Great Work, and Building Better Relationships

My favorite article I read this week was Great Work by Paul Graham. I also got to spend some time with my Dad, and see how important long lasting relationships are to people.

Articles

Great Work
“if you were going to take a break from "serious" work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do?”

I won’t talk about this too much. However, it’s about figuring out what to do. It’s hard, and that it is supposed to be.

One more line that stuck with me; “The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.“

Read this until the end if it speaks to you.

3D printing industry gripped by intrigue, litigation and churn

Two weeks ago I got to visit a 3D printing facility. It was the coolest experience I’ve had in a while. Seeing Industrial Scale 3D printing was amazing and captured my imagination.

However, the industry is coming on slower than anticipated and this article talks about how Acquisition is now happening in the industry to help it get fit. Consolidation will create economies of scale and turn this into a more predictable industrial machine.

Interestingly enough, one company is trading below its cash balance. Which means that the market thinks that it is more of a headache than it is worth. Maybe my judgement is off, but this seems like a mistake.

Lessons

Take a wander
This last week I had the opportunity to go to Italy with my Dad. Every time I had the opportunity to take an adventure, I did it. Not once was it a bad idea. Maybe the lesson is always say yes, but that can get you in some bad corners. Instead Just take a wander.

Everything is about Relationships
I found that as you develop relationships with more people, more things appear. The longer your friendships, the more valuable. The longer you’ve worked with someone, the better.

Snowflake

Snowflake builds a secure managed data cloud that solves an old problem, data siloes. Data Siloes happen when data isn’t accessible across an enterprise. Snowflake actually runs on top of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud Platform

Snowflake helps enterprises get more value out of their data, faster and at a lower cost. As the value of data increases and more organisations switch, Snowflake will continue to be a winner.

Snowflake competes in one of the fastest growing and most important industries globally, Data. They primarily compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and also run their platform on top of theirs. So they are vulnerable, if those companies build a competitor that is of the same quality.

Another risk Snowflake must examine, has to do with Security. They must be absolutely bulletproof, because of the value of the data they sit on. Any hacks would be devastating to the company.

Snowflake does however sit on a goldmine. It is the layer that sits between companies and all of their data. That means that it can be the layer enterprise software companies use to build AI bots. The next generation AI stack will involve Snowflake.

What’s interesting about Snowflake is that they are really good at finding enterprise buyers, and their average contract value increases. Companies figure out new use cases all the time, and see that the more data they add the more value they get.