Once More Unto the Breach

Henry V’s new resistance: find the gap in the larger enemy’s wall, attack it under nightfall, and take the castle.

• Ethics as a Differentiator: if you prick me, do I not bleed? The number of people I know who have been damaged in some way by startups is astounding. In this case, Pinterest settles a discrimination lawsuit for $23M. Keep fighting. [TechCrunch]
• Tokenize Yourself: we are moving in the direction of a single individual as a brand, who is a “business of one”, creates content and data, and offers it for sale. “You” could be traded in the open market, and become more valuable based on how investors view the present value of your future cash flows. Friends & Family round, indeed. [bankless]
• Secure Group Calls: Signal, the most secure messaging app on the internet based on their encryption algorithms, just launched encrypted group video calling. [Signal]
• Dead Code: have a look at this video showing Tesla’s self-driving object detection bounding boxes. Somebody said something about dead code hanging around in PROD. This software holds your life in the balance and it’s not clean? Makes me nervous. [@greentheonly]
• No-Code Profits: you can earn $14,000 MRR using Bubble. No-code has a learning curve, and you give up customizations, but for middle-of-the-road products, you don’t need to raise VC or hire teams. You just need to be good at Product Management. [@martygberg]
• 3 Bucket Model: sort your features into three buckets: game changers, table stakes, and distractions. A few of the first, a handful of the next, and none of the last. [defmacro]
• Custom Tailoring, at Scale: Amazon launched ‘Made for You’, a custom t-shirt tailoring service using visual machine learning and some manual intervention. I’ll bet you they’re going to automate the entire vertically integrated supply chain and manufacturing system. At 25 bucks a pop, it’s a sharp wedge into the consumer market and a way to test space manufacturing. [Amazon]
• Experiential Activations: the group behind Basecamp is trying alternative growth hacks to get the internet’s attention for their email platform. This time by letting you send an email, watching as a machine prints it out, rolls it down a conveyor belt, and lights it on fire. [dumpster fire]

In their research users gave higher satisfaction scores to those services that attempted to show them what was happening in the background even when there was more wait time. In one of their experiments, “each participant booked the same trip through two different sites and received identical results. One site delivered the results instantly but invisibly, whereas the other took either 30 or 60 seconds but showed the labor being done. A majority preferred the transparent — and slower — site. [Noah Briar]

— Sean