Kara Linse Buckley

New blog post: There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’ These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently: (1) Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)? (2) Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful? (3) Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem? (4) Can we halve X risk? (5) Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs? (6) Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids? In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems? (Link to full post in reply)

Imagine the impact on Greater Boston if you all stayed in area after graduation…

I started writing a lot more because someone I respect told me they really liked my writing. If you like things, tell people. It's free.

How to build good new products at larger companies: 1. Pretend you have 0 customers and 0 distribution. 2. Think big: Imagine you have unlimited time and money, what would you build? 3. Then, think small: What can you build in 1-2 weeks. Put it in 10 user's hands. 4. Repeat until you have a seed of something obviously good. At all times, embrace throwing away code and do things that won't scale. Also, it's acceptable to do things that will piss off the people who "see like a state".

We wrapped up this year's competition circuit with a full score on the ICPC, after achieving 6th in the IOI, a gold medal at the IMO, and 2nd in the AtCoder Heuristic contest!