Category: What I’m Reading

  • Dexcom non-prescription glucose monitor approved

    Cheap and accurate continuous glucose monitoring is a bit of a holy grail for consumer metabolic health as it allows people to understand how their diet and exercise impact their blood sugar levels, which can vary from person to person.

    It’s also a holy grail for diabetes care as making sure blood sugar levels are neither too high nor too low is critical for health (too low and you can pass out or risk seizure or coma; too high and you risk diabetic neuropathy, kidney disease, and cardiovascular problems). For Type I diabetics and severe Type II diabetics, it’s also vital for dosing insulin.

    Because insulin dosing needs to be done just right, I was always under the impression that one of two things would happen along the way to producing a cheap continuous glucose monitor, either:

    1. The FDA would be hesitant to approve a device that wasn’t highly accurate to avoid the risk of a consumer using the reading to mis-dose insulin OR
    2. The device makers (like Dexcom) would be hesitant to create an accurate enough glucose monitor that it might cannibalize their highly profitable prescription glucose monitoring business

    As a result, I was pleasantly surprised that Dexcom’s over-the-counter Stelo continuous glucose monitor was approved by the FDA. It remains to be seen what the price will be and what level of information the Stelo will share with the customer, but I view this as a positive development and (at least for now) tip my hat to both the FDA and Dexcom here.

    (Thanks to Erin Brodwin from Axios for sharing the news on X)


  • “Corporate” Design

    Read an introspective piece by famed ex-Frog Design leader Robert Fabricant about the state of the design industry and the unease that he says many of his peers are feeling. While I disagree with some of the concerns he lays out around AI / diversity being the drivers of this unease, he makes a strong case for how this is a natural pendulum swing after years of seeing “Chief Design Officers” and design innovation groups added to many corporate giants.

    I’ve had the privilege of working with very strong designers. This has helped me appreciate the value of design thinking as something that goes far beyond “making things pretty” and believe, wholeheartedly, that it’s something that should be more broadly adopted.

    At the same time, it’s also not a surprise to me that during a time of layoffs and cost cutting, a design function which has become a little “spoiled” in the past years and of which calculating financial returns is experiencing some painful transition especially for creative-minded designers who struggle with that ROI evolution.

    If Phase 1 was getting companies to recognize that design thinking is needed, Phase 2 will be the space learning how to measure, communicate, and optimize what the value of a team of seasoned designers brings to the bottom line.


  • Costco Love

    Nice piece in the Economist about how Costco’s model of operational simplicity leads to a unique position in modern retail: beloved by customers, investors, AND workers:

    • sell fewer things ➡️
    • get better prices from suppliers & less inventory needed ➡️
    • lower costs for customers ➡️
    • more customers & more willing to pay recurring membership fee ➡️
    • strong, recurring profits ➡️
    • ability to pay well and promote from within 📈💪🏻

    Why Costco is so loved
    The Economist

  • How packaging tech is changing how we build & design chips

    Once upon a time, the hottest thing in chip design was “system-on-a-chip” (SOC). The idea is that you’d get the best cost and performance out of a chip by combining more parts into one piece of silicon. This would result in smaller area (less silicon = less cost) and faster performance (closer parts = faster communication) and resulted in more and more chips integrating more and more things.

    While the laws of physics haven’t reversed any of the above, the cost of designing chips that integrate more and more components has gone up sharply. Worse, different types of parts (like on-chip memory and physical/analog componentry) don’t scale down as well as pure logic transistors, making it very difficult to design chips that combine all these pieces.

    The rise of new types of packaging technologies, like Intel’s Foveros, Intel’s EMIB, TSMC’s InFO, new ways of separating power delivery from data delivery (backside power delivery), and more, has also made it so that you can more tightly integrate different pieces of silicon and improve their performance and size/cost.

    The result is now that many of the most advanced silicon today is built as packages of chiplets rather than as massive SOC projects: a change that has happened over a fairly short period of time.

    This interview with IMEC (a semiconductor industry research center)’s head of logic technologies breaks this out…


    What is CMOS 2.0?
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • Store all the things: clean electricity means thermal energy storage boom

    Thermal energy storage has been a difficult place for climatetech in years past. The low cost of fossil fuels (the source for vast majority of high temperature industrial heat to date) and the failure of large scale solar thermal power plants to compete with the rapidly scaling solar photovoltaic industry made thermal storage feel like, at best, a market reserved for niche applications with unique fossil fuel price dynamics. This is despite some incredibly cool (dad-joke intended 🔥🥵🤓) technological ingenuity in the space.

    But, in a classic case of how cheap universal inputs change market dynamics, the plummeting cost and soaring availability of renewable electricity and the growing desire for industrial companies to get “clean” sources of industrial heat has resulted in almost a renaissance for the space as this Canary Media article (with a very nice table of thermal energy startups) points out.

    With cheap renewables (especially if the price varies), companies can buy electricity at low (sometimes near-zero if in the middle of a sunny and windy day) prices, convert that to high-temperature heat with an electric furnace, and store it for use later.

    While the devil’s in the details, in particular the round trip energy efficiency (how much energy you can get out versus what you put in), the delivered heat temperature range and rate (how hot and how much power), and, of course, the cost of the system, technologies like this could represent a key technology to green sectors of the economy that would otherwise be extremely difficult to lower carbon output for.


  • The IE6 YouTube conspiracy

    An oldie but a goodie — the story of how the YouTube team, post-Google acquisition, put up a “we won’t support Internet Explorer 6 in the future” message without any permission from anyone. (HT: Eric S)


    A Conspiracy to Kill IE6
    Chris Zacharias

  • Using your ear to control devices

    Very cool that we’re still finding new things we can control that can be applied to making the lives of people better.


  • Intel’s focus on chip packaging technology

    Intel has been interested in entering the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) space for a long time. For years, Intel proudly boasted of being at the forefront of semiconductor technology — being first to market with the FinFET and smaller and smaller process geometries.

    So it’s interesting how, with the exception of the RibbonFET (the successor to the FinFET), almost all of Intel’s manufacturing technology announcements (see whitepaper) in it’s whitepaper to appeal to prospective foundry customers, all of it’s announcements pertain to packaging / “back end” technologies.

    I think it’s both a recognition that they are no longer the furthest ahead in that race, as well as recognition that Moore’s Law scaling has diminishing returns for many applications. Now, a major cost and performance driver is technology that was once considered easily outsourced to low cost assemblers in Asia is now front and center.


    A Peek at Intel’s Future Foundry Tech
    Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum

  • Iovance brings cell therapy to solid tumors

    Immune cell therapy — the use of modified immune cells directly to control cancer and autoimmune disease — has shown incredible results in liquid tumors (cancers of the blood and bone marrow like lymphoma, leukemia, etc), but has stumbled in addressing solid tumors.

    Iovance, which recently had its drug lifileucel approved by the FDA to treat advanced melanoma, has demonstrated an interesting spin on the cellular path which may prove to be effective in solid tumors. They extract Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs), immune cells that are already “trying” to attack a solid tumor directly. Iovance then treats those TILs with their own proprietary process to expand the number of those cells and “further activate” them (to resist a tumor’s efforts to inactivate immune cells that may come after them) before reintroducing them to the patient.

    This is logistically very challenging (not dissimilar to what patients awaiting other cell therapies or Vertex’s new sickle cell treatment need to go through) as it also requires chemotherapy for lymphocyte depletion in the patient prior to reintroduction of the activated TILs. But, the upshot is that you now have an expanded population of cells known to be predisposed to attacking a solid tumor that can now resist the tumor’s immune suppression efforts.

    And, they’ve presented some impressive 4-year followup data on a study of advanced melanoma in patients who have already failed immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, enough to convince the FDA of their effectiveness!

    To me, the beauty of this method is that it can work across tumor types. Iovance’s process (from what I’ve gleamed from their posters & presentations) works by getting more and more activated immune cells. Because they’re derived from the patient, these cells are already predisposed to attack the particular molecular targets of their tumor.

    This is contrast to most other immune cell therapy approaches (like CAR-T) where the process is inherently target-specific (i.e. get cells that go after this particular marker on this particular tumor) and each new target / tumor requires R&D work to validate. Couple this with the fact that TILs are already the body’s first line of defense against solid tumors and you may have an interesting platform for immune cell therapy in solid tumors.

    The devil’s in the details and requires more clinical study on more cancer types, but suffice to say, I think this is incredibly exciting!


  • Another Italian merchant invention: the decimal point!

    I’ve always been astonished by how many things we use now came from Renaissance Italian merchants: the @ sign, double-entry bookkeeping, banking, maritime insurance, and now the decimal point


  • Wind and solar closing on fossil fuels in EU power generation

    This one chart (published in Canary Media) illustrates both the case for optimism for our ability to deal with climate change as well as a clear case of how geopolitical pressures can dramatically impact energy choices: the rapid increase in use of renewable energy (mainly at the expense of fossil fuels) as source of electricity in the EU.


  • The Opportunity in Lagging Edge Semiconductors

    While much attention is (rightly) focused on the role of TSMC (and its rivals Samsung and Intel) in “leading edge” semiconductor technology, the opportunity at the so-called “lagging edge” — older semiconductor process technologies which continue to be used — is oftentimes completely ignored.

    The reality of the foundry model is that fab capacity is expensive to build and so the bulk of the profit made on a given process technology investment is when it’s years old. This is a natural consequence of three things:

    1. Very few semiconductor designers have the R&D budget or the need to be early adopters of the most advanced technologies. (That is primarily relegated to the sexiest advanced CPUs, FPGAs, and GPUs, but ignores the huge bulk of the rest of the semiconductor market)
    2. Because only a small handful of foundries can supply “leading edge” technologies and because new technologies have a “yield ramp” (where the technology goes from low yield to higher as the foundry gets more experience), new process technologies are meaningfully more expensive.
    3. Some products have extremely long lives and need to be supported for decade-plus (i.e. automotive, industrial, and military immediately come to mind)

    As a result, it was very rational for GlobalFoundries (formerly AMD’s in-house fab) to abandon producing advanced semiconductor technologies in 2018 to focus on building a profitable business at the lagging edge. Foundries like UMC and SMIC have largely made the same choice.

    This means giving up on some opportunities (those that require newer technologies) — as GlobalFoundries is finding recently in areas like communications and data center — but provided you have the service capability and capacity, can still lead to not only a profitable outcome, but one which is still incredibly important to the increasingly strategic semiconductor space.


  • NVIDIA to make custom AI chips? Tale as old as time

    Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business.

    And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.

    Given the above and the fact that NVIDIA did used to effectively build custom products (i.e. for game consoles and for some of its dedicated autonomous vehicle and media streamer projects) and the efforts by cloud vendors like Amazon and Microsoft to build their own Artificial Intelligence silicon it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that they’re pursuing this.

    Or that they may eventually leave this market behind as well.


  • Which jobs are the most [insert gender or race]?

    Fascinating data from the BLS on which jobs have the greatest share of a particular gender or race. The following two charts are from the WSJ article I linked. I never would have guessed that speech-language pathologists (women), property appraisers (white), postal service workers (black), or medical scientists (Asian) would have such a preponderance of a particular group.


  • Trouble in commercial real estate

    Commercial real estate (and, by extension, community banks) are in a world of hurt as hybrid/remote work, higher interest rates, and property bubbles deflating/popping collide…


    The Brutal Reality of Plunging Office Values Is Here
    Natalie Wong & Patrick Clark | Bloomberg

  • Stocks for the Long Run? Maybe not all the Time

    One of the core assumptions of modern financial planning and finance is that stocks have better returns over the long-run than bonds.

    The reason “seems” obvious: stocks are riskier. There is, after all, a greater chance of going to zero since bond investors come before stock investors in a legal line to get paid out after a company fails. Furthermore, stocks let an investor participate in the upside (if a company grows rapidly) whereas bonds limits your upside to the interest payments.

    A fascinating article by Santa Clara University Professor Edward McQuarrie published in late 2023 in Financial Analysts Journal puts that entire foundation into doubt. McQuarrie collects a tremendous amount of data to compute total US stock and bond returns going back to 1792 using newly available historical records and data from periodicals from that timeframe. The result is a lot more data including:

    • coverage of bonds and stocks traded outside of New York
    • coverage of companies which failed (such as The Second Bank of the United States which, at one point, was ~30% of total US market capitalization and unceremoniously failed after its charter was not renewed)
    • includes data on dividends (which were omitted in many prior studies)
    • calculates results on a capitalization-weighted basis (as opposed to price-weighted / equal-weighted which is easier to do but less accurately conveys returns investors actually see)

    The data is fascinating, as it shows that, contrary to the opinion of most “financial experts” today, it is not true that stocks always beat bonds in the long-run. In fact, much better performance for stocks in the US seems to be mainly a 1940s-1980s phenomena (see Figure 1 from the paper below)

    Stock and bond performance (normalized to $1 in 1792, and renormalized in 1982) on a logarithmic scale
    Source: Figure 1, McQuarrie et al

    Put another way, if you had looked at stocks vs bonds in 1862, the sensible thing to tell someone was “well, some years stocks do better, some years bonds do better, but over the long haul, it seems bonds do better (see Table 1 from the paper below).

    The exact opposite of what you would tell them today / having only looked at the post-War world.

    Source: Table 1, McQuarrie et al

    This problem is compounded if you look at non-US stock returns where, even after excluding select stock market performance periods due to war (i.e. Germany and Japan following World War II), focusing even on the last 5 decades shows comparable performance for non-US stocks as non-US government bonds.

    Even assumptions viewed as sacred, like how stocks and bonds can balance each other out because their returns are poorly correlated, shows huge variation over history — with the two assets being highly correlated pre-Great Depression, but much less so (and swinging wildly) afterwards (see Figure 6 below)

    Stock and Bond Correlation over Time
    Source: Figure 6, McQuarrie et al

    Now neither I nor the paper’s author are suggesting you change your fundamental investment strategy as you plan for the long-term (I, for one, intend to continue allocating a significant fraction of my family’s assets to stocks for now).

    But, beyond some wild theorizing on why these changes have occurred throughout history, what this has reminded me is that the future can be wildly unknowable. Things can work one way and then suddenly stop. As McQuarrie pointed out recently in a response to a Morningstar commenter, “The rate of death from disease and epidemics stayed at a relatively high and constant level from 1793 to 1920. Then advances in modern medicine fundamentally and permanently altered the trajectory … or so it seemed until COVID-19 hit in February 2020.”



    Stocks for the Long Run? Sometimes Yes, Sometimes No
    Edward F. McQuarrie | Financial Analysts Journal

  • InVision founder retro

    As reported in The Information a few days ago, former design tool giant InVision, once valued at $2 billion, is shutting down at the end of this year.

    While much of the commentary has been about Figma’s rapid rise and InVision’s inability to respond, I saw this post on Twitter/X from one of InVision’s founders Clark Valberg about what happened. The screenshotted message he left is well-worth a read. It is a great (if slightly self-serving / biased) retrospective.

    As someone who was a mere bystander during the events (as a newly minted Product Manager working with designers), it felt very true to the moment.

    I remember being blown away by how the entire product design community moved to Sketch (from largely Adobe-based solutions) and then, seemingly overnight, from Sketch to Figma.

    While it’s fair to criticize the leadership for not seeing web-based design as a place to invest, I think the piece just highlights how because it wasn’t a direct competitor to InDesign (but to Sketch & Adobe XD) and because the idea of web-based wasn’t on anyone’s radar at the time, it became a lethal blind spot for the company. It’s Tech Strategy 101 and perfectly highlights Andy Grove’s old saying: “(in technology,) only the paranoid survive”.


    Tweet from @ClarkValberg
    Clark Valberg | Twitter/X

  • Public EV chargers suck

    We have a Nissan Ariya and currently DON’T have a home charger (yet — waiting on solar which is another boondoggle for another post). As we live in a town with abundant EVGo chargers (and the Ariya came with 1 yr of free EVGo charging), we thought we could manage.

    When it works, its amazing. But it doesn’t … a frustrating proportion of the time. And, as a result, we’ve become oddly superstitious about which chargers we go to and when.

    I’m glad the charging companies are aware and are trying to address the problem. As someone who’s had to ship and support product, I also recognize that creating charging infrastructure in all kinds of settings which need to handle all kinds of electric vehicles is not trivial.

    But, it’s damn frustrating to not be able to count on these (rest assured, we will be installing our own home charger soon), so I do hope that future Federal monies will have strict uptime requirements and penalties. Absent this, vehicle electrification becomes incredibly difficult outside of the surburban homeowner market.


  • Will Hong Kong Put the Fear Into China’s Property Builders?

    The collapse of China’s massive property bubble is under way and it is wreaking havoc as significant amounts of the debt raised by Chinese property builders is from offshore investors.

    Because of (well-founded) concerns on how Chinese Mainland courts would treat foreign concerns, most of these agreements have historically been conducted under Hong Kong law. As a result, foreign creditors have (understandably) hauled their deadbeat Chinese property builder debtors to court there.

    While the judgements (especially from Linda Chan, the subject of this Bloomberg article) are unsurprisingly against the Chinese property builders (who have been slow to release credible debt restructuring plans), the big question remains whether the Mainland Chinese government will actually enforce these rulings. It certainly would make life harder on (at least until recently very well-connected) Chinese property builders at a moment of weakness in the sector.

    But, failure to do so would also hurt the Chinese government’s goal of encouraging more foreign investment: after all, why would you invest in a country where you can’t trust the legal paper?


  • Amazon Delivers More US Packages than UPS and Fedex

    It’s both unsurprising but also astonishing at the same time.