Ben’s List 24
This week is deep. Starting with two books I’d like to read about lost cities and the pseudo-science of trees. A stressful reckoning of our growing incapacity to acknowledge the weakness of our civilization.
Also see more startups coverage: /startups/
A brilliant article about the value of dead innovations.
TLDR: they are still useful to biologists.
Some management & HR tips. As well as product insights for better customer research – that’s what I’m up to these days.
And the crypto galore of NFTs, community and DAOs…
To Discord or not, that is the question.
Ping me on Twitter if you also felt that this week’s reading list was deeper than usual.
Thank you Suzanne ❤️
Books
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
“Tracing the early development of urban planning, Newitz also introduces us to the often anonymous workers—slaves, women, immigrants, and manual laborers—who built these cities and created monuments that lasted millennia.”
The German Forester Who Wants The World To Idolize Trees
“Wohlleben is fanatical about the virtues of slow growth. The more slowly a tree grows, he says, the tighter its grain, and the greater its chances of surviving natural threats. It pains him to see fast-growing trees in single-species plantations lost to pest infestations and storms.”
- newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-german-forester-who-wants-the-world-to-idolize-trees :: Robert Moor
Propaganda
We, The Screamers: The Nightmare That Is a Reality
“Our awareness seems to shrink in direct ratio as communications expand; the world is open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisoners, each in his private portable cage. And meanwhile the watch goes on ticking. What can the screamers do but go on screaming, until they get blue in the face?”
Management
The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers
Product
Customer Problem Stack Ranking: How Stripe Validate New Product Ideas
“…the results of our own stack ranking experiment showed us that the value proposition we had spent 7 months building through customer discovery research came dead last for our target users.”
How companies analyze customer feedback
“The most popular type of question businesses ask of their customer feedback is how to improve their product. This indicates that product, user research, and customer support teams want customers input to inform their product development processes.”
Biology
Extinction Isn’t an End: Mining Ancient Innovation for Future Solutions
“Careful observers can begin to see that the next evolutionary phase of scientific exploration of ancient life on Earth may be far more interactive and beneficial than has been imagined: an exploration of new techniques that can bring past states to life to solve our current, and future, most pressing problems.”
Crypto & Community
Community Founders Are a New Kind of Tech Founder
“Community can be more powerful than code or capital. By leveraging the power of mass collaboration, even the wildest ideas can become reality. Proof in point: at one point Dogecoin was trading at ten times the value of the New York Times.”
