The Chomp #031

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. Let’s dive into it.

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Quick Bite

• Generating Good Ideas: This is a piece I put out on Friday. You can read it on a separate page by clicking the link.

  Idea generation has many different definitions depending on who you’re talking to. For someone in the startup world, idea generation typically means coming up with an idea for a new business. For someone at a hedge fund, idea generation centers on finding new trading opportunities. For a VC, idea generation is tied to developing new thematic investment strategies. Despite differences in definition, idea generation is a critical element of success in each industry. Regardless of industry, those at the top are good at generating quality ideas. While they undoubtedly leverage the ideas of others, they build success on the backs of their own.

  

  So, how do you get good at generating ideas? Sam Altman, the former President of Y Combinator, recently wrote down some pretty sage advice. It starts with getting yourself in the right environment and being around the right type of people. As Jim Rohn once said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Going back about 170 years before that, Goethe proclaimed “tell me with whom you consort with and I will tell you who you are.” To generate good ideas, you want to be around people who are challenging the status quo. People who are optimistic and are smart in creative ways. You want to be surrounded by people who aren’t put off by improbable plans. Most importantly, you need to spend your time with people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning bad ideas—because they mention plenty of their own.

  Staying away from the wrong type of people is just as important as being around the right type. Generating good ideas will be incredibly difficult if you spend your time around naysayers. Steer clear of anyone who belittles your ambition or your ideas. These types of people are generally comfortable with the world as it is and aren’t looking to forecast the future. It’s important to note the distinction between someone who belittles your ideas and someone who challenges them. You want to be around the latter. This distinction isn’t always easy to make though—especially for ideas you’ve put a lot of time or effort into. What may be a perfectly legitimate challenge to your idea can often be mistaken as an attack. In these instances, it pays to be objective and to detach yourself from the aura of ownership around your ideas.

  The next component of generating good ideas is being able to project yourself into the future. Not six months or a year, but 5, 10, 20 years down the road. Good ideas tend to take a long time to play out. They might sound crazy when put into the reality of today, but that often means your on to something. Especially if your idea is built on the back of something that is either possible now or will be possible in the near future, but wasn’t possible last year.

  Let’s use Uber as an example here. From the founder's perspective, Uber wasn’t possible until the iPhone came along. Once it became available though, Travis Kalanick was able to project the future and saw the potential for using an iPhone app to replace taxis. Bill Gurley, who famously led the $10 Million Series A investment in Uber in 2011, was able to see this as well. After taking an Uber for the first time he quickly realized that they would one day replace cabs. That initial seed investment went on to earn him and Benchmark Capital billions of dollars.

  Seeing into the future isn’t easy though—none of us have a crystal ball. But there are plenty of tools we can use to predict it. We can map out ways that the world is currently changing around. We can look for tectonic shifts and identify what’s at the leading edge that’s causing those changes to take place. Sam Altman gives the mobile phone explosion from 2008-2012 as an example of this. Following that period there has been a tectonic shift to mobile. The people who identified the future potential of mobile devices went on to generate the ideas and businesses that have defined the past decade.

  

  Paul Graham once said that if you want to know what we’ll be doing on computers 10 years from now, go spend an afternoon walking around the computer science department at a top school like Stanford or MIT. The same idea can be extrapolated for identifying the future of other spaces as well. People who spent enough time around high school and college students over the past several years were quick to see the shift away from Facebook to Snapchat, Instagram, and Tik Tok before they went mainstream. While you may not be able to see directly into the future, there are plenty of opportunities to study the people and groups that are creating and using the tools that will define it.

  When you’ve finally fleshed out your idea, you need to test it. A good test is if you’re able to articulate why someone might think it’s a bad idea and can then give a compelling case for why it’s good. Once you’ve passed this initial test, you can start the process of validating your idea. Validation is an entirely separate beast and a topic I’ll save for another day.

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Deeper Dive

• The Observer Effect - Marc Andreeson Interview: “I’ve really read all the time since I was a little kid, it's been a lifelong thing. It's basically trying to try to fill in all the puzzle pieces for the big discrepancies. A great term is “sense-making”. Essentially, what the hell is happening, and why? The world's an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out ...is kind of a lifetime occupation.

  The thing I've tried to do the last few years is really ‘barbell’ the inputs. I basically read things that are either up to this minute or things that are timeless...” (28 Min)

  Marc Andreeson is one of the most influential people in the history of the internet. Despite his influence, he’s very good at staying out of the public eye and very rarely gives full-length interviews. So, when I saw the release of this interview last week I couldn’t wait to check it out. It certainly didn’t disappoint and is chock full of interesting tidbits.

  I found the most interesting sections of the interview to be Marc’s comments on the value of open time and reading. Allocating open time on your schedule and sticking to it is a tricky thing to do for many people. Yet, it’s incredibly important to do and Marc does an excellent job of highlighting the positive value of doing so.

  In terms of reading, Andreeson is a notoriously avid reader who consumes a lot more books than the average person. In the interview, he sheds light on how he reads so many books and how he settles on topics to explore. Rather than read one book at a time, Andreeson has a pile of books that he’s reading at once. When he sits down to read, he picks the one that’s most interesting to him at that moment. The books he picks up the most are the ones that he finishes and the others he just eventually stops reading. He shuns the notions that you need to finish every book that you start, or that you need to finish a book before you can start a new one. Not finishing a book I’ve started is a mental hurdle I’ve struggled to get over but have been working hard to overcome. There’s no point in wasting time on finishing a book just for the sake of doing so.

  The interview explores a number of other interesting topics aside from reading and time management as well. I definitely recommend checking this one out and giving the full interview a read.

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Tweet of the Week

Blake Robbins @blakeir

I think my favorite Twitter pro-tip is pasting article links into the search bar to see commentary around it. Bonus: Select "people you follow" to only see their commentary.

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

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Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• Wool has received fantastic reviews and I was excited to dive into this as my next sci-fi series. My excitement quickly faded after I made the mistake of listening to it as an audiobook. This was the worst narrated audiobook that I’ve ever listened to. The voices used by the narrator for the male characters are beyond painful to listen to. Nonetheless, I persevered through as the story itself is fantastic. Wool is an excellent tale of survival set in a dystopian future that one can easily draw parallels to with our current world. I’ll definitely continue the series and recommend this to all sci-fi fans—just make sure you avoid the audiobook version. (4/5)

• Notes from Underground was my first foray into Dostoevsky’s work. His novels are often considered to be complicated and difficult to follow for someone who hasn’t previously read him, so I settled on Notes from Underground after finding many recommendations pointing to it as the best place to start. Despite having aged more than 150 years, Dostoevsky’s social commentary in Notes from Underground is just as relevant today as it was when he penned the novella in 1684. This is a great starting point for anyone interested in exploring Dostoevsky. (5/5)

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Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• Microsoft was incorporated on June 25, 1981, six years after being founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. This took place slightly ahead of the release of the IBM PC, which soon changed their entire trajectory. (Source)

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

—  Leonardo Da Vinci

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-CM