johnny won - human

I help tech, startups and ad agencies make stuff in NYC. Products, strategies and wonderful things.

[wonific]

We pay people a lot of money, and we expect them to tell us what to do. When that’s your attitude, you shouldn’t run off and do things if people don’t all feel good about them. I can’t remember a time when I said ‘Damn it, I’m the CEO and we’re doing it this way.

Steve Jobs

MIT Sloan 1992

[wonific]

Progression of Crypto

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(via Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella looks for three traits in leaders — Quartz at Work)

Satya continues to just be incredibly impressive. 

Attribute #1: The ability to create clarity when none exists. 

Attribute #2: A knack for sparking energy. 

Attribute #3: An ability to succeed in “an over-constrained space”

[wonific]

I left my hotel room this morning to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, and saw part of a man standing in the hallway. His feet were on a ladder. The rest of him was somewhere in the ceiling. I introduced myself, and asked what he was doing. Along with satisfying my natural curiosity, it seemed a good way to delay my appointment with gravity, which I was in no hurry to keep. His name is Corey Mundle….We quickly got to talking. “Well, Mike, here’s the problem,” he said. “My pipe has a crack in it, and now my hot water is leaking into my laundry room. I’ve got to turn off my water, replace my old pipe, and get my new one installed before my customers notice there’s a problem.” I asked if he needed a hand, and he told me the job wasn’t dirty enough. We laughed, and Corey asked if he could have a quick photo. I said sure, assuming he’d return the favor. He asked why I wanted a photo of him, and I said it was because I liked his choice of pronouns. “I like the way you talk about your work,” I said. “It’s not ‘the’ hot water, it’s ‘MY’ hot water. It’s not ‘the’ laundry room, it’s ‘MY’ laundry room. It’s not ‘a’ new pipe, it’s ‘MY’ new pipe. Most people don’t talk like that about their work. Most people don’t own it.” Corey shrugged and said, “This is not ‘a’ job; this is ‘MY’ job. I’m glad to have it, and I take pride in everything I do.” He didn’t know it, but Corey’s words made my job a little easier that day. Because three hours later, when I was trying to work up the courage to leap out of a perfectly good airplane, I wasn’t thinking about pulling the ripcord on the parachute—I was thinking about pulling MY ripcord. On MY parachute.

Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs

https://hbr.org/2018/07/creating-a-purpose-driven-organization

[wonific]

The Future of Online Security

William Hugh Murray has a few provocative thoughts:

Abandon the password for all but trivial applications. Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous mobile computer have lowered the cost and improved the convenience of strong authentication enough to overcome all arguments against it.

Abandon the flat network. Secure and trusted communication now trump ease of any-to-any communication.

Move traffic monitoring from encouraged to essential.

Establish and maintain end-to-end encryption for all applications. Think TLS, VPNs, VLANs and physically segmented networks. Software Defined Networks put this within the budget of most enterprises.

Abandon the convenient but dangerously permissive default access control rule of “read/write/execute” in favor of restrictive “read/execute-only” or even better, “Least privilege.” Least privilege is expensive to administer but it is effective. Our current strategy of “ship low-quality early/patch late” is proving to be ineffective and more expensive in maintenance and breaches than we could ever have imagined.

When the Internet was born, everything was real. Every person behind every webpage was a person. Today, we’re so far removed from that, I think a layperson cannot begin to fathom the amount of bots and phantom activities that exist to make the web as it is today. The darker corners of the web in security, advertising, data-mining have practices that are rampant with fakery. 

So a part of the excitement around blockchain could be attributed to our collective disgust of the bots and fraud in the web today but this suggests it’s less about the blockchain but more of a collective desire to find a sense of security. 

I then have to start imaging a future where there are multiple layers of verifiable security in exchange for the most authentic of authentic experiences. 

[wonific]

Top: Reforge

Bottom: Flurry 

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Walking Backwards Into the Future: Analyzing 15 Years of Y-3 - History Of Y 3

Dry Clean Only is your destination for fashion, streetwear, and the best of what Grailed has to offer.

Rejected by Nike first. Ouch

OG LEGEND

[wonific]

Taking money off the table

Fred Wilson’s wisdom:

Taking money off the table is smart portfolio management. It is very different from selling your entire position, which could be brilliant but is equally likely to be a mistake. Selling a portion of your position, returning a multiple or two (or eight) of the fund, and holding on to the balance works out for you no matter which way the position goes in the future. If the position blows up, you got a lot out and booked a huge gain. If the position goes up significantly, you make even more money on the part of the investment you retained. If it goes sideway, you got a little bit out early. It is a win/win/win pretty much every way you look at it.

Which takes me to crypto (naturally). If you are sitting on 20x, 50x, 100x your money on a crypto investment, it would not be a mistake to sell 10%, 20% or even 30% of your position. Selling 25% of your position on an investment that is up 50x is booking a 12.5x on the entire investment, while allowing you to keep 75% of it going. I know that many crypto holders think that selling anything is a mistake. And it might be. Or it might not be. You just don’t know.

[wonific]

Warren Buffett, the billionaire chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., said he rates businesses on their ability to raise prices and sometimes doesn’t even consider the people in charge.

Bloomberg

A perfect test. 

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Future Shock author Alvin Toffler saw the problem back in 1970, when he coined the term “information overload.” “Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation,” he wrote, “the ‘mind’ and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded.” Fellow futurist Ben Bagdikian expressed similar concerns, writing that “the disparity between the capacity of machines and the capacity of the human nervous system” results in “individual and social consequences that are already causing us problems, and will cause even more in the future.”

Wired

“Information overload” is an effective tactic of information warfare. 

[wonific]

There’s lots of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are, and remember what’s really important to us. That’s what is going to keep Apple Apple, if we keep us us.

Steve Jobs

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I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you’re brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you’re still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.

Steve Schwarzman

Bloomberg

[wonific]

Why Advertising Urgently Needs More Weird. (Or, the Dark Side of Agency Culture)

Creative brilliance and weirdness go hand-in-hand -- sadly for our ever-increasingly corporatized ad agency industry.

In ad agencies, culture is the new religion -- as in the Marxist sense of "the opium of the masses." It's a tool to regulate behavior -- which is directly in opposition to diversity. The entire point of diversity is to ensure differing behaviors and viewpoints.

[wonific]

Amazon has been quietly building out its ad business, and ad buyers say the company is looking to appeal to a wider set of brands

Pencil this in. 

[wonific]

(via Will Amazon Kill FedEx?)

You should aspire to work at a company that let’s you make GIFs like this and get paid money for it. Also, yet another crazy Amazon story. 

[wonific]

This sounds bizarre but I’m buying an iPhone SE. I know, this sounds crazy but it’s fucking art. 

I am currently rocking out with the iPhone 6s+ but I will buy the iPhone SE and put it on my bookshelf as that greatest iteration of what the original iPhone was designed to do. I don’t think I could give up the glorious screen on the 6s+. 

The iPhone SE is worth buying (for me at least) because there was a time before the massive screens, before there was LTE, before streaming everything was something, the idea of a smartphone was a massive Steve Jobsonian idea that touch would work and that something simple with two (!) buttons could outperform every phone in the world. That was the original idea of the iPhone and it’s evolved into it’s end with the iPhone SE. 

With brisk sales of the iPhone 6′s 4.7 inch screen size, I imagine Apple will continue to flagship the iPhone 7 at 4.7″ along with the plus sized 5.5″ but I would bet that Apple continues on with the smaller 4 inch since there is some demand to it. With a unified design language at iPhone 7 or 8, I think we’re at the end of the original Jobsonian vision since it has been a decade from the original R&D of the iPhone in 2006 and we’re well past what the original iPhone was dreamed to do. 

Apple’s future is incredibly bright and I am eagerly awaiting to buy the future Watch, iPhone and other toys but an original vision has lasted a decade and we’re still just getting started with smartphones reshaping media, wearables, augmented reality, banking, mobility and dozens of other fields. 

Bits of glass fused with chunks of metal has changed the course of history and I can think of nothing more beautiful than the original concept going full #Jobs. 

h/t The Best is the Last

[wonific]

Efficiency may be the right priority when times are difficult and resources are scarce but creativity is the right priority in a time of plenty. And abundance is what being big is all about.

asymco

A perfectly constructed sentence on creativity. The beancounters will lose when management prioritizes not profit but delight.

Apple has singularly shown to this generation of customers and industry titans it’s not about profits per se, but the mathematically quantifiable numbers behind acquisition, retention and satisfaction of customers.