Here is a digest of the best links I found each week for anyone who might be interested.
Coronavirus Pandemic: the reality we live in
The First Modern Pandemic is an amazing piece from Bill Gates on covid’19, coined as the “Pandemic I”, that pits the entire humanity against the virus.
It summarizes things we know so far about the virus, the key questions to be answered, the tools that needs be built. Bill identifies global innovations in the five categories — treatments, vaccines, testing, contact tracing, and policies — as the key to limiting the damage. I cannot think of a better way than he put it: “During World War II, an amazing amount of innovation, including radar, reliable torpedoes, and code-breaking, helped end the war faster. This will be the same with the pandemic.”
One great thing that the pandemic brings in my opinion is an on-going opportunity to observe how the greatest shapers in the world react, approach and solve this unprecedented challenge humanity faces. It’s inspiring to see how they distill real information from noises, put things into perspectives, and pull off systematic efforts at such a large scale. You also got the chance to realize who has a big heart, and who are the real leaders to follow and learn from.
Meanwhile, we are also inspired to learn how one guy feeds a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship.
Talking about food security, we might see more wide-spread food insecurity around the world, according to the Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. The major factors include lost income especially for low in-come people, reduced food supply due to the limit of labor and more restricted rules for export, and even the drop in the gasoline demand, which could affect for food prices.
Disruptions: how it might be different
The Rogue Experiments (New Yorker) offers a fascinating read about ongoing efforts of community labs, which tries to demystify the drug production process and enable more people to make things outside of big institutions. If you are first time hearing this, you’d be surprised to learn that they can make things from insulin to prostheses. When we entered the 21st century, two technology showed the most promises on changing our life: computer science and bioengineering. Almost everyone now has seen how the world is reshaped by computers, but bioengineering moved much slower due to the high cost of experimentation and more strict regulations. Now, the cost is dropping, the knowledge is easy to access, and the online community is growing. How soon will we see the big shift? Will we see something similar to the open source efforts in software industry?
Tips: raise the bar for myself
FirstRound’s How to Become Insanely Well-Connected is among the best recommendations on networking I have seen. It covers a lot of insights I have learned throughout the years, but still provides some inspiring new perspectives to help me reflect on my practice.
Auren Hoffman (CEO of SafeGraph) shows you how to write a great cold email that will actually get a response. It’s such a great post. Not only it shows you how to write it, but also demos the applications (some may blow your mind) that it can help to build.
Management: the ideas for better collaboration
I spent a lot of time reading about remote work this week, which I will write separately about my learnings. Among all, I found Coinbase’s post on their post COVID-19 plan to be a remote-first company very thoughtful on both the value they see and the challenges to expect.
Here is a survey on remote team by Asana. I have talked about some of the challenges on remote work from my own observation, but the more broad stats is still beyond my expectation.