A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE

So you had a great idea. It might be a fun weekend challenge, a side project, or a business idea. Maybe it’ll even be the next billion dollar company. Now you need a name. And the name has to convey so much!

There’s no secret formula to coming up with a name, and a lot of what I’m about to write is subjective. None of this is a guarantee for a good name or a strict playbook to follow.

And if you think the strength of a brand is entirely unrelated to the name, try to imagine Apple’s brand conveying…

You might have heard about the rare “10x engineer” recently. But you probably haven’t heard of the even rarer 1,000,000,000x engineer (or 1Bx engineer for short).

Sometimes referred to as “unicorngineers,” this type of engineer will significantly increase a company’s odds of achieving implosive growth and unicorn status.

Here are some steps you need to take if you want to 1Bx your productivity as an engineer and become one.

1. Set your desktop wallpaper to pure blackness.

The best way to start your journey toward becoming a 1Bx engineer is by creating a daily reminder of your newfound focus on improving your output by 1Bx. You don’t need…

Reinventing things is the lifeblood of Silicon Valley: shopping, space travel, transportation, currency—the list goes on.

But you might not expect email to make that list.

A few months ago, a hot new startup started generating buzz around their mission of disrupting email … and paying you 30 dollars a month for the pleasure? Subhuman’s mission is to fundamentally change our relationship to one of the oldest forms of digital communication.

Look down at your keyboard. It’s one of the biggest keys on there, and I’d be willing to bet that you don’t use it very often. At its best, it’s stylistic fuel for enthusiastic internet comments.

At its worst, it’s a waste of precious space, an annoyance, a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist any more, and an unnecessary holdover from a time when typewriters were the bleeding edge of consumer technology.

Dearest Caps Lock, your time has come and gone. Go quietly.

WHY DOES IT EVEN EXIST?

The QWERTY keyboard debuted in 1873 on a typewriter that could only produce capital letters. A…

The human brain is the most complicated object in the universe. It’s also the only one that got to pick its own name, which is pretty cool.

It’s your body’s operating system. It takes care of everything from making sure you don’t die in your sleep to navigating awkward social situations.

We think of people as bodies and faces, but really, everything that makes us more than just piles of skin and bones is inside that weird little clump of jelly swishing around in our skulls.

The brain is endlessly fascinating and complex and beautiful, and we haven’t even begun…

Screens connect us to our closest friends and strangers. They let us experience other people’s stories and tell people ours. Screens are how we work, play, create, and talk to each other. They bridge gaps in knowledge, time, and space. Screens are windows into other worlds and canvases we fill with the brushstrokes of our lives.

But they’re going to die.

You’re about to witness a revolution. Google and Facebook amass staggering amounts of money by harvesting your data and charging advertisers for your attention, but that’s going to change very soon.

The power is about to shift from the tech giants of Silicon Valley to the foot soldiers of the internet: me and you.

The internet is broken

“The system is failing.” — Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the web) on how digital advertising is ruining the web.

Advertising has become the most common way to monetize free content on the internet today. The system used to be simple, with advertisers, users, and publishers. …

Google made almost all its money from ads. It was a booming business—until it wasn’t. Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.

The crumbling of Google’s cornerstone

Back when Google was still just an idea, its founders thought that “advertising funded search engines [would] be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

They changed their minds.

With that change, Google became one of the wealthiest, most powerful companies in history. Search was Google’s golden goose, as well as its only unambiguous win. …