Stuff I read that maybe you'd like too

I’m trying out something new: instead of sharing reading recommendations most weeks after the main post, I’m going to dedicate an entire post to recommendations whenever I feel like I have enough good stuff to share. The ruminations will resume next week. If you want to chat with other fine TFoS-readers and myself about any of these, I made a topic on the Discord forum.

⭐ The space between traditional VC-backed startups and bootstrapped/indie hacker businesses is both valuable and neglected. There’s much in this piece which describes how I feel about entrepreneurship. See also Venture capital is ripe for disruption, Rocket ships and tractors.

Another one from the department of don't-push-things-faster-than-they-should-go: Launch School, an online coding school that claims to actually use mastery-based learning. From the little I’ve read, it looks legit. Back in 2018 or so I was very excited about BloomTech (née Lambda School) until my wife enrolled and we discovered that the teaching quality was not in fact anything special (and they certainly didn't use mastery-based learning). Though to be fair, at least we never had to pay them anything.

Former Waze CEO on the frustrations of working at Google. “I was the naive start-up leader believing that I can build out Waze within Google to its full potential and conquer the beast.” See also The maze is in the mouse.

Which tech companies are the most evil? “[Facebook] doesn’t attract enough criticism for the fact that its core business is inducing people to compulsively waste their time.” Not sure I’d say that makes it evil, but that does happen to be my core beef with the main social media platforms (and what I'm trying to fix with Yakread).

A profile of the guy who invented blog advertising. See also It’s time for the media to embrace self-service native advertising, and of course my own post from last week, Help me sponsor your newsletter.

Did Medium succeed? My conclusion from working on The Sample was that the most important and challenging business problem in this space is aggregating reader attention. And if you're going after that, everything else is a distraction. (Sounds like a Ben Thompson-esque idea).

“Misinformation” is too simplistic of a term to fully describe what’s actually happening.