Category: Uncategorized

In the context of the new agriculture reform bills recently passed by India’s parliament, I came across this article on the need and opportunity for technology in Indian agriculture. The whole article, end to end, is a gold-mine. For anyone with any interest in building a business in the agricultural space after these reforms, this is a great read.

[A farmer looks for] answers to three basic questions—what crop to sow, how to grow it, and where to sell it… To be specific, there are three infirmities in the current agriculture extension system—insufficient knowledge creation, poor delivery of information, and an absent grassroots capability. We need to reimagine the agricultural R&D and the extension system by creating knowledge, disseminating personalized information through technology, and decentralizing knowledge delivery by empowering local channels.

On knowledge creation:

An extension officer visiting Kamlakant’s farm is often swiftly surrounded by a crowd of farmers waiting to get their query answered. To really address farmers’ knowledge gap, we have to create a knowledge bonanza… agriculture universities and institutes need to create open access online agriculture courses (like courses on Udemy, a popular online learning platform) on horticulture, soil science, nutrient management, crop protection, greenhouse cultivation, post-harvest management and cold supply chain.

This is an enormous opportunity because

Currently, over 94% of India’s 138 million farm landholdings do not receive information through the agriculture extension system due to which smallholder farmers continue to be far less productive than what’s possible.

On information delivery:

Smartphone for all can be a real gamechanger as it would solve for all the three questions that Kamlakant and his ilk usually have at the beginning of every cropping season…. Recently, during the lockdown, tomato prices plunged, causing tomato cultivation to decline. If Kamlakant can find out that there are fewer tomato growers in the same way Google Maps informs us about the route which has less traffic (past trends would indicate that less cultivation could result in a price rise 2 months down the line), he would plant tomatoes. Data can help farmers make safer bets and get better prices.

On grassroots capability:

With cheaply available online courses, young graduates and even progressive farmers can self-train as extension officers and fuel on-farm innovation… When every farmer uses a smartphone, it becomes easy to develop mass contact farmer-to-farmer data sharing as well as individual contact with farmers. Armed with individualized information, farmers make independent data-driven decisions and mitigate harmful herd behaviour. Smartphones help gather large amounts of data quickly, contributing to better policymaking.

Hugely inspirational. At the same time, I balance excitement with experience of how slowly things move. Back in 2006, I had written a guest post on a website I cannot remember, on the (Indian) state’s excessive interfering in business – a subset of that ended up becoming a post on this site. I remember that guest post had references to what could be possible with information delivered over SMS and focused radio stations accessed via phone calls, all over hardy Nokia dumbphones. A decade and a half later, after the mobile revolution we’re talking about smartphones for all farmers, but the information gap remains.

(Part 2 – Repurposing Google Docs and Evernote to publish to the web falls short)

There are two things unique to Notion that have made it so popular for such a wide variety of web-based properties:

One, it’s made page layout very simple. Creating columns is as simple as dragging and dropping one beside another, so you end up treating a Notion (web) page as a grid that you can populate with sections as you like, making creating a page like this trivial.

Two, re-imagining the database. To say Notion embraces structured data is an understatement. Structured data is at its very core – Notion is a database of pages. Pages can themselves contain databases, and so on.

With Notion, you can have a database displayed as a list, a gallery, a calendar, a kanban board, and as a simple table. You have have your viewers switch between these views. And while there are many ways to customise each view, the basic idea is that you can filter which fields in your database are displayed in each view.

What does any of this have to do with the web?

For one, you can create a database if your blog posts. You can now create different List Views of your blog posts, filtered by stag or a combination of tags. You can now have these lists displayed side by side (or any other layout) on the same page.

You can create a personal or product roadmap as a database, with each feature or fix marked with a date or a month. You can now display these on your home page in Calendar View, giving your customers or prospects a view of what’s to come. You can offer different calendar views filtered by (product) tags, so if you’re running a specialised mobile camera app, you can have one calendar view of just upcoming new camera capabilities, another of just new photo management and editing features, another for sharing features, and so on. If you tag these features by status – whether they’ve been proposed, planned, scheduled, are being worked on, or have been released – you can have them listed as a Kanban Board View, a pipeline view of your product’s future evolution. As your team knocks these features off and takes up new ones, you update your database internally, and your public board changes automatically. There is no edit – preview- publish loop anymore.

You can create a database of your customer testimonials and have them displayed as a Gallery View. If you have photos of your customers, you can choose to have them displayed as the preview image in each gallery card. You can display the whole testimonial in the gallery card, or have the gallery card clickable to view the whole customer testimonial page. The page itself is like any other web page – you can leave it empty other than the testimonial text, or include other information, including text (a customer profile?) or even more structured data (how long the person’s been a customer), more tags (what features the person most likes in your product), and so on.

And you can combine some or all of these elements on the same web page, link to other web pages, add text, links, tables, pictures, embedded files – anything you like. You can even embed other HTML in it, so if you want to capture customer interest, you can embed a Google Form. [1]

Notion makes it possible like never before for data, HTML, text and multimedia to co-exist. Equally importantly, it brings down the friction of creating these seemingly complicated pages to nearly zero. Like Steve Jobs said of computers being bicycles for your mind, Notion is a bicycle for data.

(Part 4 – My own Notion website)

[1] And, using something like Zapier and Notion’s for-now unofficial API, auto-populate a private Notion database of leads.

The venture capitalist Bull Gurley published a great long read comparing the traditional IPO process with the more recent direct listing process and with Spacs or special purpose acquisition companies, of which there have been some recent high-profile examples.

I found the details of Spacs somewhat hard to follow, but the bulk of the article is readable and darkly fascinating. He describes just how inefficient the IPO process is for both the company going public and ordinary investors buying into the newly public company.

In simple terms, the intermediary investment bankers set the listing price below what they estimate its market value would be. This is so that private investors, typically clients of the investment bank, who buy into the company right before it goes public have a rise in price, and the investment bank itself, which facilitates this. This is unfair to most retail investors who now buy at the much higher market price, and to the company and its promoters, who are giving away equity to these pre-IPO investors at a price lower than what it will (shortly) command.

You are told the “optimal” target is to be 30X over-subscribed. This is not a joke. You are told that you actually need 30X more orders than you actually plan to sell. This is an explicit admission that they plan to ignore 97% of the actual orders and fill only 3%…

Now imagine you are selling any other asset, be it a piece of art, a home, a piece of software, or perhaps your car. Where would you have to price that asset to ensure that 97% of the people that considered that purchase would make an offer, and you would have 30X more demand than you need? It is truly tautological that underpricing is happening, because this flawed process is being used by each and every investment bank… it is increasingly hard to understand how a board of directors can legitimately exercise their fiduciary duty, while subjecting the company to such a structurally backwards approach…

Who benefits from underpricing? Clearly the people that are handed the shares in the hand-chosen allocation process. On the IPO process the underwriters are agents for both the company and the buyside (the shareholders who are allocated shares). The IPO may stand-alone as the only very high-dollar transaction in our world where a single agent represents both sides of the transaction.

An engineer at Google wrote a wonderful Twitter thread a little while ago on becoming a better reader.

https://twitter.com/juvoni/status/1295057579681501196

Someone had already summoned the ever-useful Threader app to stitch the thread into a single page, which I sent to Instapaper to read leisurely. I’m quoting some tweets here:

Read Non-fiction for mental models & perspectives on how the world has worked, currently works, and how you can create new works within it.
Read Fiction for emotional models on how to feel deeper within yourself and in relation to others.

Lindy Effect is a theory that longer a non-perishable thing has been in existence, the more likely it is to be in existence.
Old Ideas & Books that are still relevant today, have a lower chance of becoming expired knowledge and are therefore more valuable in the present

5-star reviews can be gamed & don’t tell you why you shouldn’t read the book. Read passionate, constructive, and specific 3 & 4-star reviews to find out what the book lacks to see if what remains is worthwhile.

Cultivate a Triathlon Reading Pace
Learning to see:
– Flat planes of a book to speed up,
– Wet hills to climb up slowly with care, as to not fall back to re-reading,
– Rocky patches with varying shapes for a hop and skip & more dynamic reading speed for the changing terrain.

Some books are meant to be sat and soaked in. Immerse yourself over, many days, weeks, months.

I identify with that last tweet. Once a year I’ll go through the ritual of reading my well worn copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a river that takes several weeks to ford, during which time I’ll read a few other books in parallel. During those weeks my mind floats in DFW’s alternate universe even as it carries on its business in the real one. As with many great books, each experience is different, each experience uncovers something new, each experience is a different me.

My advice before switching to something new, is to get first clarity about what is broken with your current system and tool. Decide how things needs to be improved and what a better system would look like for you. Then find a tool that will support your new workflow (instead of the other way around).

– Shawn Blanc at The Sweet Setup

This applies to most changes in life and in business.

Incorporating sunk costs into decision-making is a fallacy, but it’s true that switching costs are nonzero, learning curves are real, opportunity cost of time exists.

This comment on Hacker News, via Michael Tsai:

It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they’re keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that’s all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.

As we had seen earlier, no part of the Mozilla blog post announcing the layoffs and the new direction actually describes what the focus will be. It’s far too abstract, other than a reference to making more money. The future is no different than the past.

Power is sought so it can be wielded. Just as no one builds a multi-billion dollar empire without some sort of savage determination and intense will to power (otherwise they would have stopped at some earlier point, taken their winnings and gone home), no one accumulates power and then declines to use it in the face of existential threats—of which Thiel counted Gawker as one to his business interests. A Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk doesn’t build an empire and allow others to encroach on their borders. And yet, it says something about our reflective, childlike understanding of the minds of these people that we condemn, the Koch Brothers or George Soros for various schemes, without stopping to think about why they are doing these things. It’s not simply to save on their taxes, I’ll tell you that. It’s because they have those same “privileged claims to knowledge” and “strong claims of human agency,” that Peter was talking about.

– Ryan Holiday answering the Quora question “How powerful and resourceful is Peter Thiel?”