My wife was saying that giving my daughter a head bath did not have enough RoI because she was going swimming anyways.

And sure enough, my daughter who is the consummate questioner asked “What is RoI?”

Well, first I had to explain what an investment was to a 4 year old.

What is an investment?

Essentially, It’s something you do today so you can get something nicer later. Often its something you do not really want to do. But then I realised, sometimes the today’s stuff can actually be quite nice. So it’s not quite the same as delayed gratification.

I believe startups are best built by high agency individuals focussed on a joint goal.

Why? The nature of a startup typically involves:

1. A market opportunity - a problem faced by some set of people that is not being solved at scale.
2. A non-obvious solution - although the founders are typically in a place where the solution seems somewhat obvious to them.

That means often the path to take is not exactly clear and the primary thing that determines a startups success is the rate of experimentation.

One of Homo Sapiens’ most powerful skills is our ability to work together and strategize on a larger scale than any other animal. It is believed that this is what helped us edge out our other hominid competitors.

Why are we able to collaborate better than other animals?

It seems we have a unique ability to communicate abstract concepts using specialized language centers in our cerebral cortex. We are able to communicate concepts like possibilities, flow of time. For example “yesterday there was a lion near the river, and I saw it go near the mountain. It is possible you might encounter it near the hill today” vs “lion near river, dont go”. This way we can share more nuanced information and benefit from each other’s knowledge and coordinate better at greater distances and at a larger scale.