Sunday Review: The City That Handled The Pandemic Well

Posted on by Congxing Cai

Here is a digest of the best links each week for anyone who might be interested.

The Pandemic: the reality we live in

Wired reviewed why San Francisco handled the onset so well:

  • The history of fighting HIV/AIDS has transformed SF to be more open, compassionate, science curious and become an international center of medical talents;
  • The city mayor has direct control of the health department, and the health department has direct access to the mayor;
  • The local political and community leaders trust the experts and made decisive decisions at early stage of the pandemic;
  • The tech companies responded quickly to the city’s decision and ordered their employees work from home early on. This had both the effect of hurdling the transmission of virus and a greater cultural effect for other companies;
  • The support of political leaders unleashed the innovation power of tech community and significantly improve the testing and contact tracking infrastructure needed to combat the pandemic without the regulation constraints that are dragging the country broadly;
  • The city’s attentions to poor community and homeless people also helped to prevent the large outburst among communities that are most vulnerable to the pandemic.

For many of us, who might be doomscrolling all day, it’s important to see that things can and have been done quite differently and in a much better way.

Disruptions: how it might be different

  • The modern chicken is fully industrialised. It started with the corn industry seeing the opportunity of spurring the demand for meat chicken in the 40s. “Over the past 70 years, the poultry industry has measured its success in terms of how many pounds of meat a chicken can produce for a given amount of feed.” This brings us one highly optimized breed, a specialised cross between a Cornish and a white rock, for almost all of our receipts. The breed was chosen for its large breasts, white feathers, fast and efficient growth, consistent sizes and gentle dispositions. It’s hard to imagine the life those chicken endured. It’s even more scary to think about what we will do to ourselves once we know how to genetically modify human.
  • While we might feel that we have seen enough innovation on digital screens, there are indeed lots of them that haven’t happened yet.

Insights: raise the bar for ourselves

Predicting election is hard, if not impossible. I have been following FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 election forecast’s work for not only their conclusions, but the data they used to build their models, their methodology to derive those forecasts, the assumptions they made and the remain uncertainty of their predictions.

I like their focus on providing context about their models and innovating on the visuals that best explain the forecasts. After reading all their updates, you don’t arrive at a better prediction. But you understand better the uncertainty between now and the election.

FiveThirtyEight’s work shines as a great example for all data science projects, for which the goals should not be defending the conclusions but helping everyone understand better the uncertainty behind the model and data.

Leadership: the ideas for better collaboration

Co-founder, often referred in the metaphor as marriage in business, is hard to find and choose. It’s widely recognized as one of the two challenges for startup success besides finding product and market fit. Here is a business model canvas that can be used to find a cofounder. I like the straightforward question it suggests to ask “do I have a company without this person?”

The Founder Dating Playbook offers a more detailed process to find the cofounder:

  1. search for potential candidates through broad network and recommendations instead of immediate social circles;
  2. identify overlaps and common interests through initial conversations;
  3. dive into exploring more specific ideas and identifying fit;
  4. fill-out a more thorough cofounder questionnaire to evaluate the match;
  5. commit to work together or part away.

It’s important to have that direct conversations on the viabilities to work together. And, stay as best friends over time.

Regarding to the equity split, which might be the most common but hard question for founding teams, it’s recommended to split it near equally among cofounders. Here is a brief ~5 minutes YC video introduction on the topic.

Well, after all, it does sound like marriage.

Economy: the science hidden among fallacies

The stock market is still creating new highs, while the economy is suffering. The big techs are good companies, but their share prices seems too high. If you are currently resisting the urge to change your investment strategy to chase the growth, read Issac Newton’s story 300 years ago. Even the genius could fail to calculate the madness of the stock market.

Here is New York Times’s explanation of the assumptions that might support today’s record market:

  • everything will get better in 12 or 18 months;
  • the bigger will get bigger during the crisis;
  • a vaccine will be available soon;
  • stock market is the only choice for investing right now;
  • the government won’t let it fall;

It looks suspicious to me if any of these sounds like a truism.