Curiosity, opportunities, and who are the best managers
Raz Tirboaca 
Curiosity has created more opportunities than hard work ever will
So if you’re not born into a rich family, what are the factors in obtaining wealth?
According to some studies: hard work, education, and smart investing - in this order. Wealthy people start as working or middle-class and it sounds like great news. But what exactly hard work does mean?
I mean do you know any type of work that’s easy?
A dear friend of mine is a metro driver here in Barcelona and I used to think that’s easy. You need to press 2 buttons to start and stop. Actually, it’s the same button. Until one day when she let me ride in the cabin and I could understand the psychological aspect of being underground for 6 hours while repeating the same task over and over again. You, sitting there and driving in circles for hours, while everyone around you going on with their lives. After some time it hits you hard!
Everybody works hard, yet just a few become wealthy, and I believe that curiosity is what makes all the difference.
Curiosity leads to asking lots of questions, asking questions leads to generating ideas, generating ideas leads to creating opportunities. And when those opportunities produce IP (intellectual property), then you have a real chance of becoming wealthy. Traditionally, curiosity is associated with kids, and growing up most people lose it somewhere on the way, and maybe that’s exactly the biggest mistake of our lives. You can’t be poor if you’re curious. Food for thought!
The great thing about tech is that opportunity is unlimited. There are always new problems to solve, new markets to create, new products to ship. You just need a curious mind and positive energy!
TOOLS
🍿 Someone made this IFuckingHateJira website that went viral in the last 7 days. Some opinions are funny and some are great product feedback - if I would work at Atlassian I would be 👀
It seems that by this time, Jira is getting the same amount of hate as Internet Explorer used to. Not a great place to be 🙃
🎨 Lea Verou and Chris Lilley officially release Color.js, a 2 years effort to get serious about color. It’s a library for manipulating colors in code and navigate a dev environment that’s becoming more complex each day.
Color is hard yo, I struggled with it for years until I found the ”Color for Creatives” course by Greg Gunn which I highly recommend. Greg does a perfect job to explain the color theory using paintings, movies, and illustrations as practical examples. Check it out!
In the words of Lil Wayne “Bring the crowd and I’m loud in living color”.
🧶 Interesting thread on HackerNews about the current state of frontend tooling:
“Last six months with my last employer I spent immersed in the full Next, React, Prisma ecosystem. I swear that 80% of developers’ time was wasted on fighting compatibility issues. Actual work happened in the small crevices of time left between endless stream of build breakages or chasing random bugs caused by changes in transitive dependencies. My God, never again.”
🧑🔬 The most popular machine learning frameworks used by data scientists?
Tensorflow, PyTorch, and Keras are all deep learning tools and deep learning is a very, very small part of real-world machine learning.
TEAM
🎯 Steve Jobs on recruiting people and who are the best managers
*You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors, who never ever want to be a manager. But decide they have to be a manager because nobody else is gonna do as good a job as them.*
Execution eats strategy for breakfast. During the years I worked with lots of engineering managers that came from consulting and boy, nothing got done, nothing was delivered except some presentations that nobody was paying attention to. There’s nothing like a hands-on manager!
🧗♀️ It’s not uncommon to spend too much time and effort working on the wrong things. Maybe you’re putting hours into status updates for your manager, who never actually reads them, or prioritizing a presentation’s design over the message you’re trying to relay.
HBR has 3 tips for young managers in large organizations to make their teams work smarter.
But then again, great people don’t need to be managed, and those great people are most probably the makers.
MARKET
💸 Top 10 VC firms have ownership in 38% of all unicorns. CB Insights provides a list of all of the world’s unicorns and matched it with data on their investors and industries.
According to the data, just 10 firms own 38% of all 1143 unicorns currently on the market. Accel leads the way with ownership in a staggering 67 companies valued at over $1 billion, while Tiger Global Management and Insight Partners both invested in 61 unicorns. Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most well-known names in the VC world, has ownership in 57 unicorns.
Internet software and services, fintech, and e-commerce account for over half of the total number of unicorns. The next four industries — AI, cybersecurity, health, and data management — amount to just over a quarter of the unicorns.
“Since the beginning of 2021 fintech unicorns grew by a staggering 330%, followed by internet software and services with 274% and cybersecurity with 267%.”
When you’re part of all the boards, you decide the future! For comparison, the cocoa industry is owned by just 5 brokers.
👍 Plural launches €250M entrepreneur-led fund for European tech startups. The new fund’s co-founders are Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of the international payments company Wise; Ian Hogarth, the co-founder of Songkick; Sten Tamkivi, the co-founder of Teleport; and Khaled Helioui, the former chief executive of Bigpoint.
The group aims to invest in more than 25 startups over the next 18 months, taking early-stage stakes of between €1M and €10M. If successful, Plural will enlist dozens more entrepreneurs as investors and raise bigger funds to boost the European startup sector.
“In Europe, they (traditional VCs) could not imagine investing in an outsider, a woman, an immigrant who did not have a college degree. But I did show grit and lateral thinking. You don’t have to be called Louis or Xavier or Benoit to succeed.” - Amira Yahyaoui, a Tunisian human rights activist who was for a while an illegal immigrant in Europe, now founder of Mos.com
I strongly believe that what Europe’s missing the most to compete with the US are successful founders turned investors. Traditional European investors are mostly folks coming from old rich families who are very risk-averse, and it’s hard to innovate under these circumstances. I still remember a time when seed investors were asking for >50% 😖
Thanks for reading, and see you again next Tuesday!