February 2021 updates
Hello!
Writing
Ideas not mattering is a psyop (a collab with Stephen Malina and Leopold Aschenbrenner!):
Conventional startup and business wisdom has become “there are plenty of good ideas, all that matters is execution.” We don’t buy it.
Empirically, all our aspiring founder friends are desperate for startup ideas, with few managing to land on something worthwhile, and all our scientist friends are desperate for research ideas.
Good ideas are essential, even ones that seem obvious in retrospect were non-obvious ex ante, and in fact good execution itself depends critically on good ideas.
Miscellaneous
I interviewed Ben Kuhn and we talked about about productivity, his college experience, job choice, the value of an inside view, the EA community, and a bunch of other topics. Transcript. Video.
A regular reminder that if you do anything related to biology at all (students/postdocs/professors/randos reading pubmed in the evenings/investors/philanthropists), I would love to talk to you — alexey@guzey.com. Even if you feel like I wouldn’t be interested in talking to you! (in relation to guzey.com/how-life-sciences-actually-work and newscience.org)
I’ve been enjoying experimenting with co-working by the way of 1:1 12 hour work marathons over zoom/gather.town lately and they have been great. If this sounds exciting, let me know! Kinda feel like I should give up on trying to enter flow states when working on hard and anxiety-inducing work alone tbh. I’ll also be trying out a 4-day Ultraworking marathon in the coming days.
Quote of the month
I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot lately:
And so magazine editors who would never for a moment consider leaving their teenage daughters alone with someone like Terry Richardson continue booking him for shoots with other people's teenage daughters.
It’s from a long piece on Terry Richardson — a famous photographer who apparently forced people he shoots to perform sexual acts on him. It seems like everyone in the industry knew about this for many-many years and nobody at all cared until metoo happened. The linked piece is from 2010, big journals only stopped working with him in 2017.
Have a great March..
Cheers,
Alexey