haruki zaemon

Great meetings have an outcome:

• Decisions: Discuss problems to come to a decision. This includes ranking the backlog, deciding on the project portfolio, and possibly impediment identification and removal. Whatever this discussion is, it leads to a decision. These decisions might create action items.
• Work product: Collaborate to create a work product. This might be story creation and refinement, experiment creation, or any kind of outcome that the team will use to inform its future work.

Then, there are the status or information dissemination meetings. Stop them. Don’t go.

We’re entering a period wherein governments regulate large technology businesses more actively. Startups evaluating M&A have additional factors to consider.

The period between a startup signing a merger agreement & the transaction close (when money & stock changes hands) might last a few weeks for a small acquisition or drag for more than a year for higher-profile buys.

The longer the period, the greater the challenges facing the business.

unlike many other functions, engineering will be intimately involved after the acquisition closes, typically leading the integration and operation of the acquired offering. This incentivizes engineering to be particularly careful in their assessment. While there are no prizes for diligently vetting acquisitions, often just a trail of annoyed colleagues, it’s critical work.

It is not at all inevitable that because platform businesses operate by different economic rules than normal businesses, they will migrate from differentiation strategies to low-cost strategies as they grow and develop.

However, while not inevitable, it is the easiest trap in which to fall. Because the network effects on costs of modern Internet-based platform businesses are so strong, the easiest thing to do is follow a low-cost strategy powered by network effects.

Transitioning from differentiation to low-cost is really, really tricky. Differentiators have legacy costs which are likely to limit them to being, at best, cost-competitive, not low-cost. That puts them in danger of native low-cost players.