Alex Kantrowitz book, Always Day One, is an excellent study into the top 5 Tech companies in the world: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Alex interviewed many employees and ex-employees in these companies and have done extensive research to summarize what makes these companies tick. It’s a page turner.

There are a few themes that seem to repeat in all but one company – Apple. In fact, Apple comes across as a relic in an age of innovation. Apple’s culture of secrecy, its reliant on external consultancies to build tools and provide support, and it’s deeply rooted top-down approach, sounds a lot more like IBM or GM 25 years ago than a tech company evaluated at $1.5T. So one of the first take home messages in the book: Apple is truly disfunctional.

The other 4 companies all share an interesting trait between its leaders: the engineer’s mindset. It seems that with Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai, along side the founders led companies Amazon and Facebook, the role of the leader is to facilitate ideas creation and support the engineers that actually invent. This is not a new concept. In fact, Andy Grove created Intel’s dress-down culture, a culture that was unique at the time, in order to give the engineers at Intel a voice. So the concept is not new, but all 4 leaders, according to Kantrowitz, embrace the engineer’s mindset with both arms. The engineer’s mindset can be summarized by:

• Encouraging invention from everywhere and against common believe – just because it works does not mean that you can not improve it.
• Constraint-free hierarchy – This one is taken from the chapter on Microsoft, but is also prevalent in the way that google internally does everything in the open or the feedback culture that Facebook have. Ideas should come from everywhere and everyone should be able to pitch them. Just because you are an MTS does not mean that do not have the next billion dollar ideas.
• Collaboration – this also comes up in each and every chapter (apart from the chapter on Apple). The manager’s job and the tooling are meant to facilitate collaboration. In google, using google’s tools to collaboratively create documents is an excellent example of where the culture of collaboration brings invention.

Another strong notion in the book is the drive to automate everything that is not invention. In essence, the tech giants focus a lot more on ideas and invention and a lot less on execution. Each company does things slightly differently, but apart from Apple, they all try to flip the pyramid on its head and spend time inventing and a lot less time executing. This cuts clear across warehouse workers at the Amazon fulfillment centers that are retrained to be robot mechanics to creating HR AI that scans through resumes and help recruiters identify candidates. There are of course massive implications to the ever increasing reliance on AI and automation (what do we do with an untrained workforce? Is the education system setup to teach inventors as opposed to people who execute?) but these topics are going to be addressed in another post.

Will the tech giants stay that way forever? Probably not. At their high-time, GM and IBM surely expected to be the leaders forever, but as the tide shifts and technology moves, old giants tumble and new giants are born. What is fascinating in this book is the emphasis on culture and how culture helps keep the tech giants where they are. Each of the leaders depicted in this book focused and has been very intentional on building the organization’s culture. This ties nicely to Ben Horowitz’ “What You Do is Who You Are” which also emphasizes the importance of culture in organizations large and small. In that respect the chapter on Microsoft and its current CEO, Satya Nadella, is the most interesting study on corporate culture. Nadella had to take a very broken corporate culture and turn it around completely. Given that 10 years ago, a younger me would have puked all over such statements as “the new Microsoft Office Suite works great on my Mac”, and given Microsoft’s current market evaluation, I’d say that Nadella has been very successful.

In a new article from Berlin’s excellent ESMT, Konstantin Korotov states that “What the crisis has revealed is how very dependent our work is on other people.” Initially, you want to agree with the statement, but the more you think about it, the less it makes sense.

You have been working remotely for almost 5 years now. Your experience as a remote worker taught you that you have to be extra open and welcoming and…well…nice to your colleagues and forge relationships through common projects, goals and opportunities. Physical proximity is a nice way to accelerate such bonds, but these can be done remotely just as well if you are cognizant enough to the challenges of being remote.

So now that everyone is remote, and new employees are not being physically introduced to their new colleagues by their manager, we have to collectively be more cognizant and spend the extra time to virtually meet our peers and colleagues. In fact, unlike dating, the smell of your colleagues or the way they look should play a small role on how much you like them so everyone being forced to work remotely might actually bring more teams together. The office could be saved for those team building exercises that will happen again once we can all travel again.

We will have a vaccine and we will be able to meet our colleagues again. Let’s not wait until that happens to build teams and relationships.

After only one year of riding the Velocity Blunt SLs they developed cracks.  At close investigation the cranks are only on the drive-side.  It’s never boring in Bike Land.

It’s time to replace the hoops and reconsider weight, stiffness and satisfaction.  A quick call with one of most respected wheel builders in Germany, brought forward a few options:

• Velocity Aileron. 460g, Height: 28 mm Width: 25 mm
• Stan ZTR Grail.  460g, Height: 24.5 mm Width:  24.1 mm
• H Plus Son Archetype. 470g, Height: 25 mm, Width: 23 mm

The big difference between the rims above and the Velocity Blunt SL I was using is a mere 40-50 gram as the SLs are advertised at 420 g.  I had to scratch my head and ask myself can 40 gram makes such a difference?  I also thought that an interesting option, in the same price range, would be Kirk Pacenti’s SL25.  The rims weight 450 gram, are 24.5mm wide and measure 26.0mm high.  So I contacted Kirk and asked for his opinion.  Within a few hours Kirk responded recommending the use of different spokes than the ones I used so far (Sapim CX-Ray) and pretty much assuring me that even with the style of riding the wheels endure, I should have no problems.  After all, these rims were used by Mark Beaumont to ride clear across Africa – these roads could not have been better maintained than the paths I take around here.

Kirk’s note also sent me to the Sapim website to check out some data points.  It turns out that the CX-Ray weight 272 gram for 64 pieces at 260 mm.  They are rated for strength at 1600 N/mm2.  The D-Lights come in at 307 gram while the Race model weights 363 gram.  Both D-Light and Race, however, allow for “only” 1300 N/mm2 of tension.  As the good folks at Sapim write on their web site, “high tension is always better.  The higher the tension the stiffer the wheel.”  So back to said wheel builder we go and entrust him with making the right decision on building a wheel that’s stiff, light and robust enough to cary my rather large skeleton.

So here we have it, loads of data, but the real question is still open – what wheels to build.  The discussions seems like a rabbit hole, especially since one can easily find articles such as these that dissect at great length the concept of wheel stiffness.  Decisions?  Since Kirk is such a nice guy and I am interested in trying his SL25 rims out, I’ll go with these.  This is by no mean a statement about the rest of the options.  I rode H Plus Son for a while, but they are not Tubeless compatible and suffer from the “been there” syndrome.  I rode a lot of Velocity rims and managed to kill all of them.  So it’s really time for something new.  And new, as we know…is always…better.