Welcome to the third Monthly now Quarterly Quality Contributions topic to the Commonplace forum. This is part of our goal to make Commonplace the best location on the web for business discussions.
You can find all historical quality contribution threads below:
Commonplace High Quality Contributions - 2025 Q1
- @rostbog.news wrote a series powerful anecdotes about the role of agency during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The first PM, when the war started, quickly realized that everything had changed forever and that you need to adapt or die. Despite knowing nothing about drones, he teamed up with another guy (was doing marketing in tech) and together they launched a drone piloting course. Over the course of two years, they transitioned to drone production. Today, they employ around 200 people, operate a production line that manufactures hundreds of drones, and have garnered media attention and strong connections within the defense industry.
The second PM, a smart guy, chose a different approach. He decided to keep a low profile, staying home and trying to avoid being drafted. Three years later, he’s struggling with depression, drinking heavily, rarely going outside, and facing serious issues in both his marriage and career. Conversations with him are difficult, as he blames everyone and everything around him for his situation.
- @bobbiec gave a breakdown of some of the reasons that Wiz was such a strong player in the cybersecurity market.
Selling through a channel partner (VAR, SI, MSP, etc.) is an entirely different world. At my company we once sold direct to a major bank, and going from a verbal agreement that they would buy to a signed contract took several months for vendor onboarding things. For a major payments company we sold through a VAR and did the same in under a week. The VAR took an eye-watering cut for that service.
- @james used “The Heart of Innovation” to help talk through business challenges with his entrepreneur friend
I was walking around New York with a friend who just raised his Series A financing. He thought his big issues were:
- Increasing Average Contract Value (ACV)
- Shortening the sales cycle
- Delegating more
I suggested these were important but that wasn’t his biggest opportunity. He has already made something out of nothing. He’s got real customers and a real product, armed with fresh funds and optimistic board. So he’s got a very long list of things to do and learn. BUT his actual problem is more basic: despite having a good product with some happy customers, he faces “a vast sea of indifference” in the market.
To have kids (when you have the choice not to) is fundamentally an act of faith, a belief that investing in kids is worth the long term investment, a belief that the world will be a place worth living in for decades (who would want to have kids in a collapsed society?), and a belief that such an investment is of higher value than other things one could do with one’s time and energy. Given the uncertainty in the world, I get why people don’t do it.
The tl;dr: there’s a lot of content about AI right now. Much of it is rubbish. I think we should have a thread where we share high quality field reports on the use of AI. That is: no fluff, no takes, no opinions. Just reports from use or from observation of practice. I suspect that this would be a service to members, who — if you’re anything like me — are currently experiencing a barrage of Bad AI Takes.
What constitutes writing expertise?
Believability: I used to volunteer over at https://www.storywritingschool.com/ (as a teaching assistant and writing coach, though I’m not that skilled myself), and I have 1 published 10 minute theater play.
- @ellen took a review of “Scaling People” and made a meta point about ZIRP and its’ influence on tech management writing
That is actually my biggest gripe with most tech management books, they are usually based on ZIRP era needs and conditions. Even if their advice still applied (much of it doesn’t), I just don’t face the same problems that those leaders faced back then.
It’s strange to me to see the business world’s reaction to LLMs and wider AI research, and generally what laypeople tend to take away from progress. One thing that seems common is the “evaluation” of these AI models based on limited performance on limited use cases, but making wide-ranging conclusions.
This post of mine aggregating YouTube videos with tacit knowledge got attention again on Twitter today and reminded me that it could be useful for people to share here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SXJGSPeQWbACveJhs/the-best-tacit-knowledge-videos-on-every-subject
- @justin had some advice on the CS intern job market, and some good advice for all of us to take at least once in our careers
I recommend making at least one absolutely gigantic mistake that you can tell people about later in your career. In my first job when I was 18 in finance I got the sign wrong on some numbers because the systems were terrible, so I ran a $100m overdraft which had to get reported to the regulator. After that they let me fix the systems, everntually someone turned that into a standalone company, which I didnt get any equity in.
- @parconley continued his great aggregation work and linked to several great blog posts, including one allowed me to negotiate for ~$50K more than otherwise in my latest job
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued by Patrick McKenzie. This blog post introduced me to the idea of negotiation being a thing that people do. Some of its tips also informed my exit in late 2023 as well as a couple of other role negotiations.
- @eric discussed the failure modes he sees in many execs that he coaches, overly focusing on the technicals at the expense of influencing and communication skills)
But most executives think the basic skills are the technical skills that got them promoted, so they are “sparring” with the wrong set of basics and get beaten up pretty badly, and then blame it all on “politics”.
My insight was that we as humans don’t achieve the objective directly but rather by designing a system that achieves the objective. We may very well be the ones who operate the system (after all a book isn’t going to write itself) but from the perspective of a system it’s a lot easier to improve things.