Mostafa Nageeb

Today a friend reminded me of this iconic Paul Graham essay in which he publishes the emails between him and Fred Wilson while he was trying to convince Fred to invest in Airbnb.

To me this is one of my most favorite reads along with the linked Fred post in the essay. When I read it some time ago I was impressed by seeing Fred admitting how he missed it, and by how a random guy like myself sitting in Egypt can see something of what’s happening in the Mecca of tech, while being surrounded by people who mostly don’t get it.

I hope one day to make a difference by working on something that gets big, and to have the desire to write about it, and inspire others as I was inspired by Fred and Paul’s posts.

There is no product Monday today. Instead I am sharing this interesting letter written by J. C. R. Licklider who was the director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The letter written in 1963 describes his vision of an “Intergalactic Computer Network”. This is the very first vision for what became later the internet.

It is funny how he talks about the heterogeneity of the technologies involved and how they would interact on the network. Very similar to modern day discussions about development environments. Worth spending some time reading.

Aloha! It is been quite some time since I wrote one of those.

I actually don’t have much on my mind. If you have been following the recent posts, quite few of them were lengthy. This mostly comes from having a lot of time in the past few weeks.

I am proud of my brain diet post, I have always wanted to share how I do this and finally had the ability to do it.

On the other side I feel I exaggerated the expected effect of the racism in Germany post. It got read more than my average posts but the paragraph in which I say it might bring heat to me was kinda stupid. It is actually a well balanced post and not my most controversial thought. But in general I like how I wrote it and I am also glad I wrote it because it will save me time in the future when someone asks about my opinion.

I am recently thinking a lot about my superpower to let go. Most people when they say they don’t care, they don’t mean it. I mean it 99% of the time. Almost a year ago I learned there is a philosophical school for that called stoicism. I might be a stoic without knowing it.

As usual, now it is books talk. In January I read more than any other month in my life. I finished 7 Powers, When Violence Is The Answer, Blood Seat and Pixels, and read half way through an Arabic book, plus parts of The Headspace Guide to Meditation, The Book of Why, and currently reading The Order of Time.

After I finish my current book I will go back to venture deals, I tried listening to it which turned to be a useless idea. I bought the text version and will read it. I will also start listening to The Dream Machine.

Tomorrow is a product Monday post. I have no idea what to write about but let’s see.

Sam Altman published a post yesterday with the same title. I like how it laid out many of the advice I advise myself and others to do. It is also a good reminder to assess one’s self and know where one is lagging.

There are few dates in one’s life where everything before is totally different than everything after. 25th of January 2011 is one of them.

I have always believed in the power of a big group, but I didn’t expect a Facebook event inviting people to demonstrate would lead to thousands on the streets, and 18 days later the throwing of a 30 years ruling dictator.

Fast forward, I know many feel sad as to how things are today. Many of the original voices are silenced, in prison, in some sort of exile, or dead. As sad as it sounds, I believe it is an acceptable price to pay to gain our freedom. All nations that went through such transformation had to pay similar price.

I always see the good side in things. And the good side in what happened so far lie in the breaking of taboos. Our generation no longer accepts the patronizing tone of fatherly respect to the ruler, nor the total submission to religious authorities. If you had those ideas before this date you couldn’t express them, you would be vilified or think you are crazy since no one else thinks the same. All of this has changed. You may not see it in the moment, but if you zoom out you clearly see how far we have progressed.

There are also lots of lessons. The biggest for me is how wrong I was when I thought that once everyone is on the internet and freed from the state controlled media, the truth shall prevail and everyone will move to the right side. I was wrong, totally wrong. This lesson the Americans realized two years ago, but we have been suffering from misinformation consequences since 2011.

The second biggest lesson is my total failure in underestimating what humans might accept if the right conditions are met. It hindsight, I no longer believe in such a thing as the collective wisdom. If you create the right environment, people will accept mass killings, arrests, torture, or anything you prime them into. I thought there are limits, there aren’t. And no one is immune including myself.

One last thought, the optimist in me believes nothing stays the same. With infinite time comes infinite possibilities. As a wise man once said “of course, but hWhen?”. I don’t have infinite time, but I know that #Jan25 was a black swan event, and the thing about black swans is that they are unpredictable. In such complex system with huge number of variables, you never know when the next butterfly effect will happen. History is never linear. Stay hopeful.

Happy #Jan25

MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images 

One more horoscope for the educated. Here is my result.

This is one of my favorite concepts in probability. The idea that after an extraordinary outcome, the next ones will always regress towards the average, shaping a bell curve.

This applies to football players who do insanely well in one season, probabilistically they are more likely to perform worse the season after. Same applies to flight cadets who do above average in dog fights. And same applies to writing, after writing a very good piece, it is more likely that my next one won’t be as good. If I stress too much to keep the quality up, I might even produce a lower than average outcome.

That’s why gradual progress that improves the mean trumps random bursts of success. There are rare exceptions to this, but if you understand regression to the mean, you will focus on what matters and be less anxious.

I was with a friend in Potsdamerplatz, we were talking in Arabic when a lady started making fun of our speech blabbing random Arabic words while calling us Turkish and Arabisch.

An Egyptian guy wrote on his Facebook he was in a club and three guys at different times approached him asking if he has any drugs to sell. I was telling this story to a black German/American friend and he told me this happens to him all the time on the streets.

I went on a bus with two American friends, one of them asked a lady in German to make space for the wheelchair, a random man started blabbing telling her we are not waiting for foreigners to tell us what to do.

I have few of stories of treatment of government employees to foreigners, and how the tone changes for better with Arabs if unfortunately they show their blue card to prove they aren’t refugees.

Those are examples of racism happening everyday in Berlin, with different people, all the time.

The typical reaction I see from many people after such incidents is to generalize racism on the whole population. I understand where they are coming from but I refuse this conclusion.

The problem with racism is that it is low probability, high impact event. I have the thick skin (and the elastic heart) to not bother when a random stranger throws racist words at me while crossing the street. I am also not offended when someone tries to give me money because I am on a wheelchair (yes, this happens). But I would be furious if someone wouldn’t treat me fairly at work or a government institution because they are being racist.

I personally see the topic too complicated and anger rarely solves it. Most of the vocal people on racism tend to be leftists, and when they start being vocal, the right is good at being provocative, which fuels the anger more and leads in the post facts era we live in to spread the right’s message even further. Add to this there are those leftists who has victimhood mindset and make matters worse by making the issues shallower instead of focusing on the core problems.

When I say the right I mean the extreme, I don’t mean the whole right. I myself have some tendencies towards the right in some aspects such as being pro-capitalism.

Being vocal doesn’t help, silence is also not a solution. When these topics are less talked about, they keep boiling until they explode. This is one of the main reasons I am against laws that silence people on the basis of hate speech. I see such laws endanger democracy. Once we give the government the right to silence people, all it takes is a single bad actor to expand the same laws to silence their opponents.

This takes me to the role of media in breaking the silence. I don’t know what’s happening on German media, but my trial to follow the Arabic speaking, government funded Deutsche Welle channel was disappointing to say the least. The main narrative is Germany is a utopian place with few racist AfDs that kind people demonstrate against and the Parliament issues laws to shut them up. Most of the programming is about how people are becoming successful just because of being in Germany and not because they put a lot of blood sweat and tears to get where they are. They discuss sensational topics such as free speech or women’s freedom in a very shallow way and with no criticism to how such topics are being handled in Germany. Even Yosri Fouda, who is one of the best Egyptian investigative journalists (the only journalist to interview Bin Laden post 9/11) became equally shallow when he joined DW.

Where are the investigations on how German embassies treat visa candidates? Did no one see the Facebook comics on the rudest employee in the Cairo embassy? The guy who refused to move to the accessible counter when I was applying for visa. Where are the discussions on the two way street of integration? Can someone show up on DW and argue from the point that the whole refugees situation was driven by pure economic and not humanitarian incentive (I am not claiming that, I am just playing the devil advocate)? I doubt.

So being vocal makes things worse, silence doesn’t help either. What’s the solution? I don’t know, and mostly don’t care. I’m living in my own bubble. I consider racism just a risk factor, and it ranks low on my list of immigration risk factors below things like loneliness and the stability of my medical condition.

Why am I writing this? Food for thought. It might draw a lot of heat towards me because of the sensitivity of the topic, it might get misinterpreted, but I am publishing it anyways to articulate my thoughts, and because I also expect it to draw some interesting discussions with smart people. And maybe, maybe it opens up someone’s horizon into understanding the complexity of the topic.

“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer and the speech of a diplomat” – unknown

One of the mistakes I see new product people do is trying to make an impact as soon as they land a new job. Unfortunately because of this rush they end up making more mistakes and set a bumpy road for the job they just took.

We are all eager to voice our opinions and make an impact, but the thing is when you land a new job and you have to manage by influence, you start with negative social credit score with everyone, as you are new to the group, you have no authority on anyone, you are consuming more of their time than adding value, and some will even see you as a threat, you are the new person they hired to tell us what to do.

Yes, you will see many things that you think the team is doing wrong, but you shouldn’t go and tell them they are wrong without deeply understanding the organism and what makes it tick.

That’s why before you start making suggestions or change things, you need to know who has influence on your work, and foster the relationship with them while uncovering their desires and incentives. Only after doing this, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and where you can add value.

One thing I did when I landed my current job was talking to most people on my team either officially by having a meeting or unofficially by having coffee. In those meetings I come prepared with a list of questions. After exchanging pleasantries I would start asking

• When did you join the company/team? The older someone is the more experienced they are and the more they might feel entitled to make certain decisions.
• What are you currently working on? Dig deeper to understand more but not so deep to waste the whole meeting. Engineers have a tendency to keep going deeper in details. Know when to stop them.
• What are your priorities?
• What does success look like to you? Keep it that open to see which success they ask you about, many will say do you mean my success or the team success? Others will just go with something. Always say both, this will expose what motivates them.
• What are your challenges? Or what might lead to not achieving the success you just mentioned? The answer to this question will reveal areas they are struggling with where you can add value.
• Don’t ask “What do you expect from me?” except to your manager. The reason I would be careful to ask this question to peers especially if they are engineering leads is it might set a relationship similar to what they have with their directs, which you don’t want. If you want to ask something along this line you can ask “How can I help?”. Never give an answer on the spot. Always say “I will see what I can do”.

The above exercise is mandatory with your manager, the engineering leads you work with, and the most senior engineers on the team. It is optional with everyone else.

Once you do this, you need to create a map of priorities, people, and motives. This map is more conceptual than physical. You essentially want to know what are the top priorities, who has influence on their success, and who might be a blocker to achieving this and why?

This process typically take few weeks to maybe months. But without doing this it becomes dangerous to try changing things with incomplete information. Remember that information is leverage, the better (not more) information you have, the higher your leverage to getting things done.

In short, shut up and listen. Good luck!

Such a long title. But it is what this post is about.

I am recently giving a lot of thought to coding education. I think we haven’t figured a way to make it as fun as games, and give you the right amount of knowledge that enables you to become self sufficient. It always leans on being boring and informative or fun but not useful.

I recently convinced someone to learn coding, and now I am tasked to tell them what to do. I actually don’t know. I think Coursera and the likes are too challenging for someone who never wrote any code. I need something slower with small wins along the way. And it has to take the person to a level where they are confident about continuing on their own or by finding harder topics. In short I am trying to find the minimum investment and reward (dopamine) that makes someone hooked to coding.

If you have ideas please shoot them my way.