Products or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Services

Within tech, I've constantly been surprised by the religiosity surrounding product development. For a long time, I didn't understand it. In fact, it wasn't clear to me why selling products was strictly better than selling services. My career started at a company that provided a fusion of products and services, as many large enterprsie software companies do, and especially when I started at the company, it wasn't clear why providing products was such a focus for the company. In fact, when I joined, it was very stressful to be on the product development side of the organization - things seemed decidedly murkier when trying to build products than when trying to fulfill contracts.

However, there are a number of reasons that traditional product companies are so desirable. Some of these are purely financial - product companies have a much higher capacity to generate profits than other companies. Others are, however, much more cultural. Product companies bind groups of people together with an evangelical furor that rivals some of the worlds most popular religions, provide clear focus as a company grows, and allow people to concretely see what an organizations does.

I remember very clearly the first time I talked about the value of product development with my boss in 2014. I was working on a failing product at the time, and felt dejected about our lack of progress. We had worked hard, but the product we had built was useless. It wasn't because we had failed to build something, but rather because we had built the wrong thing. As a product manager at the time, the responsibility for this directional failure was mine, and I was frustrated and asked him why we focused on products when the expected return on services felt so much higher. His response stuck with me, and focused on three main components.

Firstly, product development has a much higher failure rate than providing business services. Most product development efforts fail, and many of them fail spectacuraly. However, this failure rate still doesn't change the fact that the expected value of product development is almost always higher than providing raw professional services. Despite the extraoridinarly high rate of failure, successful products are incredibly valuable, and therefore often dominate any rudimentary expected value calculation.

This value comes from a combination of two traits, which I call horizontal and vertical. Horizontal value comes from a product's ability to increase efficiency. These type of products help businesses do the same thing that they've always done, but faster. This, in turn, reduces the cost of revenue, and allows the business to generate more revenue with the same number of people. Vertical products, by contrast, open new lines of business - they allow companies to increase their top-line revenue numbers. In this model, Ads at Facebook would be a vertical product while the HipHop Virtual machine, would be a horizontal product.

In either case, though, products produce lasting results; once developed, they can continue to provide value for years either by reducing expenses or increasing revenue. This, in turn, makes them assets for the company despite not requiring additional investment.

So from a financial perspective, product development is essential. In the next post, I'll spend some time talking about some of the other ways that products can provide value. 

Small Wins

Going to an Ivy League school, you're trained to imagine that a successful professional career involves tackling big ideas and changing the world in grandiose style. In my four years of professional life, however, I've come to realize that the big wins that make headlines are often not obtained through sheer force of will and intellectual brilliance. Instead, high-level success is the emergent property of low level discipline and tactics. In this time, I've come to realize that tactics is a necessary, although not sufficient, component of successful strategy. This may seem obvious, but the American educational system often downplays the real work required to manifest actual change. Inside the academy, people spend their time primarily talking about what to change, but spend very little time thinking about how to effect that change. Policy is a much more acceptable research topic than politics.

As a result, I didn't have much operational experience going into my first job. When I showed up, I was surprised at the sheer volume of tracking, task management, and project management that I was asked to do. I saw this as a gross inefficiency and spent many hours trying to avoid it rather than excel at it. In particular, I think that I had an intuition that this level of process was an indication that the organizational structure wasn't correct - with a better structure, wouldn't most of this go away?

Having watched many, many projects succeed and fail, however, I can safely say that having a baseline level of operational ability is a necessary, although not sufficient, prerequisite for success. While small teams (<5) can thrive without structure, as the size of a group grows, the more important it is to have a de facto project manager.

I think that this point, that small wins combine and compound to create big wins, has one other interesting result, which is that the importance of a task is not always directly related its intellectual difficulty. Indeed, task management is often not the hardest thing despite the fact that at times it is the most important. Taken further, I think that this also reflects an interesting truth about founding businesses or building successful products: the best product or company is often not conventionally hard - indeed, with everything equal, an easier product is probably a more valuable product to build than one that is difficult. Sometimes just doing something, rather than thinking about that thing, is the best way to create something that lasts.

Professional Velocity: Speed and Direction

Today, I sat down with a friend and colleague and had a long conversation about his professional growth. In doing so, I ended up realizing that I needed to write down what I mean about "professional velocity", because it's a framework that I frequently use when helping others think through their professional (and personal) development, and it's something that I consistently think about when I reflect on my life.

Unlike speed, velocity is a vector, which means that it also includes a component of direction. For myself and others, it's easy to spend too much time focusing on either speed or direction, to the detriment of overall velocity.

The example that feels the most relevant in my own life is how I ended up choosing a major in college. I remember having a huge argument with my father about why I was majoring in chemistry (not so impractical of a major, I might add) over Christmas break my Junior year. The truth was, I was good at chemistry. I started doing it my freshman year, and by my sophomore year, I was ahead, taking graduate classes and advanced courses that most people took in their junior or senior years. Going back to taking something like introductory economics felt like it would have been a regression, and so I continued to take chemistry courses. It was a particularly unintentional choice - I happened to be a chemistry major because I happened to have taken advanced chemistry in my freshman year.

This was my most egregious example of focusing too heavily on speed. In the race to become a famous chemist, I was ahead. Indeed, I was probably years ahead of people my age. However, I wasn't spending a lot of time interrogating that goal. While I was getting further ahead of the cohort of budding chemists, I was actually getting behind people who wanted to do software development or who wanted to become writers. In fact, when I started working as a professional developer, I found myself paradoxically behind everyone around me!

At other points in life, I've focused too heavily on direction. I spent a lot of time when I started work trying to figure out what I wanted to do - did I want to do testing, development, be a manager, do product work? At the end of the day, thinking abstractly about things without any concrete output doesn't feel great if you don't back it up with action, and paradoxically, it's caused me to be less directed, because it doesn't generate a lot of new information about what you like doing or could be good at.

There's definitely a tension between moving forward and figuring out what the right direction is overall, and that's never going away. Thinking about where you're going doesn't get you there, but it definitely helps prevent you from getting completely lost, and if you can produce dozens of artifacts that other people can consume along the way, then you're not really wasting that time anyway!

When Narratives Lie

As you may know from reading my blog, I’m on a bit of a quantified self binge right now. In particular, I’ve set some relatively ambitious goals with respect to fitness and health. As I've reflected on the first month of the process, I was struck by the way in which I repeatedly attempted to delude myself when I was clearly missing my goals.

One of my goals is to increase my physical fitness, as measured by resting heart rate, body fat, and weight. Because of [insert_list_of_excuses], I’m currently not tracking towards achieving this goal. I certainly need to be better, but I also need to be more honest with myself. With a goal like weight loss, there are inevitably fluctuations around a trend. If I weigh myself every day, there are often natural fluctuations of a couple pounds as a result of differing levels of hydration and how recently I’ve eaten. When I’m behind on my goal, however, I’ve found myself much more loathe to step on the scale when I know I’ve been bad. I don’t want to see the quantitive metric that shows that I’m failing. Even though I know in my head that my weight probably went up, actually stepping on the scale and logging it feels like a failure. Instead, I’m tempted to tell myself that I'll be better the next day and then step on when I’m tracking. Unfortunately, things come up, and all of the sudden I’ve lost 3 days.

On the other hand, I'm ahead of my goal for reading. I'm tearing through books, and keep adding more and more to my list. I know that I'm ahead of my goal, but I still, irrationally, want to read ever more. Having the tracking system in place has helped me consciously slow myself down, allowing me to reallocate time towards some of my other aspirations - writing a simple iPhone app, for example. Having metrics to check in with week over week has provided me with the structure to manage myself, and I think that it has been one more step towards becoming an effective human. 

In reality, just stepping on the scale is the action that allows me to reset. Having that metric, locking in at a new number, that's what forces me to come to terms with my progress, or lack thereof. At this point, I'm tracking 10 discrete goals via Beeminder via a complex network of applications, triggers, and feedback loops. The simple act of looking at my landing page every day gives me the data I need to plan, move forward, and adjust my behavior. 

I'm Joining PGP

As of today, I'm an official participant in the Personal Genome Project (PGP). Ever since reading an article about the program last fall, I've been fascinated about the potential of PGP. Given my professional interest in large-scale data analysis and my personal interests in data liberation and the quantified self movement, PGP is the perfect program for me to contribute to. For over a decade, since first reading about DNA replication in AP Biology, I've been fascinated by the limitations of traditional genetics and the promise of epigenetic research. I had a couple friends who were twins, and I can still remember asking my high school biology teacher about why genetically identical organisms weren't always phenotypically the same. It seems like we're not that much closer to the answer ten years later.

For people unfamiliar with the program, it's the spiritual successor to the Human Genome Project, focused specifically on producing a publicly available database of genomic, phenotypic and environmental information with the intent of providing a rich source of input data for epigenetic research. However, unlike most similar programs, PGP's data is available to the public. George Church, the lead researcher in the study, has his data here; mine is available here. While I don't have any professional experience in the space, the narrative of researchers having to spend most of their time recruiting participants for a single study resonated with me. Research is tough enough when you can collect data reliably - I can't imagine having to spend time recruiting human subjects for every new study.

In addition to my general curiosity about altruistic participation in genetic research, the program had a couple of other fascinating attributes.

1) The organizers decided against locking down data and opted to make it publicly available. 

In order to get this program approved by Harvard's Institutional Review Board, the researchers made the choice to opt for a program that emphasizes informed consent as opposed to data protection. In order to enroll, I had to spend an hour reading about possible risks associated with participation and answer dozens of questions about the consent process. The most interesting risks felt like they were coming right out of science fiction:

• Someone could use my genetic information to create clones.
• I could be convicted of crimes based on synthetic DNA that matches mine.
• In the future, insurance companies might be able to discriminate based on my genome to charge me higher, risk-adjusted rates

2) I was required me to talk with my parents and siblings before finalizing my application.

The application process required me to certify that I had talked with my nuclear family about the risks that my participation would expose them to; because I share my genetic information with my parents and siblings, making my genome public would implicitly release some of their personal genetic information. 

3) Going through the application forced me to think about what the future of genetic research might hold.

The eventual use of the data is complete unregulated and impossible to predict. We have no way of knowing what we will be able to do with genetic data in a decade, and participation now exposes me to a number of completely unknowable risks that may arise in the future.

4) Many genetic studies aren't performed on representative human populations.

Though it's obvious after thinking about how most human genetic research is performed, I was surprised to discover that many participants are recruited from the community around the research center, often a university campus. As such, we don't have many of genetic studies that analyze longitudinal differences across demographic and regional groups, the precise studies required to make any serious breakthroughs in epigenetics. 

Finally, in the course of evaluating the program, I've come to the conclusion that it's surprisingly difficult to do effective longitudinal genetic research. This type of research doesn't generate results quickly, and it requires a coordinated effort from funding organizations, study participants and researchers. Documenting every aspect of the study, especially variables that may only be relevant in hindsight, is an arduous task, but one that has proven effective in the past; the Framingham Heart Study, which has been running for close to 70 years, has spawned over 1,000 research papers and dramatically changed our understanding of the relationships between diet, exercise, and heart disease. I hope that the data made available as part of PGP will yield similarly impressive results.

In either case, next time I'm in Boston, MA, I'll be getting blood work done and making my genome available to any of you weirdos who want to check it out! Hope to hear from some other people who decide that this is an interesting way to become a naked mole rat and altruistically contribute to the future of human genetic knowledge!

Economist Redux #5: February

The past three weeks have been pretty wild for me, and so I'm falling a bit behind on my blogging goal and my goal of reading The Economist every week. I spent today catching up on the past few weeks, and here are some articles I enjoyed!

• Some interesting point/counter-points about teaching recruitment and how teacher's unions in the US make it difficult to attract really high-performing students. There was also a good follow-up piece about different methods of training teachers that focused on TFA specifically.
• Starting the piece about the alfalfa farmer in Catch 22, this piece about farm subsidies was a pretty good analysis of different ways in which the current programs are generally wasteful and inefficient. Nothing really new here, but a good piece.
• This article about crowdfunding was focused on a game called Star Citizen (Kickstarter here), that's raised over $72 million. Cool thoughts about how this could be an effective way to pay for blockbuster films, with a pithy quote about an example that's near and dear to my heart: "if Joss Whedon wanted to do another series of ‘Firefly’, I bet he could raise a hell of a lot of cash.”
• Gentrification is a huge part of the national dialogue about urbanization, with most people assuming that it's a hugely negative trend. This article talks a lot about the positives of gentrification, which, whether or not you agree with them, are worth considering.
• Totally agree with this article; shutting down the DHS is definitionally bad for national security and is a lame attempt at governance. 
• Generally good article about Apple's risky plan to enter the car market, but I think the line about how "the technology firms have no manufacturing culture" falls pretty flat in the face of any basic interrogation of the complex supply chains and manufacturing requirements of complex modern electronics.
• An awesome article about Kaspersky Labs, an organization that has time and time again been ahead in the digital arms race over cyber security
• In an article very close to my heart, the newspaper tackles the furious battle for talent in Silicon Valley. Nothing particularly novel here, but I will say that I was disappointed that they didn't mention anything about the way developers at tech firms are in the front office, not the back office. I think that's also a huge part of why it's so hard to attract tech talent in more traditional industries.
• Cool article about the Supreme Court, and how it's the final frontier of grey, distinguished politics where disagreement doesn't make anyone enemies. Having been listening to Amicus, a podcast from Slate, I think there's a lot that I have to learn about the court.
• I highly recommend this article about North Korea's economic policies and how they end up making their economy chug along (albeit terribly). There are a couple of really interesting discussions about the differences between the North and South and some good commentary on the damage that the nuclear arms program has on the North Korean economy.
• Not particularly interesting on its own, but this article about bottled water in China resonated with me after having just finished reading How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
• This article, about how eyelashes actually create aerodynamic turbulence that prevents eye infection, was just a great reminder that science is always moving forward, and that very few things evolve for no reason. 
• My college roommate and I used to talk for hours about using viral methods to attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as well as a ton of other tactics, but it sounds like we might be getting closer to this actually becoming a reality.

Tomorrow May Not Be Better

As you may know from reading my blog, I’m on a bit of a quantified self binge right now. In particular, I’ve set some relatively ambitious goals with respect to fitness and health. As I've reflected on the first month of the process, I was struck by the way in which I repeatedly attempted to delude myself when I was clearly missing my goals.

One of my goals is to increase my physical fitness, as measured by resting heart rate, body fat, and weight. Because of [insert_list_of_excuses], I’m currently not tracking towards achieving this goal. I certainly need to be better, but I also need to be more honest with myself. With a goal like weight loss, there are inevitably fluctuations around a trend. If I weigh myself every day, there are often natural fluctuations of a couple pounds as a result of differing levels of hydration and how recently I’ve eaten. When I’m behind on my goal, however, I’ve found myself much more loathe to step on the scale when I know I’ve been bad. I don’t want to see the quantitive metric that shows that I’m failing. Even though I know  in my head that my weight probably went up, actually stepping on the scale and logging it feels like a failure. Instead, I’m tempted to tell myself that I'll be better the next day and then step on when I’m tracking. Unfortunately, things come up, and all of the sudden I’ve lost 3 days.

On the other hand, I'm ahead of my goal for reading. I'm tearing through books, and keep adding more and more to my list. I know that I'm ahead of my goal, but I still, irrationally, want to read ever more. Having the tracking system in place has helped me consciously slow myself down, allowing me to reallocate time towards some of my other aspirations - writing a simple iPhone app, for example. Having metrics to check in with week over week has provided me with the structure to manage myself, and I think that it has been one more step towards becoming an effective human adult male. 

In reality, just stepping on the scale is the action that allows me to reset. Having that metric, locking in at a new number, that's what forces me to come to terms with my progress, or lack thereof. At this point, I'm tracking 10 discrete goals via Beeminder via a complex network of applications, triggers, and feedback loops. The simple act of looking at my landing page every day gives me the data I need to plan, move forward, and adjust my behavior.

The saddest business book I've ever read

Put simply, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a stunning novel masquerading as a parody of a canned business self-help book. With twelve chapters spanning the unnamed main characters ~80 year life, the book is loaded with humor, meaning, and more than a small amount of tear-jerking emotion.

The trite early chapters (with titles like "Don't Fall In Love" and "Move to the City") slowly deepen in complexity, eventually transforming from the unabashed chronicle of a rising business titan into a touching reflection on aging, love, and finding meaning in life. It was a novel that made me cry, and its generic voice (none of the characters have names, for example) only serves to heighten the universal resonance of the story that unfolds.

To get a sense for the prose, I think that this quote is just so poignant, funny, and indicative of the entire novel: "And where moneymaking is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out."

Going into the novel, I really didn't know what to expect, but whatever my expectations, they were unquestionably surpassed. This is a book that I will likely return to later in life and experience in a totally new way as my youth fades and I, like the protagonist, become old.

Economist Redux #4: January 2015

OK, so I'll admit that I'm falling a bit behind; quarterly planning at work has killed me a bit, as has some fun ski trips up to the arid hills of Tahoe. Let's get down to business though; you guys are here for reposts of Economist articles, and I would hate to disappoint.

• An article about freedom of speech resonated with me. A good friend of mine from college was routinely attacked for making similar claims, but I tend to agree with the notion that attempts to regulate speech are often misguided. 
• Having finished the Twilight of the Elite last year, not much in either of these articles about dangers of meritocracy really surprised me, although the specific quantification of the degree to which associative mating actually increases inequality (25%) was interesting to me. Generally just a good thing to keep a mental note of.
• Apparently we're going to be able to save the fishies with big data! Hooray! 
• An interesting take on how to use low oil prices as a way to impose a carbon tax and reduce subsidies for alternative energies in one fell swoop. I need to read more about carbon taxes, but the more I hear, the more it sounds pretty awesome!
• Close to home, this was a relatively hawkish take on some of the risks that counterterrorism agencies face when dealing with more independent, commando-style attacks.
• I've actually worked on this a bit professionally, and it would be interesting to see if the President's ideas about data sharing for cyber security take off. It really could be a powerful way to combat persistent cyber threats.
• This article makes some pretty optimistic claims that even with low oil prices, innovation in the energy space is improving the lot of people everywhere! In particular, some of the stories about specific technological improvements in efficiency and production were pretty inspiring. 
• Interesting take on BP, specifically from the perspective of whether it could get eaten up by another big oil company now that crude prices are low, even though management has done a pretty good job with the company.
• Similar article about McDonald's - the downsides of being the biggest fast food company in an era of healthy food and more diversity at the slightly higher end of the market makes this a particularly tough time. 
• Really interesting article about bitcoin mining - did you know that mining for bitcoins takes more electricity than 130,000 US homes? Especially given the recent volatility, it also has some interesting parallels with the oil industry right now.
• Some cool thoughts about platform companies and the complex economics of trying to balance supply and demand, as well as some of the more traditional areas of ad optimization and whatnot. 
• Maybe things will be better in Congress than the Economist thinks, but I won't be holding my breath. This article has a particularly depressing juxtaposition of the workers fixing up the physical capital building and the people who end up working inside it.
• Crazy article about some dude who basically had the job of running a wild future think-tank for the Pentagon. Sounds like he either crushed it or sucked, but in either case, it's probably classified. 

And that's it. Here's to increased consistency in upcoming weeks!

Key Performance Indicators: The Musical

As a kid, I think I would have passed the marshmallow test with flying colors. As an adult, I'm not so sure. At the most basic level, I blame my parents for being perfect - like the best manager in the world, they created a space where it was hard not to excel. Everything was taken care of, and all that was left to me was the fun stuff; learning, running, and generally feeling proud of myself. The rules were clear, the blocks were in place, and I got to run the ball in for a touchdown every time.

In many ways, 2014 was one of my toughest professional years yet. While I didn't realize it at the time, it's clear to me that I never really hit my stride. And I really want to hit my stride. I want to feel excellent again. So, taking some inspiration from my first boss, a man who calls himself a fish but might actually be a robot (in the best of ways), I'm gonna start some experimenting with some serious life-hacking.

My personality type lends itself towards vision, but unfortunately, I struggle with execution. It's feedback I've gotten before, and it's something that I'll probably always struggle with, because that's just who I am. However, as my responsibilities became progressively more abstract, I wasn't able to build out effective processes for project management, and it showed. I've started getting involved in more complex projects on longer timelines, and my lack of discipline became professionally debilitating. Most of the things that I was involved in this year didn't really make meaningful progress. With a few exceptions, I wasn't able to really drive much forward. And that sucks.

So for me, 2015 is going to be a year of learning how to become a mechanic.

Moving into 2015, I'm experimenting with different techniques that force me to focus myself and build up my mental discipline, because I think that many of my weaknesses are just a manifestation of my fundamental lack of discipline. It's possible that someone reading this might think that I'm being pessimistic. Nothing could be further from the truth; I'm actually very excited to experiment with new techniques and figure out good ways to track, monitor, and improve my personal output. However, it's going to be hard, primarily because I'm an exceptionally organic person. I don't like structure, and I tend to find myself dancing through life, both figuratively and literally. I've thought up dozens of projects, but I've finished very few of them. Although I like the idea of finishing projects, I've struggled to learn how to structure my time in a way that actually reflects that desire.

When a lot of people hear this, they're surprised that I'm so hard on myself. And the truth is that last year wasn't a total wash - I've learned a lot of new stuff, started blogging a bit, read a ton of books, and strengthened a ton of friendships with people I love. And I've become progressively more introspective and self-aware. I travelled internationally, learned a ton about software development, and watched my company go through puberty from the inside, and I realized that I suck at managing people, especially myself.

But in the spirit of self improvement, I want to think more about how to be a better me this year, and I think that it comes down to breaking goals down into small units, building in accountability at the weekly level and publishing them publicly in a way that is trackable. So here goes:

• Habits
• Write weekly goals and reflections
• Write one blog post per week
• Write one thank you note per week
• Set up at least 5 Beeminder metrics by March 31st to track goals
• Fitness
• Drop a few pounds to 165 lbs (initial weigh-in at 176 lbs)
• 13% body fat (initial weigh-in at 18.5%)
• Ski at least one black mogul run well
• Solo kitesurfing
• Run a mile in 5:45
• Average 7m miles for one run of the Campus Loop
• Complete the Death Ride without encountering Death
• Personal Learning
• Read 15 books and expand book club membership
• Complete one project (app/website)
• Create a personal home page
• Get to 1300 ELO in chess (baby steps)
• Set up Motif and Options trading and execute at least 2 trades
• Study for and take either the LSAT, GRE or GMAT
• Complete one full online class
• Work: Goals are still TBD

Economist Redux #3: 2014 Edition

As 2014 comes to a close, I've realized that I'm further behind than I could have imagined with these Economist Reduxes. For the first time in two years, I'm also behind on Economists! So I figured that it was time for a super-lengthy review of my favorite Economist articles from every issue since November!

I shlepped them home, and now, sitting underneath a beautiful 13' tall Christmas tree, I'm getting to work!

• An interesting article on sovereign wealth funds moving in house - reminded me a bit of some of the general themes from Swenson's Pioneering Portfolio Management. It's a lot easier to say that you're going to build out an exceptional investment team than to actually do it, and it can be hard to compete with Wall Street on an even footing.
• It's inevitable that there are at least some genetic components to most behaviors; researchers recently found some genetic markers for violence. Something I really liked about this article was its discussion of "genome-wide association studies" and the frank discussion of the risk of spurious correlations.
• I'm treading lightly here, because it's a particularly touchy subject, but I found the Economist's take on the rising profile of campus sexual assault particularly well balanced, critiquing some of the statistics that are commonly used and the general practice of using tribunals made up of professors to adjudicate these cases while still clearly reflecting the fact that sexual assault is a real problem that needs to be addressed.
• Drones are coming, just not to the US. This overview runs through a lot of the early stage use cases (farming, delivering medicine, and sports). The AirDog drone profiled in the beginning of the article is particularly cool, but I thought that the piece did a good job acknowledging some of the potential risks (weaponization and hijacking), although I still feel like the FAA ban is too aggressive.
• Reading about banks is always fascinating to me - especially about banks that are struggling and trying to find new revenue streams and patch up after rough years. While I'm not often sympathetic towards them, the more I understand about the complexities of financial markets, the more I can appreciate how difficult it can be to run a really effective multinational bank.
• Well, writing in late December, it's clear that the Republicans did, in fact win the Senate. Looks like we're in for either terrible gridlock, or, more optimistically, some big deals on tax reform and some bipartisan cooperation. Given the things that have happened since then, particularly the President's unilateral decision on immigration, I'm a bit less hopeful, but I do think that if we could get some well-constructed tax reform, that would go a long way towards making the US more competitive when it comes to starting businesses, as well as keeping them.
• It wasn't completely shocking, but I do think that there were some really interesting components of the article about young voters. Compared with the traditional narrative about liberals, close to 70% of us think that government is wasteful and inefficient. Reflecting on the sequester, it seems incredible to me that the a 10% cut across discretionary spending had as small of an impact as it did. In general, though, we're pretty liberal, although we're mostly just pissed off.
• Articles like this one on industrial organization are why I love the Economist, and why I love economics more generally. It ran through the recent Nobel Prize in economics Jean Tirole, specifically for work around regulation, platform economies and some of the more complex parts of modern markets - places where industries, based on their particular economics, are naturally monopolistic. It inspired me to pick up a couple of his books, and also just to think more about complex regulatory situations. One of the more interesting examples the article gave was about giving firms choices as part of their regulatory framework in order to balance the needs of protecting consumers and motivating companies to do the hard work of improving efficiency.
• The Supreme Court is going to hear a case about disenfranchising licensed professionals, and I cannot wait. Basics first - dentists are mad that unlicensed people are cutting into the business of whitening teeth, and want North Carolina to enforce their monopoly on the business. As a techie, I really hope that the Court decides against the dentists. The Economist cites a really well-regarded startup, LegalZoom, as an example of a company that is hampered by this type of regulation, and I am pretty sympathetic to the argument that if companies are providing services with the same level of risk, they should be able to compete on price.
• I swear by ETFs, but according to this article, so does everyone else, which could be problematic! One of my favorite companies, Wealthfront, swears by ETFs, and from everything I've read, ETFs are the cheapest way to gain exceptionally well-diversified exposure to specific asset classes without rigorous analysis of specific securities. Indeed, the more I've read, the more I want to eschew all active management and just hide inside the warm bosom of the ETF. This article has a really nice summary of how ETFs work - their size rises and falls with supply and demand and they can be traded on an exchange rather than once per day, as is the case with mutual funds. However, because the index that an ETF tracks moves really quickly, ETFs would have to execute a ton of trades to mirror it exactly. To help with this, most ETFs us a structure where Authorized Participants (APs), which are often large banks, will help balance supply and demand by basically serving as a caching layer. When normal clients sell way more ETFs than there are buyers, APs buy them and then slowly sell them; when clients buy, APs sell their holdings. In practice, they seem to be focused on minimizing price volatility as a result of large orders and can gain exposure to arbitrage opportunities with the ETF prices and the prices of the underlying assets. The article runs through the risks associated with this structure, and basically comes to the conclusion that because the vast majority of trades happen between clients and do not involve an AP, ETFs are likely not systemically risky. However, it was definitely worth a read; often it's easy to forget that these funds have to rebalance relatively frequently in order to effectively track the index they are targeting.
• Low oil prices are going to be one of the biggest macroeconomic trends of 2015! Demand is down, and thanks to fracking, supply is up. Interestingly enough, shale oil will also become less economical as a result. The most interesting fact in this article was that per dollar of output, farms use 4-5x more energy than manufacturers. I just found that really surprising! A lot of that has to do with price, but it's clear that there is a lot of room for improvement in the agricultural space.
• One of my close friends is incredibly passionate about drug policy and addiction medicine; this article made me think a lot about conversations I've had with her on the subject. Apparently, heroin is starting to become more common in the suburbs, specifically with people who are using other, more expensive opioids. Apparently there are now many people who will sell their prescription painkillers and use the proceeds to buy opium. The good news, though, is that this is making methadone treatment and needle exchanges more politically feasible. It's also helping to reduce the stigma associated with addiction, something that will hopefully help us be more compassionate when it comes to addiction policy.
• Having finished The Unwinding recently, the piece about Atlanta's new transit system resonated with me, especially given that it directly referenced the 2010 Tea Party protests against a similar system in Tampa. I was also really excited to read about the high-speed rail line between Houston and Dallas that is coming online in 2021! While rail is generally an expensive investment, I've always had a soft spot for trains, and I cannot wait to have some truly high-speed railways in the good old US of A.
• In my experience, people in the US are always terrified of Chinese students and continuously worried about being overtaken in higher education. I found this article to be pleasantly contrarian on the subject. Because so many of the smartest Chinese students do graduate school at Western universities and so few return to China, there is a very real brain-drain in China. I also didn't realize that despite their dominance in STEM at the high school letter, there has never been a Chinese winner of a Nobel Prize in any of the STEM fields; this author asserts that this is primarily due to the fact that the incentive structure in China is bureaucratic and mechanical. Overall, it was an interesting lens into a challenge that I didn't realize China had.
• Single payer healthcare is one of the many things that makes my heart warm, but unfortunately, it's generally tough to do well. It's funny reading about the NHS, which apparently is one of the UK's favorite institutions through the lens of American politics, which dogmatically associates it with people dying while they wait for a heart transplant. The reforms discussed are all the things that my medical student friends pine for: coordination between primary care, social services, and hospitals; consolidated costs across hospitals; and encouraging hospitals to send healthcare professionals out to people's homes in order to improve care and reduce emergency room referrals.
• This is just a fun little pithy article about compensation consultants. The title says it all: If you hire them, pay will come. Sounds like I need a compensation consultant myself!
• Alright, this technically wasn't in print, but by god I love Buttonwood! I'm currently going through a bit of a finance phase (there's an upcoming blog post about some books I've been reading on the subject), and the column on active fund management matches my personal opinions, so I figured it must be true! Overall, I liked the way they broke down luck and competency, and I thought that the conclusion was fairly well balanced: because of the fee structure, the odds are stacked against active managers, but the top funds do seem to provide real benefits to investors. 
• This is such a super interesting piece on CEO compensation and how the options based compensation that became so popular in the 90s has led towards a very short-term focus from many CEOs, especially in the form of stock buy-backs. I need to learn more about why companies buy back their own stock, but I loved the Buffet quote: buying back stock during a bubble is the equivalent of buying $1.00 for $1.10.
• Looks like my 40-hour dream might not just be selfish! There are a lot of variables, but it's looking like there are hugely diminishing returns to working longer, and it's often much more valuable to focus on having a solid 40 hours of work rather than maximizing for hours. I am curious about whether there are people who can beat the numbers, though; Flounder definitely has an impressively high marginal output! I'll probably come back to this sometime and think about methodologies to force medical residents to work less.
• Awww, democracy is dead. That probably calls for some complex set of emojis, but in general, it does seem like we're really not doing very well when it comes to long-term planning, or planning at all, for that matter.
• Yay!!!! Robots are back!!! I really, really, really hope that this is a trend that continues through 2015 - I'm so ready to be serious, and while I love Silicon Valley, social media isn't necessarily the thing that wakes me up in the morning.
• I've never really understood activist investing, probably because I've never had the money for it. But Icahn's column was really interesting (he does sound a bit desperate for people to follow his tweets, though). Generally, the thesis was that bad management is the primary reason that a lot of companies don't perform at the level that they are capable of, and his passion is driving those bad boards and executives out. I could get behind that!
• I'm doing the personal genome project, which is about the most interesting thing I've gotten involved in for awhile; sounds like there will be more and more uses for my genes in the next couple years! In general, while Silicon Valley has been burned by biotech before, with full-genome sequencing coming down to $1,000 per person, it's possible that the field will finally transform into the data mining race so many companies have been dreaming of.
• I don't really trust bankers - they get paid too much, and as someone whose formative experience was the 2008 Financial Crisis, I tend to assume the worst. In addition, I really struggle to understand why investment banking isn't a commodity and tend to believe that the only reason it's not is because of cartel-like pricing effects. This column acknowledges all this, but then somehow seems to imply that despite these facts, banks in 2015 will become more trustworthy and less mercenary. I'll believe it when I see it.
• And again, cheers to the WLB (work-life-balance). While this column is a bit tongue-in-cheek, I really do hope that the overall themes remain true!

And anyway, hope all is well. Happy New Year, everyone!