Business

Remember the last time you saw a commercial for a Tomato, or Rice or Beans by themselves? The reason these commercials don’t exist is that fruits, vegetables and whole grains are a commodity product that don’t need to be sold as part of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. A McDonald’s Happy Meal has something that is technically called food, but in practice is “food like”, and includes a toy to encourage addiction.

A good question for a CTO or CIO is to determine if they can afford to trust SaaS in the era of GenAI. Why? Many SaaS vendors often cheap or free services, but may later changes the TOS (Terms of Service) to sell the data to GenAI companies. Further if eventually deep learning approach turns out to be too expensive this data trove could be leaked as organizations can no longer afford to keep the data.

Organic Technology The general public widely knows the concept of negative externalities in the broader scope of capitalism; a great example is a factory that sells products but emits black soot into the air, hurting people’s health in their neighborhoods. A negative externality is a cost to a third party from consuming a product. One example is the recent case of PCB, or polychlorinated biphenyl, pollution by Monsanto in Anniston, Alabama, beginning in 1929.

Disruption is always easy to spot in hindsight. How did paying one million dollars for a taxi medallion make sense as a mechanism to facilitate public taxi service? File:CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO 1996 -TAXI MEDALLION SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSEPLATE - Flickr - woody1778a.jpg What were the problems that companies like Lyft and Uber solved? Lower price Push vs. Pull (Driver comes to you) Predictable service Habit building feedback loop Async by design Digital vs analog Non-linear workflow Current State of Higher Education That Will Be Disrupted A similar disruption is underway with education.

We live in a new era. It is possible to start a business with a laptop and an internet connection. As a long time consultant and entrepreneur, I have come up with a framework that works for me. When evaluating who to work with and what project to work on, I think of PPEAR or “pear”. P(Passive) P(Positive) E(Exponential) A(Autonomy) R(Rule of 25%) Passive Does this action lead to passive income: books, products, investments?