James Rubinstein on benn.substack

Benn. You did not have to come for me like this. It's not OK to attack your friends this way! 😅 1) I think you're spot on about the people & process over tools, however, tools shape the process. Just like Conway's law is that you "ship the org chart," sometimes what you ship creates that org chart. Clothes make the man and tools make the analytics? 2) I think you are making a fallacy regarding the data that Netflix, AirBnB, or Facebook have. Don't forget that at some point in the past, Netflix was a DVD by mail subscription service, AirBnb was some dudes with an air mattress, and Facebook was a way to rank girls' hotness. They didn't always have that volume of data. They used good product insights to build and grow, used data to get bigger and grow faster. In other words, your earlier post about product > data is right, regardless of what your readers say. It's just that data makes for better products if you know how to use it. 3) Knowing how to use data means _wanting_ to use data. You gotta believe there's some "there" there, first. Everything else follows from that. 4) If tools make it easier to understand data, warts and all, does that make it easier for the business to know there's value in data? 5) Why doesn't _everyone_ feel the way you do about Pinterest, I'll never know. Literally every piece of content on the platform is _some_ form of advertisement for _something_. It's a tap straight into the desire center of the consumer brain. Quite possibly the most valuable data set in history, and yet most analysts are like "yeah yeah, it's a social media site." Infuriating. 6) Maybe FB, AirBnb, Uber, etc were just _lucky_ phenomenally, inconceivably, irrationally, mind-bogglingly _lucky_