"If I were stranded on a desert island and could only receive updates from five websites, Commoncog would be one of them. It's that good." ☺️

Oh my god.

PSA: I've published two summaries on navigating tech bubbles in the Commoncog members forum. The first is a summary of Engines That Move Markets, which examines every tech bubble since the canals. The resulting framework helps you navigate the current bubble.

commoncog.com/how-to-use-a... I enjoyed this essay by @cedricchin.bsky.social quite a bit (which is a normal reaction for me). Super practical, super applicable, deeply rooted in humanism and compassion.

@commoncog.com.web.brid.gy by @cedricchin.bsky.social is probably the most influential resource I’ve discovered on the Internet in the last couple of years. mirekdlugosz.com/blog/2025/fo... #testing #thinking #mentalmodels #blog #software

HOW do you use AI without becoming stupid? Over the past couple of months, a small group of members on the Commoncog forums (myself included!) have been testing a universal rule for AI use in our businesses and careers. It's out today.

Sometimes I am asked “Cedric, why are you still in Singapore?” The question behind the question is: “I want to aim for a billion dollar outcome. I cannot imagine being a founder if the upside is not at least a billion dollars. Why bother with SG, when the upside is so small?”

If you attend the average founder meetup, the odds are pretty good that you’re going to meet folks who are playing a lottery game, not a business building game. The two approaches use very similar language (‘markets’, ‘demand’, ‘revenue’) but are fundamentally different.

I was back in my hometown a few weeks ago and realised that my dad was treating LLMs like he would another human. This was … bad, for reasons. So I started looking for a vaccine to inoculate him against anthropomorphising the AI apps he was using.

My old company got acquired by Ant Group a few months ago. It's funny how these events can prompt reflection. I was celebrating with my old boss, who I'd helped build the company with years back, and I realised that perhaps I'd learnt the wrong lessons from my time with him.

I want to call out an example of some remarkable thinking that I've had the privilege of observing up close. About 2 years ago, @vaughn_tan started a project to come up with better thinking around 'uncertainty'. This MIGHT be important to business! MIGHT! But I was unconvinced.

I am still waiting for a concrete example of a notetaking influencer improving their thinking through notetaking. Getting a book about notetaking published does not indicate better thinking. 😉 I don't want this tweet to be a dunk, though, so I'll list concrete alternatives.

I know folks mean well, but, uhh, if I had a dollar for every time someone brings up Wardley Maps when I talk about strategy … I’d probably be rich.

Been reflecting on this line, said in passing by a friend: “Winning doesn’t require popularity. Just results.”

Sudden realisation that ambition, on its own, is not a virtue. A simple thought experiment: would you admire a super ambitious man who took on too much debt and blew up and is now homeless?

A gentle reminder that if you want to speed up your intuition, you will do a lot better if you have an actual mental model of what expert intuition *is*. The most useful model is the one below: It gives you more handles on how to improve.

You know what's the biggest giveaway that an "we adopted AI and now our metric requests are completely solved" story is fake? There's no mention of metric definitions. And I don't mean "what is the SQL query that produced this?" but "how is this measured?"

I agree. I just wrote something for an upcoming Colossus Review that argues the same cc @patrickoshag.bsky.social

You know, sometimes I’m looking at a startup, and I think to myself “if you’re good at this business thing, you’d be making money, not raising it.” Could be old fashioned, I don’t know.

Superman is a legitimately good superhero movie. Solid A. Not A+, but hopeful. Watch it.

And if you read it backwards you have C-R-A-P

About a year ago I wrote a somewhat controversial essay titled "The Idea Maze is a Useless Idea". That essay now ranks, on Google, in the 1st or 2nd spot for "Idea Maze". It's about ... well, exactly what it says on the tin. Product Market Fit (PMF) is, in reality, a crapshoot.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me before I ran a JTBD interview process for the first time. Let’s back up: you’ve probably heard of the Jobs to be Done Framework. Typically: “customers buy for a ‘JTBD’.” But the framework excels at learning HOW your customers buy.

A gentle reminder that we've already had one 'general purpose technology that increased productivity across the board' — the PC. And in that revolution, higher productivity/speed DIDN'T result in company wins. (By company 'wins' I mean that they didn't win against their competition).

There are lots of hilarious stories from early Microsoft Office, recounted in @stevesi's memoirs. Like how the Excel team looked down on the Word team, because they thought "Word was just Excel with one cell". And then there's how background spellcheck was a killer feature ...

There are, crudely speaking, 3 ways to evaluate the skill of an Asian Tycoon. 1. How well do they hold on to political power? 2. How well do they do when the capital cycle turns? 3. Are they able to expand to polities where they have no political protection?

I never expected an essay about product market fit to be so controversial. And yet, two months on, I continue to have spirited discussions about the PMF model introduced in my summary of The Heart of Innovation. Some folks find it unnecessarily complicated.

After learning of @nayafia.bsky.social's Antimemetics book my big conclusion is that the knowledge to become data driven is mostly an antimemetic idea. It just doesn't spread!

I think one of the things that has surprised me the most about Robert Kuok is how early he was (and how eager he was!) to share equity in his holding companies with his employees. This occurred in 1957 — BEFORE Singapore had even split from Malaysia!

"ICPs are reductive"; "the situations in which a customer buys > customer traits." These resonates so much. As a CTO, I've been in so many sales calls with ICPs, without understanding their situations. Going forward, going to think about situations than just ICP metric

I believe it is actually very important to not hold opinions on things that don’t matter.

Common mistake: to think social attention leads to product market fit. In the 2010s this was mostly chasing after press coverage or startup ‘awards’. In the 2020s it’s building a following on social media and doing podcasts. Attention is always easier to earn than cash.

What makes a good salesperson good? There are many subskills, but one of the most important is ‘deal sense’. That is: “can this person tell if a deal is going to close?” Some people have uncanny deal sense. Others are absolutely hopeless. What explains the difference?

Is there a way to talk about demand WITHOUT talking about pain? Why yes, yes there is. A couple of weeks ago, I introduced a demand-side mystery. I told the story of Vanguard, and described how index funds took 15 YEARS to hit real demand. I pointed out this was ... bizarre.

An Altar in Remembrance of My Mother tasshin.com/blog/an-alta...

I solemnly swear I will not blow smoke up your ass, nor will I ever pretend that business is anything other than that which tends to the sordid. (This sounds like a joke, but really isn't; prompted by this bit in Robert Kuok's memoirs):

Yesterday, @samjataylor.bsky.social announced two new features over at Xmrit: the ability to handle seasonality AND trended data! To our knowledge, this is the first time this has been implemented in a super easy to use way. The UX was QUITE difficult to get right.

For the longest time, folks have asked me "where do I start with Commoncog's content?", and I didn't have a good answer. Until now. I'm pleased to announce ... the Commoncog Business Syllabus. 😅

Here's a mystery: for the longest time, most of us believe "demand = pain". If you solve a pain, you make a sale. Except that is NOT ALWAYS true. As a trite example: otc vitamins outprice and outsell otc painkillers by 2.5x! So ... what's going on? More context:

This is a spoiler, but Jamshetji Tata is probably the most remarkable Asian Tycoon I've ever encountered. Principled. Moral. Believed in something larger than himself. Succeeded in founding an empire. (Though ... I continue to struggle with RM Lala's writing.)

I've been going back to a lot of the 'Becoming Data Driven' series, and I can't help but think a lot of AI transformation mandates seem to lack common sense. Recall: there are three big ideas in the data driven series.

In 2004 Bob Moesta invested in a small home builder in Detroit. He told them that he would buy into the business over time, but first he would learn the business by becoming their VP of Sales and Marketing. He then doubled their homesites, and tripled their annual sales. How?

A couple of weeks back, we published a case about the rise of Dhirubhai Ambani, the founder of Reliance Industries. One of the things that I didn't expect was that commissioning and then digging into the research for that case has made me ... appreciate democracy more.

One of the things that I don't see talked about a lot in 'classical' learning research is this idea that giving clear, unambiguous feedback is great for learning in structured environments (e.g. exams!) ... but it can actually DEGRADE your ability to learn from life.

One of the curses about knowing that behavioural genetics exists is that whenever you see a study going “parents doing X results in effect Y in their kids” you immediately think “because of X or because they have genes that make them more likely to do X?”

Over the past few months we've been doing a series on Asian Conglomerates, as a way to finally conclude the Chinese Businessmen Series I started many years ago. What can we learn from how various Asian tycoons do business? How does corruption play into this? And so on ...

Hmm. Well, that’s something to aspire towards!

One of the benefits of having a community where you select for serious business people is that you can ask deep questions about business and life. I asked "What is Wisdom?" in the Commoncog forums a few days ago. I wrote this after a bit of thinking and reading responses:

When you have a long enough time horizon, a valid strategy is "I'll buy the assets off them when the company dies." Most folks don't have a long time preference. But if you do have the temperament for it, time can be an interesting competitive advantage.

Wrote up notes and will share on the forum. Now it is up the founder to pull it off…