Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
“Raise Prices” This was Marc’s response to “If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?” He’d put it right in the heart of San Francisco, and here’s the reason: “The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
Tools of Titans
Timothy Ferriss
comparisons with south-east Asia show that the significance of bureaucracies ultimately depends on the more fundamental governmental decision to force entrepreneurs to manufacture for export and then to cull firms which fail to perform adequately. Bureaucracies are only as good as the policies they implement. Above all, developing states must force their most powerful and resourceful entrepreneurs to export, typically against their will. Firms that can make money at home in a protected environment are always reluctant to compete globally. Other policies tend to be induced by this basic framework. That said, the framework was not rationalised in east Asia by policy makers, but rather copied by nineteenth-century Japan from historical example.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
The last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism, in which religions have increasingly lost their importance. If we are talking about theist religions, this is largely correct. But if we take into consideration natural-law religions, then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervour, unparalleled missionary efforts, and the bloodiest wars of religion in history. The modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism. These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise