W.I.E.R.D: What I Enjoyed Reading & Discussing (week 14 2021)
Some great reads from the internet this week
Red Bull
Economists estimated that Red Bull derived $6 billion in value from the Stratos project in the form of exposure. Critically, it's a figure that will only increase in time. That is the unique benefit of owning a piece of history — anytime the event is discussed, Red Bull, implicitly, profits.
This is the genius of Red Bull. Despite making no tangible good, the Austrian firm has created an empire, manifested a distinct personality, and constructed a mythos the envy of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry.
Read on to explore:
Red Bull's working-class origins
The marketing genius of Dietrich Mateschitz
A company that makes nothing
Manufacturing history
20 Billion
Bill Hwang Had $20 Billion, Then Lost It All in Two Days
Before he lost it all—all $20 billion—Bill Hwang was the greatest trader you’d never heard of
Once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number. This is known as Goodhart’s law, and it reminds us that the human world can move once you start to measure it. Deborah Stone writes about Soviet factories and farms that were given production quotas, on which jobs and livelihoods depended. Textile factories were required to produce quantities of fabric that were specified by length, and so looms were adjusted to make long, narrow strips. Uzbek cotton pickers, judged on the weight of their harvest, would soak their cotton in water to make it heavier. Similarly, when America’s first transcontinental railroad was built, in the eighteen-sixties, companies were paid per mile of track. So a section outside Omaha, Nebraska, was laid down in a wide arc, rather than a straight line, adding several unnecessary (yet profitable) miles to the rails. The trouble arises whenever we use numerical proxies for the thing we care about. Stone quotes the environmental economist James Gustave Speth: “We tend to get what we measure, so we should measure what we want.”
UI/UX
User friction is really anything that prevents a user from accomplishing a goal in your product. I categorize user friction into a hierarchy of three levels: interaction friction, cognitive friction, and emotional friction. Interaction friction is what I hear talked about most often amongst product designers, but the higher levels of cognitive friction and emotional friction are equally important to solve for to build a great user experience.
The idea that adding pseudouridine to mRNA protected it from the body’s immune system was a basic scientific discovery with a wide range of thrilling applications. It meant that mRNA could be used to alter the functions of cells without prompting an immune system attack.
Thanks for reading through.
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