stephenhess
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
40
Submissions
35
Member since
Jan 11
Recent submissions
Comment · 5 years ago
That's true.. though you could also look at it the other way which is that they didn't capitalize effectively enough to stay competitive with Asana. The niche is not always a safe place to hang out.
Comment · 5 years ago
As much as I love not having to see Trump on Twitter now.. the future of social media is going to be fully decentralized and distributed (whether we like it or not). The Free World will need a much better immune response to this kind of radicalization than deplatforming people.
Comment · 6 years ago
CEO is the primary but everyone in a startup needs to take responsibility for this. The core goal of a startup is to discover a "scalable and repeatable" business model.
https://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-prin...
Comment · 7 years ago
Bye!
Comment · 8 years ago
Love this. I'm as harsh of a critic of organized religion as you'll find but I think secular culture has a lot to learn in terms of how religious rituals and habits can foster human excellence, joy. And finding a way of reformulating these to be consistent with scientific thinking (i.e. throw out the mythology)
Specifically, I've been really curious to understand the relationship between faith and anxiety/depression. You see a surge of mindfulness and meditative practices in the Bay Area that appear like secular replacements for how "faith" in the Judeo-Christian tradition helps people face the unknown and the fundamental uncertainty of the universe.
Comment · 8 years ago
With you until that last part.. older populations that go through diabetes prevention / weight loss programs actually do better than younger folks. Also, "if they actually care enough to do so" is a tricky statement. Many folks that are overweight have tried losing weight numerous times only to gain it back and have leaned on confusing (and often incorrect) advice about diet, exercise and its relationship to weight loss (e.g. the food pyramid). They go through waves of motivation like anyone else. There's a good opportunity for the healthcare industry to engage with people at that level, in the way mental health professionals support people battling anxiety and depression. Would love to see more research targeted at that motivation point because I agree with you that the physiological mechanisms are pretty well understood at this point (at least in comparison).
Comment · 8 years ago
Also, non-insulin dependent which lowers the risk considerably
Comment · 8 years ago
We've known that low-calorie dieting has this effect for some time; unless I'm missing something, this looks like solid confirmation of this point but isn't adding much knew to our understanding of diabetes prevention. The big challenges in this space are adherence, scaling access to treatment and creating long-term lifestyle change that will help the patient maintain the weight that is lost.
There's good evidence that ketogenic diets have an additive metabolic effect beyond pure calorie restriction which is exciting. Virta Health is doing some interesting work here and just published some results that speak to this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-...
Comment · 10 years ago
Or.. its just a reflection of the market they're in. Understanding how much innovation opportunity is left in a market/category is a huge part of identifying whether you should continue to invest there or elsewhere.
Comment · 10 years ago
Love this but they're really not holding one of these in the Bay Area? -_-
Comment · 10 years ago
With the rise of scientific thinking, we're seeing a rapid increase in the number of folks who identify as agnostic or athiest [1]. This is natural given that the tenets of most major religions can't be tested or validated via experimental methods.
The problem though is that absent these religious ideologies, we're left with a number of core questions that secular philosophy has been unable to answer convincingly. Namely:
- Where does value stem from? What is good? What is bad? - What is the meaning or purpose of life? - Why is there something instead of nothing? What was the original cause? Was there one? - What happens after we die?
This dovetails with a number of practical issues in today's world. (1) Lots of suicide and depression. There are 30 million prescriptions of Zoloft written in the United States. Many of these folks (I assume) aren't suffering some sort of pathological illness but find themselves looking at a world that appears to be devoid of meaning when these religious frameworks break down for them (i.e. nihilism) (2) Religious extremism that manifests in sectarian violence and war.
Ultimately, secular thought (agnosticism and atheism included) is just an inferior product compared to religions. It doesn't provide out-of-the-box answers to these really hard questions and as a result can be a very scary and lonely ideology.
Relevant point: I'd love to see academic philosophy working to shore up these areas and provide folks a better, clearer framework in which they can live meaningful, enjoyable lives that doesn't require a religious framework.
http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religio...
Comment · 11 years ago
Related? http://www.alchemyapi.com/