BLUF:
I'm going to write two types of posts:
Frameworks: High-level posts on the “why”.
Applications: Applying a framework to understand the “what”.
I will link the frameworks and applications posts. I'd love to get your feedback and start a discussion on each of these so I can refine them.
Why? I’ve been doing this in my personal notes for years now, and I’d like to internalize it. You only truly know something if you can teach it to someone else. So I’d like to try that :)
Frequency? I'm shooting for at least one post every two weeks. I’ll probably end up doing more.
I walk through a lot of this life abstracting what I see into frameworks.
Maybe I do this because of my training as an engineer. Abstraction is the lens through which we view the world and the end result of our craft.
Maybe I do this because of my time as a founder. When you run a company, you are forced to make decisions with little information. The only thing that guided us were the frameworks our Y Combinator* partners gave us and those we co-created with other founders in our batch and adapted to the customers we served.
Maybe I do this because now I'm at Harvard Business School* and I simply have the time. One of the top reasons I came here was to get better at framework-level thinking, and more data through cases so I could pull out the why. And some of my professors, namely Jeffery Bussgang, Andy Wu, and (the late) Clayton Christensen, have been tremendously valuable in helping me do that.
I have shared a lot of these frameworks over time with those who have asked, so I thought I'd write them down. At the very least, so I don't have to keep saying the same thing. But also so that others can benefit from the work that I have already done.
*=plug for SEO, but both are very true. I often find that the best critical thinkers are incredible at framework-level thinking. And that is equally true in YC as it is at HBS (even though the fmr community seems to hate the latter, which has always been quite curious to me).
Why does this matter?
How much money would you pay to see the future?
When I think about the ultimate list of superpowers, every single superhero has a different one but none of them - not even Superman - has this.
Frameworks give you that power.
A good framework doesn't apply only to some companies or people and not to others. It doesn't apply to some contexts and not others. It is a general statement of what causes what and why.
It may have parameters and constraints that can be well defined and specified. But with it, you can understand what is happening and predict the future.
People often (especially PMs) (not a dig on PMs I have been one) think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car by looking only in the rearview mirror.
Data is only available about the past. You have to ask the question of why instead of just pattern matching on the what.
If you pattern matched on the what, you would say that feathers are the reason things fly. But if you put in the work to figure out why, you would discover Bernoulli’s principle, the property of lift. And with that "why," you can build an airplane instead of continuing to put feathers on your back.
A lot of founders get this wrong. A lot of PMs get this wrong. And a lot of people in general get this wrong because it is easy to say "let's get more data" but it is hard to do the thinking behind "why are these things happening".
This is why theory can be so valuable - it can explain what will happen before you experience it.
Cool. So what are you doing to write?
The BLUF section, but enhanced.
I'm going to write two types of posts:
Frameworks: High-level posts on the “why”.
Applications: Applying a framework to understand the “what”.
I will link the frameworks and applications posts that apply to each other.
Why? I’ve been doing this in my personal notes for awhile, but I’d like to internalize it. They say you only truly know something if you can teach it to someone else. So I’m forcing myself to write to an audience.
Frequency? I'm shooting for at least one post every two weeks.
My ask – please comment on the posts! I wish I could hear are your internal thoughts as you read what I write. The best comments are first-party thought, unprocessed, at the moment you hear it rattle off in your mind. This is better because I can refine my writing to speak to first-principles thoughts.
To that end I will
Put an absurd amount of “Leave a Comment” buttons. Certain sections of writing engender thoughts that I want you to share immediately, as you read.
Anyone will be able to comment, including people who don't subscribe.
Hope you enjoy :)
Btw, I think of prompt engineering as this too.
The best "prompt engineers"* are framework-level thinkers who can write out a process that is generally abstracted.
*Prompt engineering is just writing the right questions, and anyone is capable of doing that, so I'd replace that fancy term with just "people"