Whatever Next #4: Keep calm, and write the newsletter
About tech CEO's, messaging tech battles, decentralized organizations, Mindfulness for engineers, live streaming selling, SpaceX, and other topics.
Hi @ll! I hope you’re all ok in these uncertain times. Welcome my humble newsletter, where I will be sharing different topics that I found interesting during the week. Only ten sections maximum per newsletter, I don’t want to bother or bore you!
Opinions and selection of topics are my own.
📜 My latest post about social selling and live streaming
In my last newsletter, I shared a twitter thread that said that the next Amazon competitor would be a social or video app.
This reminded me of a live streaming e-commerce project that took place some years ago. So I decided to write a post about it.
What is very interesting to see is how mature is the Chinese market regarding live stream selling and its social interaction, and how Europe and America remain far away from this trend.
If you’re interested in this future e-commerce trends, check it out!
🧠 How Mindfulness can help engineers?
I remember that this topic was what made me buy years ago the book “Search Inside Yourself” from Chade-Meng Tan, an early engineer from Google. Many insights from this book, maybe another day I’ll write about it.
In this article from Harvard Business Review, you could find another point of view based on convergent and divergent thinking, and how can mindfulness help engineers find better solutions.
Convergent thinking is linear, involving going through a list of steps to get to a single correct answer. In contrast, divergent thinking is exploring different directions from an initial problem statement to generate many possible ideas.
Both types of thinking are important to finding the best final solution, but divergent thinking is particularly important for developing innovative solutions. There is convincing evidence demonstrating a causal link between being mindful and being able to engage in divergent thinking.
Mental note: Last 2 months, during the lockdown, I lost the habit, and I should meditate again.
👷 From immigrant to top CEO: Eric Yuan and ZOOM
Here’s a short interview with Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom. Silicon Valleys still concentrates its innovative spirit and talent attraction based on its diversity, and Eric is a good example of it. As a corporate Webex user, thanks to Eric for looking to solve the customer’s problem.
🤔 To leave, or not to leave… This is Facebook’s question
Lots of tweets, comments, articles, media, have appeared since Twitter announced its context labeling (not to be considered as fact-checking). Lots of controversy regarding Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg (Team Jack vs Team Zucks), and their position around politics.
Everybody could (should) have their own opinion, and could agree or disagree most. But my question here is based on the following statement. These lines aren’t about David Heinemeier, it is only one example of the huge amount of requests from people asking to Facebook employees leave the company.
I agree that the CEO of the company is the visible and representative part of the company, and its culture, strategy, etc. But is the CEO (or founder) political position or opinion enough to dynamite a company’s vision and purpose? Mark has been considered for a long time as a Top CEO by Glassdoor, based on employee review, so is he really that bad now? Should people leave Facebook based on this?
💻 Slack versus Microsoft Teams battle rages on!
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield claimed last month that Microsoft Teams isn’t a competitor to Slack, but they feel that “Microsoft is perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that.” You could find it on this Verge article and you could also listen to the entire interview from the Vergecast.
Only some weeks after, Slack announced that it is partnering with Amazon in a multiyear agreement that means all Amazon employees will be able to start using Slack. The partnership also agreed that Slack has to migrate its voice and video calling features over to Amazon’s Chime platform, and in general Slack might have to move to AWS.
Slack has been growing its enterprise business. Butterfield said in a statement that “strategically partnering with AWS allows both companies to scale to meet demand and deliver enterprise-grade offerings to our customers”. It’s a deal that will benefit both Amazon and Slack. And Slack strengths enough to battle longer with Microsoft Teams. Stay tuned!
🐶 Wag the dog
A dog is smarter than its tail, but if the tail were smarter, then the tail would 'wag the dog'.
I had never heard this expression before. Now I know that there’s a movie also called like this, but the funny thing is that it was translated as “Smokescreen” in Spanish.
This is an excerpt from Jon Kabat-Zinn that has nothing to do with Mindfulness, but it worth a read, especially in these days.
🖤 All Lives Matter, but Black are the ones in danger now
📻 Using AI to decentralize organizations
You probably know Azeems Azhar’s Exponential View. Also, there’s a podcast, and the last time invited Daniel Hulme, CEO of Satalia, who explained his radical vision on how technology can be honest to build fundamentally decentralized organizations working like a swarm with the help of AI.
Think about an organization with no managers, no KPI, no holiday control, evaluated by peer review … It seems chaotic, isn’t it? Daniel assures that it works.
I recommend you to listen to it, only 38 mins, but if you want to know more first, you’ll find some insights in my post.
🚀 SpaceX
Most of us were probably engaged last week with the successful SpaceX and NASA launch and docking into the ISS. It was very interesting to see how this attracted everybody’s attention around the globe. In these days, we have a lack of success and positive stories that make our imagination fly away.
From an engineering point of view, I found this article very interesting. If you’re curious about which are the technologies that made this possible, here’s a nice recap.
Also, as he points out in the article, SpaceX opened at Reddit an AMA, “ask me anything”, which is gold. If you want to attract talent, these are the best practices possible.
🎁 Curiosities
As always, I want you to feel elder. On 1st June 1999, Napster launched. Sean Parker didn’t look like Justin Timberlake yet.
And… That’s it! If you arrived here, thanks for reading. I hope you like it!
Please, do not hesitate to add any comment. I am open to any suggestion so if you want to add a comment or contact me, I encourage you to do it.
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