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My 2016: The year of willpower

As 2016 is coming to an end with all its ups and downs, it made me reflect on what really happened in my life during that year and what’s coming for the years ahead.

I don’t look at life in years, I look at it in milestones. I have an idea of where I want to go next but I don’t put specific time frames tied to years or my age. After all, goals are dependent on many factors, some we can control, others we can’t, and that’s why I believe one shouldn’t tie goals to a calendar. Calendars can act as a guidance, but not as milestones.

If I had to pick one theme for my 2016 with all that happened, I would call it the year of willpower.

I once heard Ahmed Al Shugairi talking about the book “The willpower instinct” and how it changed his life to become a better person. He quit smoking completely after more than 10 years. I had the book on my list for long but finally managed to listen to it few months ago while I was in the middle of many willpower challenges.

My biggest willpower challenge was a compulsive behavior I don’t like talking about that took me long to overcome. It wasn’t easy but I finally managed to overcome it.

My second biggest willpower challenge this year was information control. Deleting my Facebook account was a huge challenge with lots of deactivation and reactivation. Deleting Snapchat, Twitter, and Nuzzel from my phone came only recently. It wasn’t easy. Every time I deleted one of the apps I cheated by logging to the mobile web version. I can’t even say now that I completely got rid of them as sometimes I itch to download twitter or nuzzel out of my fear of missing out.

My third challenge was to write consistently. I wrote more than 50 blog posts this year, and I hope to get better and write more.

My biggest learnings going through this

  • Willpower is one of the most mentally consuming tasks, that’s why our brains always give it up to reallocate this mental power for other tasks.
  • Things take time. This reaffirmed my point of view of not tying milestones to calendars.
  • One shouldn’t beat themselves up or restart every time they fail in the willpower challenge. If you cheated once don’t wait till next day to start over, just move on.
  • Environment, environment, and environment. Big part of willpower failures come from not changing our environment. Sometimes changing the environment isn’t possible, however being aware of its influence on a behavior is crucial to resist its triggers.

I can’t say I mastered willpower, no one can. I still have many willpower challenges on my list like eating healthy, reading books daily, allocating time to learn about new stuff, not to fear trying something instead of just getting the theoretical knowledge about it, and many more. Let’s see what 2017 will bring.

Happy new year!

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Man’s Search for Meaning

Yesterday I finished the book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. I heard of the book first time from a tweet by Keith Rabois.

It is the story of a psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps during world war II. Perfect time to read while just arriving to Germany!

The book is not the typical WWII horror story type of book. It rather focuses on the psychological aspect of being a prisoner in one of those camps, and the difference between those survived and those gave up to let themselves die.

Then the author talks about a new approach to psychiatry which he calls “Logotherapy”. Logos is a greek word which denotes “meaning”. Here is an excerpt from the book

Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused.

 

Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life. Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden logos of his existence, it is an analytical process. To this extent, logotherapy resembles psychoanalysis. However, in logotherapy’s attempt to make something conscious again it does not restrict its activity to instinctual facts within the individual’s unconscious but also cares for existential realities, such as the potential meaning of his existence to be fulfilled as well as his will to meaning.

Any analysis, however, even when it refrains from including the noölogical dimension in its therapeutic process, tries to make the patient aware of what he actually longs for in the depth of his being. Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.

I have few highlights from the book, but here is one that I really liked.

Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended, in her article on logotherapy, that “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.”

Although the book was first published in 1946, this is so true to our current world!

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How do you know?

When I was at Booking.com, John Elabd was one of the best product owners. He used to challenge every assumption and take the leap to test ideas that were never tested in the company before.

One of the things I learned from John when someone gets too biased toward their argument on whether something is good or bad for customers, he would reply with a simple, yet powerful question

How do you know?

Every time he asked me this question I had to go back and think. Many times in product organizations people fear testing new ideas because of internal resistance, or fear of messing things up.

The culture at Booking.com is to be fearless, they have no problem someone screws things up and cost the company thousands or maybe millions of Euros, because they know at this cost people move fast, then you find the breakthroughs that cover up for all the mess.

So far it is working. That’s how I know.

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Why I see Brexit as a good thing for Tech?

Since the Brexit, I heard countless arguments about British startups moving to Berlin. I tend to think most of these arguments as clickbaits for the tech media to feed on, now with TechCrunch Disrupt London, these arguments resurfaced. Here is my opinion about why Brexit doesn’t matter for tech or even contrary to popular sentiment, it could be a good thing:

  • It is not that simple. You can’t easily move a startup from a country to another because of something that didn’t happen. Up until now, the only direct result of Brexit is the devaluation of the pound which is not an enough motive for a startup to leave UK and come to Berlin. Not to mention the Euro itself is losing its value because of strong dollar and the other Euro zone problems.
  • Tech in principle is global. Being in UK doesn’t have a big difference from being in Berlin. Unless you are doing something very specific to the German or British market, you don’t have to be there.
  • Europe was fragmented, and will stay fragmented post Brexit. Each country has its own language, culture, and laws. Being in or out of EU doesn’t matter for the most part because the fragmentation is still there.
  • British entrepreneurs still have access to EU. They can still move any way they want and open offices anywhere.
  • The fact that UK speaks English gives it a huge advantage over Germany. Immigrant entrepreneurs can’t easily start a company in a country where they don’t speak the language, and have fears of falling victims to legalities they can’t even read.
  • The big players doubled down on UK. Amazon is expanding and hiring like crazy. Facebook is adding 500 new tech jobs in London office. Google is opening its biggest space in Europe and adding thousands of jobs in London.
  • Tech is the last industry affected by regulation, until UK finds out what Brexit means they will have a very long list of problems to solve before coming to what Brexit means for tech. Until then, everything stays the same.
  • In fact, Brexit could be great for the tech scene in UK. Being out of EU will allow the UK to move fast and away from stupid European laws that are preventing many startups from being started here. Less decoupling means more agility, and more competition between EU states and non-EU states, which makes things better for everyone.
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Scrum in one picture

I am attending an agile training. I like this picture which summarizes the whole scrum flow. I took the picture myself but the drawing is by our trainer, Anton.

Take a moment to figure them yourself. The answers are below.



The answers

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Vezeeta

Yesterday I saw a Vezeeta ad on Instagram asking me to download the app. I read the news few weeks ago that they raised a new 5 million dollars round. I read in the fundraising release they have 2500 doctors, and their CEO announced on a TV show that they get 24000 reservations per month.

2500 Doctors

You can do a wild search on Vezeeta by not entering anything in the search form and get a list of all the doctors they have. They rank doctors that are bookable on the website first. Doing some binary search, the last bookable doctor they have on the website is on page 182. They display 10 results per page meaning the number of bookable doctors on the platform is 182 * 10 = 1820 (1819 to be exact). This is off by 27% of what they claim to have or the press published.

24000 Reservations per month

Vezeeta charges doctors 100 EGP per month + 30% of every reservation they bring to the doctor. Or 35% with no monthly charges.

To get 24000 reservations per month at a relatively high conversion rate at 2%. Vezeeta should get at least 1.2 million visits/visitors[1] per month. I don’t know how much they spend to acquire each customer but from my previous experience, bedding on doctor keywords doesn’t cont much meaning they could do it on positive unit economics assuming a visit on average costs 100 EGP and they get 30 EGP of it.

In any marketplace, there is the risk of users bypassing the marketplace to do the transaction offline. In doctors this risk is higher, since the transaction happens offline[2].

Taking a cut from the doctor creates the incentive to either make the price on Vezeeta higher, ask users to never book from the website again, or even give them a small 10% discount for not booking from the website. All of this assuming the users will not do this without any incentive because it is easier to befriend the doctor’s assistant and call her directly.

5 million dollars

This is the most mysterious part for me. 5 million dollars is 75 million EGP. Using the existing numbers I can say they make

((1820 Doctor * 100 EGP) + (24000 Reservations * 30 EGP)) * 12 month ~= 9 Million EGP per year

I am curious to see what they are going to do with this money and whether the product will become mainstream and replace the phone. It is tough in the Egyptian market with no interest from doctors to fix their schedules and no respect from patients to appointments.

In fact from our experience building Ekshef we realized appointments are not the problem. Reputation is. Doctor search, discovery, and info is the toughest part in the patient’s journey. With no accountability on doctors, the patients are left to chance on whether this doctor is good or not. I myself suffered from during my long journey with doctors and I still have medical problems because of doctors mistakes that went unaccountable.

Will see.

[1] Some companies calculate conversion by sessions/visits, others by users.

[2] In fact, some other industries like travel, the transaction happens offline. However, part of the reason people still book hotels online is the guarantee they get by using a reputable OTA. If something goes wrong, the OTA will help the customer. Plus travel is an expensive purchase and involves a lot of uncertainty. So it is better to go with a big name as the mediator than to risk going directly to the hotel. Plus most OTAs force hotels to list the same prices as on their website (Price Parity). So the motivation for booking directly almost doesn’t exist on the customer side.

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Open Coffee, Closed Coffee

I was in the supermarket today with a developer friend of mine. I wanted to buy coffee capsules for the coffee machine I currently have at home.

Usually, I go with the standard brand capsules. However, this time I noticed there are other brands of coffee, some of them have their own machines, others are only coffee brands.

I told my friend how angry I am at Nestle, because they built a closed coffee platform, you have to buy their coffee to be compatible with their machines. He told me I am wrong and showed me some coffee brands that are compatible with Nespresso or the machine I have at home. I was a bit surprised.

It is funny we techies always compare platforms from their openness/closeness. From the Windows vs Linux days, to nowadays which VR platform will be more open, which will be more closed and the benefits of each.

I now imagine someone in the coffee world is comparing different coffee ecosystems, which machines are compatible with each type of capsules, which company is more open, and when coffee makers have to adapt their product to fit the new versions of the the platforms, or in that case new models of coffee machines.

How do you like your coffee? Open? Closed?

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Journalists, Government Hacks, and two factor authentication

I noticed yesterday multiple journalists I am following asking every other journalist to enable two factor authentication on their accounts in fear of a government hack.

I think it is less secure to have two factor authentication on your account than not having it. Let me tell you why.

When you have a strong password, for the government to hack you they have to have a malware installed on your computer/mobile, while you can’t avoid that unless you are too careful, they can’t try every combination of passwords on Gmail or any other service until they know your password.

When you enable two factor auth, your mobile number also acts as a recovery mechanism to change your password. The problem with this is that the government can write your email, say they forgot the password so you get an SMS, they intercept the non-encrypted/plain text SMS from the mobile operator network, and Bingo! They got access to your account.

There have been reports that the Egyptian government is doing this. I also have a personal friend of mine who got an email from Facebook that someone tried to reset his password, upon tracing the IP Facebook sent him, it turned to be the Egyptian national security HQ in Alexandria.

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Fake news, echo chambers and Egypt  

Yesterday I listened to the latest episode of the Bloomberg ‘Decrypted’ podcast. The episode discussed the wakening on fake news and echo chambers on social media, Facebook specifically, and the role it played in the US elections.

Sarah Frier, the host of the show tweeted earlier asking for thoughts from followers. I thought as an Egyptian this is not new to us. We suffered from fake news and echo chambers for the past five years and almost every time we were surprised by people’s reaction and the influence on them from mainstream media.

I send her my thoughts, she asked me to send them as a voice memo, and they played it on the episode. The episode also had thoughts from Justin Kan, Dave McClure, and other guests.

You can listen to it here, my part starts at 15:30.

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The ethics of taking a coke from the office for your friend

If you read predictably irrational or the righteous mind, you will find many experiments that show how contradictory we are in defining what’s ethical and what’s not. Some of these contradictions are small, hard to detect, and most of us live with it. Other contradictions are what make people being seen as hypocrites.

One of the experiments that was conducted on a university campus put some coke cans in the common fridge, these cans shouldn’t be taken as this is not a free beverages fridge, they disappeared in no time. When the researchers exchanged the cans with their monetary value and put money instead, it took longer for the money to disappear. Why people are ok with stealing coke but not the money representing it?

Another thought experiment comes like this: If your daughter asked you to get her a pen on your way home, is it ok to bring her one from the office? If yes, if instead of pens there was a pile of cash, would you take from it to buy her the pen?

I remembered this as on the weekend I went to print some documents for personal use, my friend told me why don’t you just bring it in office? I said well, I think it is wrong to do so since these are for work purpose.

Then we went into a deeper discussion into what’s ethical and what’s not.

Is taking a coke from the free drinks fridge in the office to home ethical?

What if you took it home for a friend?

What if a friend came to pick you up, you let them in and brought them a coke? Should you go to the supermarket and buy one?

I am not saying that people who print personal docs in the office are wrong, maybe their companies are ok with that. I am also not saying I follow the rules all the time, neither that I consider those taking pens home unethical since this could be something the society is ok with.

It is just something to think of.