70 years ago, my father fled his ancestral village in Bangladesh and became a refugee at the age of 10. This year, I became a C-suite executive at a Fortune 500 company, leading data and AI/ML for Opendoor. The American Dream is real, but it isn’t quite what you think it is.
Grasshopper: “What’s the secret?”
Master: “The secret is that there is no secret — you just have to work harder than everyone else.”
It’s actually very simple. If you work 10% harder every day, how far ahead are you at the end of the year? Hint: It’s not 10%.
1,283,305,580,313,390 vs. 1 — The 10% Rule
Four years ago, I walked away from Amazon and a million dollars — thousands of stock options. I was a twenty-something kid running a billion-dollar team but I wanted more.
We don’t need a Facebook for dogs and we don’t need a 300th link shortener.
Non-profit folks sometimes tease me about techies building useless stuff. (I’m the token techie at a lot of conferences.) But really, non-profits aren’t much better. So often, we just put in bandaids.
How long did it take us to find a malaria vaccine? We’re so close. Mosquito nets are great, but what if we’d really taken a chance and thrown our weight behind a vaccine earlier?