These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

Lighting strikes twice but you can’t choose to repeat history I started reading Chris Dixon’s book and had a strong immediate reaction. I’m thoroughly unconvicted by its arguments even though I agree with the premise. The very concept of web3 delivering on the early promises of web2 is based on finding and improving on what made the early Internet powerful. Cargo cult technology and business choices might find something by accident, but the current Internet is in every way more powerful than the Internet of the past.

I read the book cover to cover in 2 days. While I found it interesting, it wasn’t a good story with a strong narrative. It was clearly a stitched-together collection of his research notes that didn’t make sense as a column. It suffered from a lack of detail around everything except the engineering, which was disappointing because it could have been a much stronger customer relationship and business management story if written from a slightly different perspective.

I really wanted to like this book, but I didn’t. It succeeds in theory and fails in practice due to the overwhelming evidence organized against it. It viciously and repeatedly attacks the same issues to the point of exhaustion and provides levels of details that are not only unnecessary but sometimes misleading. The worst part is that the first 252 pages of ranting aren’t wrong, but they are so unnecessary as to explain the cause and symptoms of the system.

I was expecting this to be a dissection of the American Healthcare industrial-complex, but instead, this was the story of the ACA (Obamacare) with just enough industry explanation to understand the new regulations. The interesting part was then how the sausage got made and the politics that continue to shape health care policy, and by proxy the hospital and insurance market. Because I learned so much background that was easily digestible in narrative form, I’d give this a B.

I finished this book and thought it was a great set of arguments that address a very toxic, now well publicized, aspect of Silicon Valley, and by connection young software and startup companies today. I didn’t have a good review of it other than to agree with it and to outline my own related experiences in this industry. What’s pushing me now to write this review is another negative review that takes the whole book out of context to try to justify the prevailing culture.

I took this out of Mert’s collection on his recommendation, and while I liked the thoroughness, it over complicates a simple message with business metaphors. I’d simplify that message to Get passionate people to ruthlessly iterate on your problem. Once that was outlined, the rest of the book was repetitive with increasingly convoluted examples. As a business book, this puts it only a little above the average, so I’d give it a C+.