💡JCNews #1
La première newsletter
Chaque semaine, je vais partager avec vous quelques articles ou livres que j’ai trouvés enrichissants. J’espère qu’ils vous aideront autant qu’ils m’ont aidé. Nous allons parler de tech, d'entrepreneuriat, de santé et de développement personnel.
Certains articles sont en français, la plupart sont en anglais. Ils ne sont pas tous récents et vont au rythme de mes lectures.
Construire une entreprise
Ce vieil article de 2006 de Paul Graham doit être lu. Il traite de comment être marginal permet de gagner. Mes passages préférés :
If you’re an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite.
One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted blocks of time.
Take any project usually done by multiple people and try to do it all yourself.
Instead of working on things the eminent have made prestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.
Both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster.
Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things.
Try hacking something together. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn’t solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. But that’s ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the thing itself, but what it leads to.
J’ai particulièrement aimé ce podcast du Tim Ferriss Show (une transcription écrite est également disponible), où deux investisseurs (Mike Maples Jr, co-fondateur et partner de Floodgate, et Andy Rachleff, co-fondateur et chairman de Wealthfront) discutent du Product Market Fit, des avantages d’être non-consensuel ou encore des différences entre éduquer et vendre à son marché. Mes passages préférés sont :
Product market fit is when you have proven the value hypothesis. So the value hypothesis is the what, the who, and the how: What are you going to build? For whom is it relevant? The how’s the business model.
The only way to know that you have product market fit is if you get word of mouth. The other heuristic is net promoter score, which is a proxy for word of mouth.
The second biggest mistake that I see entrepreneurs make, especially in enterprise, is that when they pitch a potential customer on the idea, and the potential customer doesn’t like the idea, then they try to iterate on the product to build something the customer would want. By definition, that’s righting consensus, so it’s going to lead to a mundane outcome. That’s the absolute wrong thing to do, even though that feels right. So you want to go find people who actually love what you’re doing, not try to convince the nos and turn them into yeses.
Now if you ask five people in the street about your idea, which might be a killer idea, at least four out of the five of them should say they don’t like it because they haven’t been conditioned to like it.
The path to greatness is to be non-consensus and right.
Comment organiser son équipe produit à chaque phase de la vie de sa start-up ? C’est la question à laquelle répond Nikhyl Singhal dans cet article détaillant les erreurs à ne pas faire, le rôle du fondateur ou encore le rôle du Product Manager pour chacune des quatres phases qu’identifie Singhal (Phase 1: “Drunken Walk”, Phase 2: “Product/Market fit”, Phase 3: “Hypergrowth”, Phase 4: “Scale”). Mes passages préférés sont :
As the team scales, each employee begins to lose context on the product and the customers. PMs are responsible for closing that gap
Bias towards active communication here. A company can’t hope all relevant info will passively trickle down.
Hypergrowth is about scaling the core business and expanding your offerings simultaneously. Accomplishing both is insanely challenging. And it’s exponentially more difficult to pull it off amidst a sea of new employees, customers and increased expectations.
L’intégrité dans la construction d’un produit est primordiale (SVPG). Mes passages préférés sont :
You’re expected to try and figure out a solution that works for the customer and works for your business.
While that’s not always possible, you are expected to have the necessary knowledge and understanding of the business, and the ability to come up with creative solutions to tough problems.
Do sufficient product discovery to reasonably consider the risks of value, usability, feasibility and viability.
Always acting in the best interests of the company
A willingness to take responsibility for mistakes.
Je n’étais en revanche pas d’accord avec “What you ship must actually work - solve the problem for the customer and/or the business."
Santé
Google Health a publié une étude dans la revue Nature et affirme désormais mieux détecter les cancers du sein que les médecins grâce à l’IA (Wall Street Journal): L’utilisation d’une Intelligence Artificielle nourrie et entraînée par des milliers de mammographies a permis de réduire les faux positifs de 5.7% et les faux négatifs de 9.4% sur les patientes américaines.
Développement personnel
Qu’avez-vous appris en 2020 ? Cet article Medium est excellent. Mes trois choses favorites :
People hate asking sensitive questions. However, it turns out that people don’t hate being asked sensitive questions.
The goal of walking 10,000 steps per day may have originated when a Japanese pedometer manufacturer noticed that the 万 symbol (which means 10,000) looks a little like someone walking. The actual health merits of that number has never been validated by research.
Asking ‘What questions do you have for me?’ can be dramatically more effective than ‘Any questions?’ at the end of a talk.
Depuis plus de 6 ans, je pousse tout le monde autour de moi à supprimer leur notifications. Cet article sur Medium explique comment faire : How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You.
Les publications d’Alan
Deux excellents épisodes de notre podcast sur la culture : Les humains, la méthode et l’écrit et la transparence et l’autonomie.
Livres
Mes livres préférés que j’ai lu en 2019 :
A lire absolument: What You Do is Who You Are, The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth, Steve Jobs, Netflixed, Who is Michael Ovitz?
Bonnes lectures : Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, First, Break All the Rules, Remote: Office Not Required
Pour le plaisir : Le Maître et Marguerite (The Master and Margarita), Americanah, Ishmael.
Merci à tous, je vous souhaite une excellente semaine !