The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
💡JC's Newsletter #66
Dear friends,
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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read.
Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!
💡The weekly must-read
Each week, I share with you a must-read which you chose.
👉 The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce (Stanford)
Shockley came up with some new ways to run a company. Shockley published their salaries. He posted them on a bulletin board. That way there would be no secrets.
Some people did it LONG before Alan 🙂
The work bays, where the transistors were produced looked like slightly sunnier versions of the garment sweatshops of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Most big ideas are non-scalable at the beginning.
NASA chose Noyce’s integrated circuits for the first computers that astronauts would use on board their spacecraft (in the Gemini program)
Noyce rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.
He recruited engineers right out of the colleges and graduate schools and gave them major responsibilities right off the bat. Noyce wanted them all to keep internalizing the company’s goals and to provide their own motivations. If they did that, they would have the capacity to make their own decisions. “But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken”
Do you know scale-ups that hire well out of school?
Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the three original eight Shockley elves still at Fairchild, decided to form their own company.
They opened up shop with a dozen bright young electrical engineers, plus a few clerical and maintenance people, and bet everything on research and product development.
They had decided to move into the most backward area of computer technology, which was data storage, or “memory”.
In 1972, thanks largely to the 1103 chip, sales were $23.4 million and the workforce numbered 1,002. In the next year sales almost tripled, to $66 million, and the workforce increased two and a half times, to 2,528.
Impressive growth, especially in terms of headcount.
At Intel, Noyce decided to eliminate the notion of levels of management altogether. The councils moved horizontally, from problem to problem. They had no vested power. They were not governing bodies but coordinating councils.
Everybody was an equal. If you were a young engineer and you had an idea you wanted to get across, you were supposed to speak up and challenge Noyce or anybody else who didn’t get it right away.
Being focused on the problem and not the organization is really what I try to push at Alan. Organizations are easier because they seem clearer but they divert us from what are the top problems we want to solve as a company.
At Intel, everyone, Noyce included, was expected to attend sessions on “the Intel Culture”. At these sessions the principles by which the company was run were spelled out and discussed. Grove would say: “How would you sum up the Intel approach.” - “At Intel, you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and you run with it.” And Grove would say, “Wrong. At Intel, you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and inflate it and score twelve points instead of six”.
Very fun ;)
🏯Building a company
In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally and with our investors every Wednesday.
👉 Alaners have A+ problems (Healthy Business)
“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.” - That is why we focus on one A+ problem until we conquer this one problem. I had recently that internal struggle in my OKRs, where the first version had many important topics for the company and me. But that was too many A+ problems, and it would have put me in a position where I am not accountable and where I’m not in a position to make us successful.
Being focused is hard and it should be. If you don’t feel the discomfort of dropping something, it means that you are not focused enough. That is why we should always challenge ourselves: are we focused enough on the right problems personally or as a group?
👉How to create a social product for the right niche community (a16z)
To go vertical, cater to a “niche” community and build all the tools/features they would need
I do think it’s ironic that when vertical networks grow up, their path to continued growth is to expand horizontally
Networks > brands
My conjecture around personal fitness is that maybe not enough people like to talk about it. Personal nutrition and weight gain/loss end up being private topics, rather than ones you’d typically share with strangers.
What makes Peloton work is really well-executed gamification. The leader board is genius. Then there’s shared content. In social, it feels like it’s very helpful to have shared content—specific gameplay, specific media, etc.
👉Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference (FS)
Our brains have a hard time intuitively understanding time, compounding, and uncertainty. All of those things conspire to work against us when it comes to habits and mental disciplines.
🗞In the news
📱Technologies
👉 Atlassian launches a whole new Trello (TechCrunch)
With significantly more than 50 million users, Trello is one of the most popular project management tools around.
The team is now adding a slew of new board views and new capabilities to the individual cards that make up those views. With a special focus on bringing more data from third-party tools right into those cards.
Trello is adding five new views to Trello (and making it easy to switch between them): team table view for tracking cross-company or cross-project work in a spreadsheet-like fashion; timeline view for managing roadblocks and making data adjustments; calendar view for tracking deadline and time-sensitive tasks; map view for users who have location-based projects; and finally dashboard view for better visualizing success metrics and building reports.
What’s also important here is that Trello plans to open this feature to third parties that may want to build their own views as well.
The team is adding over 30 new card types where, just by adding a URL that links to YouTube, Google Drive, Figma, JIRA or even other Trello boards, you’ll be able to see previews of what you linked to right inside of Trello.
Another new feature that’s coming soon — and one that the Trello community has been expecting for a while — is mirror cards, which essentially allow you to share the same card between boards.
👉 In defense of blocking on Clubhouse (Platformer)
Ultimately, I think we should support strong blocking tools for the same reason we should support strong encryption: the more that we live our lives online, the more important that private spaces become.
👉 Clubhouse Is Suggesting Users Invite Their Drug Dealers and Therapists (One Zero)
The app pressures you to upload your phone’s contacts — and makes them visible in surprising ways.
Clubhouse uses it to recommend people to follow who are already on the app, which is common practice for social apps these days. But it soon becomes apparent that Clubhouse also takes it a few steps further, in ways that are both creative and a little creepy.
Sending me push notifications every time someone from my contacts signed up so I could welcome them via private chat and “walk them in.”
Granting an app access to your contacts is ethically dicey, even if it’s an app you trust.
Tapping on the “invite” tab pulls up a list of what seems to be all the contacts in your phone whose numbers aren’t already associated with an account that has been invited to Clubhouse, [...]and who may not have even chosen to be in your phone’s address book, for that matter. Without knowing what other ways Clubhouse might be using this data, it’s hard to pinpoint the potential harms, aside from the fundamental lack of consent involved in collecting data on nonusers.
🏥 Healthcare
👉 23andMe SPAC (Kevin O’Leary)
The 23andMe SPAC was officially announced this week.
Let’s recap - revenue has dropped roughly 30% each of the last two years, going from $441 million in FY2019 to $218 million in FY 2021.
23andMe is shifting away from the consumer business, and instead focusing on driving growth by becoming a drug development partner for big pharma.
23andMe doesn’t entirely appear to be giving up on the consumer business, as they “so-launched” a consumer subscription product in October that currently has over 75k subscribers. The subscription costs $29/yr according to their website. But I’m scratching my head trying to understand what you’re subscribing to here?
💚 Alan
👉 🇫🇷 Le Jour d’Après: l’Entreprise et le Management (LCP). I was thrilled to discuss with Myriam Encaoua our corporate culture and our leadership principles, and how we want Alan to be a happy and healthy work place for Alaners.
🙍 Featured in this newsletter
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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!