Longreads + Open Thread

Longreads

• Neal Stephenson, who coined the term "metaverse," has some thoughts on the alleged death of the metaverse. Stephenson's writing has been very influential for tech, and have been for a long time—so he's getting questions about the implementation and business case for a technology he was writing about thirty years ago. Stephenson notes that one of the tricky parts of virtual reality is the hardware—not in the sense of having the capability to create three-dimensional graphics, but the more prosaic problem that people don't like to wear VR goggles and they really don't like it when strangers might be recording them using augmented reality glasses. So there's a social/technological bottleneck: the looking-at-a-rectangle experience can actually be a bit worse than the fully immersive one, as long as people don't think they look dorky or creepy while experiencing it.
• Alex Karp reminisces about meeting with Jürgen Habermas, who declined to advise him on his thesis. It's always interesting to see how people's political views correlate with their everyday behavior. Habermas was a great advocate of democracy, trusting institutions, and universal values. He was also apparently comfortable with a strictly hierarchical social structure like academia. This isn't necessarily hypocritical—plenty of people have enough self-awareness to advocate for norms that protect them from their own worst impulses.
• Gaurav Ahuja interviews Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, whose life seems optimized around having a Wikipedia page that looks like it's a confabulation of a few different people with the same name: "Do you mean Nicholas Thompson, the marathon runner?" "Or maybe the guy who got kidnapped by Moroccan drug dealers?" "No, I mean the media executive." He's an example of a mostly-missing archetype: journalist-turned-executive. You'd think that journalists have the combination of breadth (lots of different assignments) and depth (get the story at all costs) that would make an effective CEO.
• The indispensable Jerry Neumann on how conventional wisdom for startups crystalized. In a way, there shouldn't be such a thing as conventional wisdom for startups—if what they were doing were conventional, they'd already exist, and there wouldn't be room for a startup. But the startup canon resonates for a reason: it's a reaction to whatever biases potential founders might have at a given time. So it doesn't age well, not because it's wrong, but because it emphasizes the wrong things. The article points out that the survival rate for startups hasn't budged over time, but if risk aversion dominates the decision to start a company, then better access to conventional wisdom would just mean that more people start companies until they're back to the same risk level. That model is compatible with the thesis of this piece, and also reinforces it: if there are more people entering the startup world, the tyranny of the marginal user takes hold and they get more and more average over time.
• Bloomberg's Apple whisperer, Mark Gurman, profiles John Ternus, who is likely to be Apple's next CEO. Succession is tricky at Apple, as evidenced by how different its various CEOs have been—and by the fact that the Jobs/Sculley transition, from one great marketer to another, was a lot harder than the Jobs/Cook switch to a supply chain expert. Apple has different business units that are quite complementary and well-integrated, but they do very different things. It's probably safest to have a hardware executive in charge for a while; whatever else Apple has gotten right, the hardware is the part they have to get right.
• Whoever likes writing Dune fanfiction questions for the Diff ReadHaus bot is back at it, asking about how to handle a temporary liquidity crisis for a business that is otherwise long-term profitable. And the answer to this question is: you consider that possibility in advance, because it's extremely hard to raise emergency capital unless someone who has access to capital has already established that you have a spiky mix of personality traits that leads to high expected value but too much leverage to survive long enough to realize it. In the very long run, the world belongs to people who always had a little more backup liquidity than they thought they needed.
• In this week's Capital Gains, we look at whether the dollar's reserve status causes the deficit or the other way around. Currencies have strange network effects, and they reach counterintuitive equilibria.

Books

Hands: A fun example of Early YouTube is the Jon Lajoie infomercial parody, "hands" (not-safe-for-work). It's pretty easy to ignore hands; the last time you found them fascinating was either when you were six months old or while on psychedelics. But if you really want to appreciate hands, all you need to do is talk to someone who works in any sufficiently labor-intensive industry. The cost of assembling a smartphone hits an asymptote defined by how many steps in the process still require human touch; the e-commerce fulfillment center network in any given area is limited based on how many hands each year belong to people who are finishing high school and not planning to move on to college.

The book's author, John Napier, originally worked as a surgeon at the University of London before switching to primatology. He also exemplifies the stiff-upper-lip ideal to an almost comical degree; at one early point in the book, he illustrates the dexterity of the human hand by telling a story about a patient who arrived at the emergency room bleeding profusely from the main artery in her thigh. He's able to stop the bleeding by pinching the artery shut. And he notes that, a few hours later, she died. But he did get a kick out of his handiwork regardless. A bit later he talks about learning fascinating details about how the parts of the hand connect from failed skin grafts which weakened their grips. The more you know!

In a way, we're all avid students of the science of hands. Hands are the product of millions of years of evolution, and tens of thousands of years of coevolution with tool use. One way to think about it is that we operate tools with a limited number of inputs, and that most of the bits of information you transmit about how you want the tools you use to affect the world are transmitted through your hands; if you're driving, you get send the car a little guidance through the pedals, and you might occasionally give a voice command to your entertainment system, but most of the incremental bits come from the steering wheel.

Evolution didn't have our purposes in mind; it was just blindly selecting for a slightly different set of use cases, and ended up giving us what we have today. But that selection means that hands are hard to reimplement in artificial contexts; you can redesign a manufacturing process around replacing different hand functions with automated ones, but so far we don't have a general purpose mechanical tool that's equally good at using a computer keyboard, piano keyboard, can opener, and hammer.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• I’m interested in hearing about what’s happening in logistics, especially drone delivery. Who should I talk to? What should I read? 

Diff Jobs

Companies in the Diff network are actively looking for talent. See a sampling of current open roles below:

• Ex-Anduril, Ex-Abnormal Security, Ex-Bridgewater, fast growing startup providing agentic cybersecurity to the long tail via MSPs is looking for platform and machine learning engineers. Startup experience preferred; what matters most is that you've grown in scope and handled ambiguity over the last few years. (SF)
• A Google Ventures-backed startup founded by SpaceX engineers that’s building data infrastructure and tooling to accelerate product development for hardware companies is looking for a deployment strategist to ensure that the platform creates maximum value for customers with sophisticated engineering organizations across aerospace, transportation, renewable energy, and more. (LA, Hybrid)
• High-growth startup building dev tools that help highly technical organizations autonomously test and debug complex codebases is looking for forward deployed engineers who want  to dive into customers’ complex software systems, find pressing business needs and deploy a cutting edge platform to help thoroughly test mission-critical applications. Experience with fuzzing or property-based testing a plus! (SF, London, D.C.)
• Series-A defense tech company that’s redefining logistics superiority with AI is looking for a MLE to build and deploy models that eliminate weeks of Excel work for the Special Forces. If you want to turn complex logistics systems into parametric models, fit them using Bayesian inference, and optimize logistics decision-making with gradient descent, this is for you. Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, MLOps (Kubernetes, MLflow), and cloud infrastructure experience preferred. (Salt Lake City or NYC)
• A hyper-growth startup that’s turning the fastest growing unicorns’ sales and marketing data into revenue (driven $XXXM incremental customer revenue the last year alone) is looking for a senior/staff-level software engineer with a track record of building large, performant distributed systems and owning customer delivery at high velocity. Experience with AI agents, orchestration frameworks, and contributing to open source AI a plus. (NYC)

Even if you don't see an exact match for your skills and interests right now, we're happy to talk early so we can let you know if a good opportunity comes up.

If you’re at a company that's looking for talent, we should talk! Diff Jobs works with companies across fintech, hard tech, consumer software, enterprise software, and other areas—any company where finding unusually effective people is a top priority.