A Survey Of One

Following interesting people

[A Survey Of One @ASurveyOfOne]

Retweeting so I can pin this.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

There has never been a more exciting time in history to be a curious person than right now

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

You're picking the person who will be with you on the worst day of your life. The day you have to bury a parent, the day the doctor calls you to give you bad news, the day you lose the job, the day your dog that you've had for 14 years doesn't come home. That's who you're choosing. And still most people date like they're casting a movie. Do they give me butterflies? Are they exciting? Is their chemistry cool?Butterflies aren't gonna matter when life punches you in the face and when that day comes, you will not care how charming they were on the first date. You'll care whether they stayed, you'll care whether they showed up, you'll care if they made the effort and they made the unbearable feel bearable. The older I get, the less I'm asking myself if I want to spend a saturday night with this person, and the more I find myself asking, do I want this person to stand next to me when my life falls apart

[Tom Zohar @TomZohar]

Dental hygienists while asking you if you did anything fun last weekend:

[James Clear @JamesClear]

I split problems into two groups: muddy puddles and leaky ceilings.

Some problems are like muddy puddles. The way to clear a muddy puddle is to leave it alone. The more you mess with it, the muddier it becomes. Many of the problems I dream up when I'm overthinking or worrying or ruminating fall into this category. Is life really falling apart or am I just in a sour mood? Is this as hard as I'm making it or do I just need to go work out? Drink some water. Go for a walk. Get some sleep. Go do something else and give the puddle time to turn clear.

Other problems are like a leaky ceiling. Ignore a small leak and it will always widen. Relationship tension that goes unaddressed. Overspending that becomes a habit. One missed workout drifting into months of inactivity. Some problems multiply when left unattended. You need to intervene now.

Are you dealing with a leak or a puddle?

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

There's a second path: go where you're uniquely suited to win. Where you're their first draft pick, not a roster player. Go where they give you more than you're qualified for as opposed to starting levels below because it's so competitive. Less sexy, but often more fulfilling.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

https://t.co/DBVkUktRK2

[A Survey Of One @ASurveyOfOne]

@lhamtil Good chart from the compound show the other day on this - https://t.co/D4OjP72oFR

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

I would add that in many high-paying industries you should be saving like your career will be over at 55. Or even 50.

[Overeducated Gibbon @MostlyMonkey]

A lot of people don't realize that if youre not in sales or management by the time you're 40, you will not have a high-paying job 10 years forward.

[Justin Su'a @Justinsua]

As a leader, it’s easy to feel like your value comes from having all the answers. But some of the best decision-makers I’ve been around don’t lead with answers, they lead with questions.

Not yes/no, surface-level ones, they ask the type of questions that make people pause, think, and reflect.

Questions like:

“What did you see?”
“What would you do differently?”
“Where do you see yourself improving?”
“What are you going to do about it?”

Asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of a leader who’s focused on helping people learn to think for themselves and become great problem solvers.

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

There’s a dynamic with aging where you’re used to the world being a certain way and struggle to adjust to change, but there’s another angle where because you’ve seen multiple regimes you’re more open to things changing than maybe a 25-year old who’s only lived through one cycle.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

Just say the thing.

"When I got to Opendoor, I would sit in meetings where everyone would act like everything was going well, but things were not going well. You could tell things were not going well by the shape of the chart."

How do you change this? You have to say the thing and say it now.

"Say it about the thing, not the person. Always say, 'This sucks,' not, 'You suck.'"

It's ok to call out stupidity.

[Ramp Capital @RampCapitalLLC]

Found the perfect chart. No notes.

[A Survey Of One @ASurveyOfOne]

@CapitanoJacko @cronometer Do it religiously for a while, find the meal prep that works for macros and anything else you want to watch (cholesterol, sodium, etc.), and then stick to that meal prep 70-80% of the time so most days are generally where you want to be.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

One of my most extreme beliefs is that if you design a faucet that is too shallow for the sink, forcing people to bump their hands against the back of the sink to wash their hands, you should be executed

You had one job. A very simple one. You failed. Time to die

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Chinese companies distilling models from the frontier labs who trained them by stealing IP from literally everyone

[Jesse Kelly @JesseKellyDC]

Still one of great historical memes ever.

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.

[Dave Kline @dklineii]

For years I delegated by gut. "Can I trust them with this?" If yes, hands off. If no, hover close. Both were wrong. I smothered good people and abandoned people who needed help. Trust wasn't the right lens. Here how to get your oversight right:

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

Periodic reminder:

One day you will be dead and nobody will remember you or your work

Try to have some fun along the way, OK?