Hi, this is an issue of my monthly newsletter. I’ve picked a few interesting articles on technology, startups, growth, marketing and other topics for you.
I hope you enjoy the read with your morning cup of coffee. Let me know what you think! ~Max
Technology and Startups
- The State of Artificial Intelligence in 2018: A Good Old Fashioned Report.
- Learning Dexterity (3-min video). Open AI trained a robot to manipulate physical objects. Plus, the NYT article on the same subject.
- How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs? A person who is 40 is 2.1x as likely to found a successful startup as a person who is 25. The average founder who had a successful exit through an IPO or an acquisition is 46.7 years old. (Kellogg)
- Amazon’s Facial Recognition Wrongly Identifies 28 Lawmakers, A.C.L.U. Says. ACLU used Amazon face recognition software, trained the model on a mugshot database and applied it to pictures of US congressmen. This led to some false positives — 28 members of Congress were identified as people who were arrested. The high false positive rate was mostly due to the low confidence threshold (80%) and the biased training set but the point that this technology can be misused is well taken. (NYT)
Growth and Marketing
- 19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace. A short read and practical advice.
- Intercom on growth. The new book by Intercom that provides a high-level overview of all key growth drivers — from acquisition to retention. (Intercom)
- On writing for deprecation. How to announce feature deprecation: be clear, be compassionate, communicate early and provide a path forward. (Slack)
- DAU/MAU is an important metric to measure engagement, but here’s where it fails. Andrew Chen on when to focus on daily/monthly active users and when not to.