
2. The powerful lesson is that anything in the world can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all the activities that matter to you.
3. Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.
4. In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.
5. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.
6. But the centaur lesson remains: the more a task shifts to an open world of big-picture strategy, the more humans have to add.
7. “How Not to Teach People to Discover Rules”—that is, by providing rewards for repetitive short-term success with a narrow range of solutions.
8. There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition. Like golfers, surgeons improve with repetition of the same procedure. Accountants and bridge and poker players develop accurate intuition through repetitive experience. Kahneman pointed to those domains’ “robust statistical regularities.” But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill. In research in the game of bridge where the order of play was altered, experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did non-experts. When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices. Erik Dane, a Rice University professor who studies organizational behavior, calls this phenomenon “cognitive entrenchment.

How the wicked world was made 

1. The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries. The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.
2. Flynn was bemused to find that the correlation between the test of broad conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero. In Flynn’s words, “the traits that earn good grades at [the university] do not include critical ability of any broad significance.

When less of the same is more

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What does culture look like in your team

 I have worked at several companies and every company has their culture deck. I found some of the key ones that have influenced and shaped me that are core to the culture of all the teams that I have led

1. Growth mindset over a fixed mindset
2. Act like an owner rather than a renter
3. Customer focus/obsession
4. High agency/high equity
5. Data driven decision making 
6. Transparency and openness
7. Collaborative mindset
8. Zero tolerance for jerks or culture killers

Questions to ask before taking up a new job

Nearly all interviewers expect you to ask questions at the end of the interview. 

While most of the advice is genuine, but they dont uncover as much information as you would need. Also some of them are cliche and the team is often prepped with the standard answers, having already rehearsed it with several candidates. 

Here are a few questions that could uncover a lot of more signal. Also the surprise element to this questions will help get the most signal for you as an interviewee

1. What could go wrong if I join the team in the first 90 days ?

In any role there will be a rampup time, this question ensures commitment to the rampup and guarantees the runway. Having said that, any org or team may have skeletons buried and burning fires. This question and the discussion henceforth will help build commitment to a leadership transition and support through that journey. It can also help you understand the resources(existing TLs, peer managers, XFN counterparts) you can leverage to rampup.

2. What does failure look like after 1 year ? 

These two questions are good because they distill the top 2-3 priorities of this role that are needed for success. It also helps extract and gives the opportunity to align on the right expectations. 

3. What is the hardest feedback you have given to a manager ? 

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. This will give you a sense of style of how the manager helps people grow and develop on their weakness. Also there can be several followups like what makes the feedback hard. It could reveal not only about the manager's work style but also challenges in their terrain that another able manager is having a hard time resolving. It might expose structural flaws of the terrain that you are not likely to get otherwise. 

4. What was the hardest feedback you have received as a manager ? 

5. What is the relative weight of how people conduct their work and the output they generate ?

This might give you signals of how much psychological safety there is in the team and what kind of culture the manager promotes. 

6. How do you resolve conflicting priorities between projects across two different teams ? 

This will give you a sense about how neat the boundaries are, how the goals are structured, how principled/adhoc resolution approaches are, how people/project/collaboration tradeoffs are made in an org. As a manager, this is something you will have to deal with all the time. 

7. What will you do if your team suddenly starts missing the goals ? How would you debug it ?

This will tell you what phase of growth this manager is in as described here. Good managers also regress in these growth stages when they face pressure from the top. 

References

1. 40 interview questions to ask and how to go deeper than what's culture like ?
2. How to respond to the interview questions "what do you have for me" ?

The Professor, the banker, the suicide king : Book Review

1. A few notes on professional poker players and parallels I see with investors from the book The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King (about a series of high stakes poker games between Vegas pros and renegade real estate investor/banker Andy Beal)
2. “The best players walk a tightrope between their business sense and their passion. As professionals, they seek out the most profitable opportunities. As gamblers, they want the risk and excitement of having something important on the line."
3. “Elite players are drawn from a pool of gamblers, not problem solvers or people readers. They start off losing like everybody else." Ingredients: competitive drive, risk tolerance - and "a lot of losing." It's ok to pay your dues, that's how you learn.
4. “The pro is developing a recognizable edge. From that point on, she has more in common with the casino than the other bettors." "Professionals merely have to allow enough trials to even out the role of luck." (and stay in the game long enough)
5. "There are a lot of poker players who aren't gamblers. They find a level where they can win and they make their living. But if you don't have that need for action in you, you don't push yourself to move higher up. It takes a certain amount of gambling mentality to keep pushing."
6. Keynes: "The game of professional investment is intolerably boring to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to his propensity the appropriate toll."
7. For the dealmakers: maximizing your advantage vs. being someone people want to play with. Professional gamblers faced this all the time, choosing between the conflicting goals of maximizing their advantage and marketing themselves, so people would gamble with them. After all if the members of the group somehow demonstrated to Andy Beal that their advantage was so big that he had no chances whatsoever, he would never sit down to play with them. Likewise, if they would play only under conditions that favored them in every way, he would eventually be frustrated by their inability to give him a fair chance and give up. 
8. Poker was a game of skill, but if you played it for a living, you also had to be willing to gamble. 
9. "The true professionals were those whose attitude might sometimes cost them, but who had the skills to handle the bad gambles while cashing in on all the favorable situations their "let's gamble" style brought their way."
10. "Confidence bordering on arrogance. Players would crack under the pressure unless they truly believed they were better."
11. Munger: "In my whole life, nobody has ever accused me of being humble. Realistic is probably a better word. We understand our limitations better than others."
12. A common characteristics of high stakes poker player is confidence bordering on arrogance. Playing against other pros and skilled amateurs night after night was so competitive that players would crack down under the constant pressure unless they truly believed that they were better than everyone else. 

Distribution vs Product vs Service

 When distribution is proprietary, distribution wins

Examples

1. Netflix vs comcast
2. Microsoft vs Slack
3. Azure's rapid rise leveraging Microsoft's entrenched position in corporate licenses

When distribution is commoditized, best product wins. Within product, global network effects win over local network effects.

Example

1. Chrome vs IE
2. Uber vs Lyft - duopoly because of local network effects, no product differentiation and no distribution advantage. 

When product is commoditized, best service wins

1. Amazon vs others
2. Amazon is also taking the much harder route to establish value through better services and change distribution. For eg : Amazon now gets a larger share of the retail search traffic than google

Questions to ask as a Manager that can make any idea better

 One of the key responsibilities of an engineering manager/direction/leader in any organization is to ask the right questions. Here is a list of questions to ask to make almost any idea better

1. What does success look like and how to measure/track it reliably ? 
2. How does this tie to the north star/mission/vission ? 
3. Who are we solving for ? 
4. What problem are we solving ?
5. Recursively ask why is this a problem till you find the root cause. Always treat the root cause rather than the symptom. 
6. What makes this challenging ?
7. What is the P50 goal - 50% chance of hitting success and why is this a P50 goal
8. What tradeoffs are we making ? 
9. What is the cost benefit analysis of the tradeoffs ?
10. What are the prioritization principles being used behind these tradeoffs ? 
11. What is the opportunity cost of doing this over something else ? 
12. What ideas are we not able to fund because we are funding this ? 
13. What are the constraints we are operating in and what happens if fundamentally relax/change any of those constraints ? What is the timeline of the change of those constraints. 

Volatile, Synchronized, Re-entrant lock, Condition variable

Volatile

• The volatile concept is specific to Java. Its easier to understand volatile, if you understand the problem it solves.
• If you have a variable say a counter that is being worked on by a thread, it is possible the thread keeps a copy of the counter variable in the CPU cache and manipulates it rather than writing to the main memory. The JVM will decide when to update the main memory with the value of the counter, even though other threads may read the value of the counter from the main memory and may end up reading a stale value.
• If a variable is declared volatile then whenever a thread writes or reads to the volatile variable, the read and write always happen in the main memory.
• As a further guarantee, all the variables that are visible to the writing thread also get written-out to the main memory alongside the volatile variable. Similarly, all the variables visible to the reading thread alongside the volatile variable will have the latest values visible to the reading thread.
• Volatile comes into play because of multiples levels of memory in hardware architecture required for performance enhancements.
• If there’s a single thread that writes to the volatile variable and other threads only read the volatile variable then just using volatile is enough,
• however, if there’s a possibility of multiple threads writing to the volatile variable then “synchronized” would be required to ensure atomic writes to the variable.

Synchronized

• Java’s primary tool for rendering interactions between threads predictably is the synchronized keyword. Many programmers think of synchronized strictly in terms of enforcing a mutual exclusion semaphore (mutex) to prevent execution of critical sections by more than one thread at a time. Unfortunately, that intuition does not fully describe what synchronized means.
• Synchronize is more than mutual exclusion : The semantics of synchronized do indeed include mutual exclusion of execution based on the status of a semaphore, but they also include rules about the synchronizing thread's interaction with main memory. In particular, the acquisition or release of a lock triggers a memory barrier -- a forced synchronization between the thread's local memory and main memory. (Some processors -- like the Alpha -- have explicit machine instructions for performing memory barriers.) When a thread exits a synchronized block, it performs a write barrier -- it must flush out any variables modified in that block to main memory before releasing the lock. Similarly, when entering a synchronized block, it performs a read barrier -- it is as if the local memory has been invalidated, and it must fetch any variables that will be referenced in the block from main memory.
• The proper use of synchronization guarantees that one thread will see the effects of another in a predictable manner. Only when threads A and B synchronize on the same object will the JMM guarantee that thread B sees the changes made by thread A, and that changes made by thread A inside the synchronized block appear atomically to thread B (either the whole block executes or none of it does.)
• Furthermore, the JMM ensures thatsynchronizeblocks that synchronize on the same object will appear to execute in the same order as they do in the program.

Reentrant Lock

• Java’s answer to the traditional mutex is the reentrant lock, which comes with additional bells and whistles.
• It is similar to the implicit monitor lock accessed when using synchronized methods or blocks.
• With the reentrant lock, you are free to lock and unlock it in different methods but not with different threads. If you attempt to unlock a reentrant lock object by a thread which didn't lock it initially, you'll get an IllegalMonitorStateException. This behavior is similar to when a thread attempts to unlock a pthread mutex.

Condition Variable

• We saw how each java object exposes the three methods, wait(),notify() and notifyAll() which can be used to suspend threads till some condition becomes true.
• You can think of Condition as factoring out these three methods of the object monitor into separate objects so that there can be multiple wait-sets per object.
• As a reentrant lock replaces synchronized blocks or methods, a condition replaces the object monitor methods. In the same vein, one can't invoke the condition variable's methods without acquiring the associated lock, just like one can't wait on an object's monitor without synchronizing on the object first.
• In fact, a reentrant lock exposes an API to create new condition variables, like so:

Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();

Condition myCondition  = lock.newCondition();

• Notice, how can we now have multiple condition variables associated with the same lock. In the synchronized paradigm, we could only have one wait-set associated with each object.

Differences Between Lock and Synchronized Block

• A synchronized block is fully contained within a method — we can have Lock API’s lock() and unlock() operation in separate methods
• A synchronized block doesn’t support the fairness, any thread can acquire the lock once released, no preference can be specified. We can achieve fairness within the Lock APIs by specifying the fairness property. It makes sure that longest waiting thread is given access to the lock
• A thread gets blocked if it can’t get an access to the synchronized block. The Lock API provides tryLock() method. The thread acquires lock only if it’s available and not held by any other thread. This reduces blocking time of thread waiting for the lock
• A thread which is in “waiting” state to acquire the access to synchronized block, can’t be interrupted. The Lock API provides a method lockInterruptibly() which can be used to interrupt the thread when it’s waiting for the lock

 

Amazon's 2020 review

 In the beginning of the pandemic, I had published a post on "How Coronavirus will expedite the Amazonification of the world" and also had put my money where my mouth was, ie invested in Amazon. The other day I was reading an article on how marketplaces faired in 2020 and here are few highlights on Amazon

• 3P Amazon marketplace added eBay's worth of sales to its GMV in 2020. 3P went from 200bn to 295bn. Overall GMV was up 42%. Marketplace share of Amazon GMV grew to 62%. 

• Revenue for all business categories grew by 25%+ in Q3 demonstrating across the board strength

• Amazon's marketplace is even more concentrated than Parreto principle would suggest. Just top 852 (.05%) of the sellers contribute 10% of the GMV, and top 12% of the sellers contribute 80% of the GMV. 

• 18% of US GMV came from 2015 seller cohort showing stickiness in the platform

• Investors pour 1bn into buying up small merchants on Amazon. The capital pouring is validation about the robustness of Amazon marketplace as a platform to grow businesses. Also as the 3P sellers get better capitalized, this line of business can continue to see eye popping numbers. 

• Amazon launched in 3 countries this year - Netherlands - March 10, Saudi Arabia - June 17 and Sweden - Oct 28th. Using auto-translated catalogues and reviews, the cost to launching new countries seeded with sellers already serving similar countries is too small. This will only expedite Amazon's international expansion. 
• Ads revenue came in at 20 bn and advertising revenue as a share of marketing expense is steadily rising. This is similar to what Chamath had previously pointed out, Amazon thinks about making every expense item a revenue bullet point. 

References

• Marketplaces year in review 2020
• Investors pour 1bn into buying up small merchants on Amazon
• Inside the whale : an interview with an anonymous Amazonia
  
  

The Amazing Vaccine Race

 Few astounding facts which will be table stakes for the future

• The digital copy of the virus from China reached America even before the biological/physical copy of the virus on Jan 11 thanks to the advances of Genomic Sequencing Tecnology
• Moderna was able to design a vaccine with just the digital copy without the actual physical copy in a matter of 48 hours
• The team at NIH and the team at Moderna had the exact same copy of the vaccine after they compared the results
• At the same time they started to make a clinical grade product that could go into Phase 1 trials
• The vaccine that was reviewed by FDA in December 17 was the exactly the same vaccine that was designed by Moderna in Jan

What is mRNA technology ? 

Its a molecule that exists in everyones cells that is like a xerox copy of the instructions of your genome to one gene at a time to make protein. 

When cells want to make insulin, it makes a zerox copy of the instructions from the DNA. Ribosome (like a 3D printer) will read the mRNA instructions and makes a protein adding one amino acid at a time. 

How to use mRNA ? 

Most viruses in life including COVID-19 contain mRNA. Through evolution mammals have developed mechanisms to recognize foreign mRNA. People abandoned and quit on trying to make mRNA as a drug. In 2010-2011, a set of academics at Harvard and MIT, played with mRNA. They believed that if you modify you can make an mRNA that is immunosilent. 

1 Protein of the virus - spike protein - this is the instruction that is being passed through the mRNA technology in the vaccine. The cell knows then how to create this protein. Then the body knows that this foreign protein is in the body and starts making antibodies. The spike protein sticking out the cell mimicks the real virus and the immune system starts fighting it.

How to know the Spike protein ? 

Spike is what the virus uses to get into the cells. Spike protein had been used to protect against MERS in animals. 

Future mRNA verticals

• mRNA for Tumours
• mRNA for heart 
• Vaccines