Also fun fact, the robot companies are usually contracted and dealing with the food service providers to the college than to the college themselves.

My favorite was the one that made words blink.

I typed things into Notepad, meticulously tabbing and aligning the little tags to make sure it's okay.

Next year I stumbled upon a Taiwanese website somehow, with a call to action for submissions to their design contest.

I made something and sent it. For some miracle I won. They called my jr. high school for it too for some reason and got confused when I answered thinking I was a student in a fancy college in the Americas.

For the award ceremony my mom had to go accept. She was on the way home grocery shopping and didn't understand what the Internet or World Wide Web was. They congratulated her with her shopping bags in hand.

What a wild 30 years to the whole world getting connected.

I think the grind from Windows CE to Windows Phone is just a blip to them for now.

Google can't change for now, in doing so they undermine all the AdWords accounts, the real customers to Google, paying six figures to stay on top of SERPs.

But the other competitors can and will.

So it goes

Services, and their sales team, are still Microsoft's strong point.

Apple seeing its services grow and is leaning in on it now.

The question is whether Apple eats services faster than Microsoft eats into hardware.

An engineering friend of mine has documented and labeled every aspect of his vacation rental in Hawaii.

The only thing is, it's styled the same as the 1980s terminal systems he worked on down to the embossed black tape labels that gets attached to every switch, knob, and dial.

Treat your house like a black box.

So yeah, you niched down to say creators and IRL tasks, tossed in some sense of community activism.

Well, this is an example of how it really is about ideas and not just execution to reach success.

This is a great idea. Who hadn't thought of some utopian altruism in the middle of a global crisis?

But it's not a good idea. Because you don't have the means to get traction because it's a two sided platform play that without critical mass will not lead to further utility. And because it's merely but a singular use case out of multiple for the larger entrenched competitor.

You need more usage to even build your way into success and you don't have usage because... while this is a great idea it's not a good idea.

But now we're here.

You want to know what to do?

1. Highlight user stories.

Find the most interesting one, make content, share. Segment on a morning infotainment news? Blog articles on guest writing platforms? Sappy robot voice TikTok videos? Reddit?

2. Quit and add this to your portfolio.

Your friends and families don't want to be spammed with this. Don't be weird about it.

2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!

2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.

Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.

This new silicon valley era is weird.

It's a small world, prior military experience gets you far since everyone would rather pull someone up like that, not necessarily just the tech.

Job Corps is a training program for 16-24 year olds as an alternative or supplement to high school or college. Your first touch to this would typically be your high school guidance counselor. Your second touch might be your community college counselor. Your other pathway might be through your parole officer.

It's free. It's listed multiple times on the website.

They learn welding, manufacturing, automative tech, construction, hospitality, healthcare, and the best one is probably forestry. It's listed multiple places on the website.

How long is typically 1 to 3 year stints.

Job Corps centers are located in almost every major city in almost every state. It's a government program since the 1960's. There's an entire program finder on the website.

How you feel about safe spaces will be analogous about how you feel of design thinking. A lot of consultants cashed in on this trend to sell all kinds of stupid things. That's also what he's talking about.

Now with new generation coming in, empathy is by default. Therefore, if you really think about it, design thinking is fizzling out because it's now the standard.

Then when I started leading the design thinking sessions all I can think of is how silly all this is. When we went remote during covid, introducing in virtual whiteboards like Miro and Figma, made the rituals and ceremonies more tolerable and more importantly actionable.

After all this time weaving through Stanford where this all went down, the corporate war rooms all over, settling down now, ultimately I think it just comes down to this: design thinking is really just empathetically solving problems rather than apathetically solving problems (as in working off requirement documents or best practices or protocols or just because you're told what to do).

All the little ceremonies and rituals is inclusivity of everyone to empathize and feel good about each other, and consider things from additional POVs. Which back then at the tail end of Gen-Y transition into the workforce was needed. Now you talk to the Gen-Z workforce about using empathy at work more and they'll just go: facts.

My mom didn’t ask about it until after the first year.

So to answer your question… maybe it doesn’t take to be the top 1% of something.

Now I learned ideas and execution are minimum requirement, good execution is common, great execution is hard, good ideas are hard, great ideas aren’t worth it.

Starting with a good idea can save you plenty of opportunity cost, money and tears; but many can’t explain nor tell apart what a good idea really is.

Then you have the metaphorical sand trap of great ideas. Don’t get stuck in those.

And, finally, it doesn’t even matter if it’s good ideas nor good execution, if people don’t know your story nor are they willing to retell your story then none of this matters in the market.