Links of the Week
Talent - on the different meanings of ‘top talent’ in different corporate cultures (Toyota vs Goldman Sachs vs Stripe for instance). Highly recommended! (Link)
Finally, different models of talent partly explain the differences between McKinsey and Silicon Valley cultures. The former is highly quantified, favors tightly-coordinated teams of overachievers, and encourages a competitive zero-sum talent environment (A-players are a fixed percentile of the overall pool, and if you’re not in, you’re out). The latter skews more qualitative, favors lone “creative genius” archetypes, and has a positive-sum approach to talent (linchpins could be lurking anywhere, and we surely haven’t uncovered them all).
Japan - On the extremely interesting trend of abandoned houses in the countryside available for sale in Japan. You could have a house in Japan for as low as $25000! (Link)
Municipalities across Japan are also compiling listings of vacant houses for sale or rent. Known as “akiya banks,” they are often bare-bones web pages with a few underwhelming photos. Some have partnered with private-sector companies like At Home, which currently lists akiya in 658 of Japan’s 1,741 municipalities.
Science - Extremely interesting article on the rise of fertility tech startups. With birth rates in a continuous decline in a number of advanced economies, technology may have to step up to avoid a scenario of population collapse. (Link)
A hundred years ago, many Americans died in their mid-fifties. Today, we can expect to live into our seventies and eighties. In the U.S., as in many other countries, women give birth for the first time at older ages than they did several decades ago, but the age at which women lose their fertility has not budged: by forty-five, a person’s chances of having a pregnancy without assisted reproductive technology are exceedingly low.
And here’s another article about a couple trying to fight anti-natalism and trying to shift the narrative on having babies.
Travel - Katherine Dee goes to Saudi Arabia to travel alone as a woman (with justified trepidation) and comes back with some surprising findings. (Link)
But, she added, if I wanted to learn about the social scene in Riyadh, online meet-up groups were a good place to start—and if I spent enough time there, the city would start opening up to me. She asked if we had those in the United States, and I said yes, but they were seen as a last resort. The kind of people who use meetup.com are usually a little awkward. She said it isn’t the same in Riyadh: “It’s good for immigrants.” She also recommended I check out the Snapchat map to see where people are hanging out.
Housing Policy - What could other cities learn from Vienna’s successful low-cost housing which has endured for decades? (Link)
Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.
China - On the absolutely bat-shit crazy culture at Temu, Pinduoduo’s online marketplace giving Shein a run for its money. (Link)
Under Abu’s leadership, executives at Temu such as (nicknames) “Winter jujube” (冬枣) and “Grape” (葡萄) work hard every day. Unless there are exceptional circumstances, Abu appears at her desk promptly at 8 am every morning and works tirelessly until midnight.
Continuing the flat management style of Pinduoduo, the entire team’s management is only three levels. Abu is the first level, “Winter jujube” and “Grape” are the second level, and the category managers are the third level, and everything below is the lower-level employee.
In order to better tap into employees’ proactiveness, Temu strictly implements a “horse racing” mechanism internally, with fierce competition. Temu will assign the same project to different teams to execute, and judge the abilities of each team based on the final results, with losers being eliminated.
AI - Might AI usher in a new age of ever smaller unicorns? (Link)
Like lean startups, startups born in the AI era will start small. They will use open source and cloud computing to get off the ground quickly and iterate. But thanks to AI, they will stay smaller for much longer, and the most successful of them will achieve staggering scale with only a handful of employees. Stories like Instagram (13 employees, acquired for $1B) and WhatsApp (35 engineers supported 450 million users at the time of its $16B acquisition) will become more common. Perhaps we’ll even see companies with fewer than 100 employees go public.
Happy reading!