Dan Hock's Essays

Dan Hock's Essays

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Generalist Disease
What elite professionals get wrong about career growth
 • Dan Hockenmaier
LLMs vs. Marketplaces
Which marketplaces will probably win the battle with LLMs, which will probably lose, and what any marketplace can do to improve its odds.
 • Dan Hockenmaier
Why Did DoorDash Win?
Three stories, all of which are true.
 • Dan Hockenmaier
The Software Shakeout: What Is Durable and What Is Not in the Age of AI?
A lot has been said about the software selloff in the last few weeks. This is an attempt to distill all of that into a framework to predict which…
 • Dan Hockenmaier
Vibe Analysis
AI is coming for data analysis, and it will never be the same
 • Dan Hockenmaier
How to Use AI Without Losing Your Mind
A common-sense, hype-free guide to using AI to become more effective
 • Dan Hockenmaier
How to be Strategic
The actual nature of strategic work, and how to become great at it
 • Dan Hockenmaier
How to Choose a Startup
And why so many people get it almost entirely backwards
 • Dan Hockenmaier
The Concept That Explains Everything About Marketplaces
Understanding transaction costs will help you understand where marketplaces will succeed, what kind of marketplace to build, and how to price them.
 • Dan Hockenmaier
How to Design an Org for Founder Mode
Examples from Apple, Airbnb, Shopify, and Nvidia
 • Dan Hockenmaier
When to join a startup
Learning to assess risk will help you maximize the economic outcome of joining a startup
 • Dan Hockenmaier
The Next Trillion Dollar Marketplace Will Put SKUs on Services
Why service marketplaces aren’t scaling and how they might get unstuck
 • Dan Hockenmaier
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