Notes of a Contrarian Strategist. Episode 40 is live! Today’s topics: Most Traditional Business Metrics Tell Only Part of the Story People in Hollywood are wiser than those in Silicon Valley A childish generation Read more in my latest newsletter: sbiryulin.com/blog/notes-of-…

You can judge human rationality by this: a founder’s story about “believing in the dream” always gets more attention than statistics showing 9 out of 10 startups fail.

Want to understand optimism? Just look at AI enthusiasts hoping to build superintelligence… …by training it on content from social media.

It’s not as funny as it sounds. I’ve seen such strategies — and I’ve seen strategic goals passed off as strategy.

Three immutable laws of marketing: 1. The customer must see value in the product. 2. The customer wants to feel part of a community. 3. “20% off until the end of the week” works better than both — and many other laws, for that matter.

Fixing customer problems only when they complain to tech support is like going to a marriage counselor after the divorce.

The faster AI catches up to human intelligence, the closer we get to the day when robots start trolling people on social media.

Doing strategy once a year is like quitting bad habits just for a week and expecting to get healthy.

Entering a market without a unique product is like joining a lookalike contest—you might even win, but people will keep mistaking you for someone else.

If your strategy doesn’t work, you can always blame your customers. Picture source: CartoonStock

If someone inherits wealth, attends a top university, makes the right connections, works hard, and builds a successful business, by the time they start giving interviews about their success, all they’ll remember is how hard they worked.

Good CEOs See the Distant Future. Great Ones Master the Near Term Two ideas and one simple tool for razor-sharp future thinking open.substack.com/pub/svyatoslav…

The first reviews of Apple’s “liquid glass” design got me thinking: Steve Jobs is long gone, but his “customers don’t get a vote” energy lives on. Picture credit – unknown author