Category: Articles
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Selection is king (for marketplace businesses)
Back in late 2018, I remember my jaw dropping when I read the following headline in the New York Times: Netflix Will Keep ‘Friends’ Through Next Year in a $100 Million Agreement. Netflix paid a reported $100 million for the rights to stream a television show for only one year! The (perceived) craziness did not…
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How to write an effective work email
Writing effective emails is a superpower in the workplace. An effective email can make the difference in getting your proposal accepted, key question answered, or idea to stick. After writing thousands of emails, I have learned how to distill a work email to the essentials. Over the years, I developed a five step checklist for…
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How to inspire teams with TAM
Total Addressable Market, or TAM, is a term used to describe the market opportunity for a product or service. There are a few definitions, but I like to think of TAM as the global market for x in a given year, where x is whatever category a product or service is in. For example, Coca-Cola…
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Context, understanding, and memory
A couple years ago, I read On the Shortness of Life, a letter by the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger. While the gist of Seneca’s writing was clear, many references he made were lost on me and I found the whole thing to be quite dry. What I didn’t realize at the time is that if I…
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Throwing darts with a Monte Carlo simulation
Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently tweeted out an interesting problem. I didn’t know how to solve it mathematically, so I wanted to build a simulation in R. Here’s the problem: I like to visualize things, so I decided to simulate throwing 8 darts on a board first, then simulate the dart throwing model many times using…