Ethics

Some thoughts on the moral implications of building habit-forming products

2019-05-11

I recently finished the book Hooked: How to build habit-forming products I challenged the author’s view on the moral permissibility of creating habit forming products here on medium (It was picked up by product coalition and selected by medium curators 🙌) and again as an interactive essay using idyll.

On Selling your Soul: Notes on Gregg Pollack's Founder's Talk

2016-08-09

If you’re going to be successful, Richard, you need to learn to be an asshole. Erlich Bachman, Silicon Valley For those of you who don’t know, I was recently accepted into Starter Studio, an Orlando-based incubator to work on University Android, a codeacademy-like program for learning Android development. Every Monday night, Starter Studio brings in successful founders to talk about things they’ve learned along the way to success. I’ve decided that throughout my time at Starter Studio, I’d like to note two big “take aways” from each founder’s talk: one business-related and one personal.…

Why I'll Probably Try to Manipulate You

2014-05-21

I became a hippie when I was a freshman in college. When I say I became a hippie, I don’t mean that I wore tie dye t-shirts all the time, smoked a lot of weed, and listened to “All you need is love” all day. I was a hippie even though I owned zero tie dye t-shirts, wasn’t cool enough to get invited to the weed parties, and had never heard that famous Beatles song that more conventional hippies love.…

Should the Idea Person get Extra Equity?

2014-04-24

As I mentioned in my last post, I have some ideas for a startup, and I’m excited to start working on them.¹ Unfortunately, doing a startup raises a lot of questions that I, as a former wannabe philosophy professor, haven’t really considered. Since its probably not a good idea to dive in to a venture that I don’t really understand, it seems like I should spend some time wrestling with what we might call “startup questions.…