Hey Josh, a friend of mine - Mark Hayes - has recently started publishing on SubStack. https://markallenhayes.substack.com/ I think the two of you would have a lot to chat about!
Yesssss! Jesse Cole is my hero. Engineering brilliance. I was actually going to write about him but you covered so much. Apparently they are sold out for 3 years too. Let's get a ticket!
So good, right? You should listen to the ACQ2 episode with him if you haven’t yet. It’s really excellent. I want to try to get a ticket for the next season when they are in LA.
Thank you for the piece. There is A LOT that universities will have to think about to reinvent themselves, as families will think twice before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree which won't pay with a job later. There is a lot of charity work which experienced people will have to do to share with up and coming youngsters, as it probably won't happen within a corporate framework anymore.
Thanks Nadia. Totally agree. There is a huge opportunity right now in higher ed (and education more broadly) to rethink and reimagine what we are doing. Definitely not going to be easy, but I am energized by the possibilities for change and experimentation that I think we're going to see open up.
I'll offer a little pushback and say that the prophet-priest post made me shiver in my bones. I appreciate half the thrust- that hyperscaling, shareholder-value-paperclip-maximizing money vacuums are, on balance, bad and boring. But the last thing the world needs is another wave of corporate behemoths convinced that their work is Really Important instead of just a nice way to keep themselves amused and make something nice for people. The world's richest men got rolling making picture sharing websites and payment processors and other quotidian internet things and are now convinced that's the first step to building Dyson spheres full of their progeny- I think the conviction that starting a company is a prelude to 'addressing reality's incompleteness', while a fine gesture towards wise notions like 'do things that actually need doing for good reasons,' is exactly the sort of cult-of-personality, end-justify-mean bonkeroo reasoning that has gotten us to this particular historical cul-de-sac.
To the extent that the world needs founders and not ten thousand other classes of human being, it needs founders that are not totally unglued from perceptions of their own importance and moral priority. It needs normal-ass people that don't think that making software is opening a path to the godhead and that would feel bad about buying a 500-foot yacht and let their people take proper weekends and think that paying hefty tranches of taxes and having unionized workforces are a sensible price to pay for a nice civilization that has given them good fortune. It needs founders that stop trying to add ads and gambling and predatory payment plans to everything forever because that feels gross, and that imagine they might not have anything interesting to say on a podcast. I'll take 'founder as person with sense of proportion, humility, shame, and a sense of humor about life and their limitations' over this, the natural end point of this put-a-dent-in-the-universe business, any day.
It strikes me that sports plays an important role at college for a lot of students and operates in almost the same way as banana ball (togetherness, shared experiences).
Ask any Penn State / Ohio State grad about their alma mater and football is probably still up there!
How do we get that elsewhere in the university setting, and more importantly, how do we get that in non-sport, non-leisure parts of the culture that might support or propel the mission...
Such a fan of your thinking! Thank you for writing in public. It's a gift.
Thanks Daria!
Hey Josh, a friend of mine - Mark Hayes - has recently started publishing on SubStack. https://markallenhayes.substack.com/ I think the two of you would have a lot to chat about!
Thanks Carol Ann. I will check him out!
Yesssss! Jesse Cole is my hero. Engineering brilliance. I was actually going to write about him but you covered so much. Apparently they are sold out for 3 years too. Let's get a ticket!
So good, right? You should listen to the ACQ2 episode with him if you haven’t yet. It’s really excellent. I want to try to get a ticket for the next season when they are in LA.
I have added to listen. The World of Education can take a note from that playbook.
Thank you for the piece. There is A LOT that universities will have to think about to reinvent themselves, as families will think twice before spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree which won't pay with a job later. There is a lot of charity work which experienced people will have to do to share with up and coming youngsters, as it probably won't happen within a corporate framework anymore.
Thanks Nadia. Totally agree. There is a huge opportunity right now in higher ed (and education more broadly) to rethink and reimagine what we are doing. Definitely not going to be easy, but I am energized by the possibilities for change and experimentation that I think we're going to see open up.
I'll offer a little pushback and say that the prophet-priest post made me shiver in my bones. I appreciate half the thrust- that hyperscaling, shareholder-value-paperclip-maximizing money vacuums are, on balance, bad and boring. But the last thing the world needs is another wave of corporate behemoths convinced that their work is Really Important instead of just a nice way to keep themselves amused and make something nice for people. The world's richest men got rolling making picture sharing websites and payment processors and other quotidian internet things and are now convinced that's the first step to building Dyson spheres full of their progeny- I think the conviction that starting a company is a prelude to 'addressing reality's incompleteness', while a fine gesture towards wise notions like 'do things that actually need doing for good reasons,' is exactly the sort of cult-of-personality, end-justify-mean bonkeroo reasoning that has gotten us to this particular historical cul-de-sac.
To the extent that the world needs founders and not ten thousand other classes of human being, it needs founders that are not totally unglued from perceptions of their own importance and moral priority. It needs normal-ass people that don't think that making software is opening a path to the godhead and that would feel bad about buying a 500-foot yacht and let their people take proper weekends and think that paying hefty tranches of taxes and having unionized workforces are a sensible price to pay for a nice civilization that has given them good fortune. It needs founders that stop trying to add ads and gambling and predatory payment plans to everything forever because that feels gross, and that imagine they might not have anything interesting to say on a podcast. I'll take 'founder as person with sense of proportion, humility, shame, and a sense of humor about life and their limitations' over this, the natural end point of this put-a-dent-in-the-universe business, any day.
I used to live next door to Grayson Stadium. Jesse would walk the park it was located in (Daffin) in his full yellow tux every morning. Great guy.
But Jesse didn’t reinvent baseball. He reinvented the circus. He is PT Barnum for the modern era.
Sounds like what the folks at https://christianhalls.org are aiming to do...
It strikes me that sports plays an important role at college for a lot of students and operates in almost the same way as banana ball (togetherness, shared experiences).
Ask any Penn State / Ohio State grad about their alma mater and football is probably still up there!
How do we get that elsewhere in the university setting, and more importantly, how do we get that in non-sport, non-leisure parts of the culture that might support or propel the mission...
Great question