Sprezzatura ([sprettsaˈtuːra]) is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".[2] Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura See Renaissance Man (more)

Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American science fiction short story writer and novelist.[1] He wrote 45 novels[2] and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines.[3] His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness.[4][5] He is considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century science fiction. Born in Chicago, Dick moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with his family at a young age. He began publishing science fiction stories in 1952, at age 23. He found little commercial success[7] until his alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) earned him acclaim, including a Hugo Award for Best Novel, when he was 33.[8] He followed with science fiction novels such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) (basis of Bladerunner) and Ubik (1969). His 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (the novel is parodied as The Android Cried Me a River in Dick's later novel VALIS) won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick (more)

Diamond Age junkie; product manager https://x.com/startuployalist | https://www.bushrafarooqui.com/ | https://www.linkedin.com/in/bushra-farooqui-3b60639a/

The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations, book by Joe Pine ISBN:979-8892791373

Category Pirates: Stop Teaching, Start Transforming: Meet The AI That Turns Your Ideas Into Life Breakthroughs. Fast. Most people think they have a knowledge problem. (more)

1978 Essay by Philip K Dick (more)

Bending Spoons has filed to go public. Excerpts from their F-1 (S-1 for foreign companies): (more)

Olivia Moore: Bending Spoons just filed to go public - and their F-1 (foreign-company S-1) is full of lessons for builders. Their model is unique - they acquire businesses (ex. Eventbrite, AOL, Evernote, Vimeo) and rebuild the product + marketing. They've grown to $1.3B in annual revenue...which is accelerating at scale!. (2026-06-08) Bending Spoons F-1 (more)

There's no typical series of Start Up growth stages. (more)

a very interesting business metric

Matt Zeigler: Joe Pine is a Framework Alchemist. Do you know Joe Pine? He's the author of The Experience Economy and The Transformation Economy, a Strategic Horizons advisor, and one of the most thoughtful observers of how value actually gets created in the modern economy. (more)

Logistics is the part of supply chain management that deals with the efficient forward and reverse flow of goods, services, and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption according to the needs of customers,[2][3] and a logistician is a professional working in the field of logistics management. Logistics management is a component that holds the supply chain together.[3] The resources managed in logistics include physical goods such as materials, equipment, and foodstuffs, and also intangible items such as time and information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistics (more)

A hostile takeover allows a bidder to take over a target company whose management is unwilling to agree to a merger or takeover. (M-and-A) The party who initiates a hostile takeover bid approaches the shareholders directly, as opposed to seeking approval from officers or directors of the company.[3] A takeover is considered hostile if the target company's board rejects the offer, and if the bidder continues to pursue it, or the bidder makes the offer directly after having announced its firm intention to make an offer. Development of the hostile takeover is attributed to Louis Wolfson.[4] An SEC working paper tracking hostile takeovers from 1965 to 2013 found that such deals accounted for about 40% of total M&A activity in the late 1960s but declined to around 5% by 2013, making them a small share of overall takeover activity by the 2000s.[5][a] Additionally, a study of M&A transactions from 1990-2005 found that approximately 24% of hostile takeovers succeed.

In finance, a high-yield bond (non-investment-grade bond, speculative-grade bond, or junk bond) is a bond that is rated below investment grade by credit rating agencies. These bonds have a higher risk of default or other adverse credit events but offer higher yields than investment-grade bonds to compensate for the increased risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-yield_debt (more)

Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. was an American multinational investment bank that was forced into bankruptcy in 1990 due to its involvement in illegal activities in the junk bond market, driven by senior executive Mike Milken. At its height, it was a Bulge Bracket bank, as the fifth-largest investment bank in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexel_Burnham_Lambert

Apollo Global Management, Inc. is an American asset management firm that primarily invests in alternative assets.[2][3][1] As of 2025, the company had $840 billion of assets under management, including $392 billion invested in credit, including mezzanine capital, hedge funds, non-performing loans, and collateralized loan obligations, $99 billion invested in [[private equity], and $46.2 billion invested in real assets, which includes real estate and infrastructure. The company invests money on behalf of pension funds, financial endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, as well as other institutional and individual investors.[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Global_Management (more)

Simon Willison: My review of Claude Code Interpreter, released under a very confusing name. Today on the Anthropic blog: Claude can now create and edit files: (more)

video streaming platform

Jonny Miller: The Best Decision-Making Is Emotional. In my work as an executive coach... (more)

For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 FaceBook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves... The effect the study documents is very small, as little as one-tenth of a percent of an observed change... when researchers reduced the appearance of either positive or negative sentiments in people’s News Feeds—when the feeds just got generally less emotional—those people stopped writing so many words on Facebook... Susan Fiske had earlier conveyed to The Atlantic that the experiment was IRB-approved. “I was concerned,” Fiske told The Atlantic on Saturday, “until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time.” (more)