Linked List: December 3, 2024

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

Andy Grove in 2000: ‘What I’ve Learned’ 

A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:

Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.

Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address, because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.

Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. He worked out of an 8x9-foot cubicle.

What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that many of us have spent in business before this time are of only limited relevance.

This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.

The Verge Launches a Subscription 

Nilay Patel:

So many of you like The Verge that we’ve actually gotten a shocking number of notes from people asking how they can pay to support our work. It’s no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free. We also think our big, popular homepage is a resource worth investing in. So we’re rethinking The Verge in a freemium model: our homepage, core news posts, Decoder interview transcripts, Quick Posts, Storystreams, and live blogs will remain free. We know so many of you depend on us to curate the news every day, and we’re going to stay focused on making a great homepage that’s worth checking out regularly, whether you pay us or not.

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

This sounds like an extremely well-considered balance between keeping much of the site open to all, allowing metered access to a limited number of premium articles free of charge, and creating a new sustainable revenue stream from subscribers. Bravo.

Count me in as a day one subscriber.