A lil life update! I quit my job at Google and moved to Rwanda for a few months!
I’m going to be working at @AmpersandMotor1 building motorbikes and charging infra for motorcycle taxi drivers
Let’s hold our grief then turn to curiosity 💓
From @ezraklein: “It does mean taking seriously the world people are experiencing so you know how to respond to that world”
I hope everyone heard Ezra Klein make such an important point today about the self-sabotaging dynamics of exclusivity and ostracism that have dominated left-leaning culture in recent years when he brought up Bernie Sanders's appearance on Joe Rogan:
"But it wasn't always like that on Rogan's podcast. It wasn't that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview and then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. And you know what happened after that? Many liberals were furious at Bernie Sanders for going on Rogan in the first place. I was still on Twitter back then and I wrote about how of course Bernie Sanders was right to be there. That the fact that Sanders could attract people like Rogan was one of the very best arguments for his campaign. One of the reasons he might be able to beat someone like Donald Trump. This was 2020. If you wanted to beat Trump, of course you'd try to win over Rogan and his voters. But online liberals got so pissed at me for that it was briefly a trending topic on Twitter. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not the kind of person you wanted to talk to, but if these last years have proven anything, it's that you don't get to choose who is marginalized."
The startup built out all of that without a preexisting blueprint. The decisions they made around charging station operations, business model design, etc were fascinating to see.
I’m back in SF after working in Rwanda for a few months! A few reflections….
I was surprised by how fascinating it was to work at a startup in an emerging market. Software startups in NA/Europe aim to find an niche problem that isn’t solved + someone will pay for.
The work felt more creative because you need to build out the entire value chain from scratch. There’s no playbook and no charging, maintenance, or policy infrastructure.
it’s super cool seeing the payments infra in Rwanda and how much you can do without a smart phone 🤯
Every business (and person) has a phone code for payments and you can input the amount to pay (by dialing a number) + your pin
A lil life update! I quit my job at Google and moved to Rwanda for a few months!
I’m going to be working at @AmpersandMotor1 building motorbikes and charging infra for motorcycle taxi drivers
@ZadaianchukML @AmpersandMotor1 Thank you!! And yeah, it’s super cool to be a part of a solution that I literally use everyday to get around while I’m here
Fascinating seeing lessons from the Chinese public charging infra rollout (where the majority are operated by the monopoly utilities). High deployment, highest number of EVs of any country, easy to use, and yet it’s incredibly hard to pencil.
https://t.co/1s54kMxE8n
We see tech and more broadly, progress, as inevitable. It’s interesting seeing how that creates a crazy rush to integrate ai any way we can into our work, products, and lives
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy