4+1: episode 13

Postcards from Antiparos

Welcome to the new season of 4+1. I mean, that’s what it’s called when there is a huge gap between episodes, right? To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I’d keep doing this, but I recently ran into two different friends who told me how much they like reading these — quite a surprise, really.

Lots of interesting have happened in the meanwhile, which I’ll cover in a separate post soon. But for now, here’s a couple interesting things I’ve come across or that have been on my mind recently:

1. If you’re looking for really interesting and impactful projects to work on, Jeff Dean (Senior Fellow at Google and Google AI lead) suggests looking at a list put together by the National Academy of Engineering. This pointer came up during an overall very interesting interview he did on the Google Cloud Platform podcast.
2. On the same theme, Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe and overall really thoughtful and well-read guy), put together a list of interesting questions, ranging from economics to startups to science. This one will keep you busy for days.
3. I’ve also been thinking a lot about online data privacy and how we can rethink how we share our data online. As usual, Stratechery (one of my top-5 favorite blogs, btw) wrote a post covering some of this stuff, way better than I could ever have done. Quite coincidentally, in the same week, I came across the new ambitious project from Tim Berners-Lee (who know, the guy who brought us the World Wide Web). This is the second project in this overall same theme (the other being Brave, by the Mozilla folks). It’s really worth looking into both of these.
4. As I was doing a bunch of reading related to product management, there were a couple of interesting things that I read recently. One was this post by the co-founder of Behance on First Round’s blog (always a top-notch resource). He also recently published a book on the topic. Further, I was pointed to another great resource (thanks Andreas Klinger!) that the guys at Intercom put together. I would highly recommend this to anyone in product management or design.
5. Finally, I recently discovered my newest favorite YouTube channel, this one being a lot more on the nerdier side, covering interesting math topics like linear algebra and neural networks. Since my YouTube stream mostly contains cooking, travel, and car videos, this one brings in some variety 😉