Gambling is our generation’s smoking. And for applied behavioral scientists who choose to work in the industry, “I didn’t know” isn’t going to be an excuse. To understand the problem, you first have to understand the scope. Gambling is big business, bigger than most people think: ~$70b in revenue last year in the US. That’s […]
Al Pacino got it right in The Devil’s Advocate: for all our advances in greed, lust, and gluttony, vanity is still the Devil’s favorite sin. If your users want to tell you how they’re exploiting your systems: let them. A few weeks back, the NYT wrote an article about Matthew Gallagher and how his two-person, […]
Because it is a complex system, most of life is a choice between differing errors. So rather than trying to be on time and ending up accidentally early or late, it is better to make leading or lagging a specific choice. I love surfing. It is relaxing to be in the water and when you […]
Working with global talent will make you better at what you do, because insight is driven by diversity. It will also redefine what privilege means. I get it: your gas prices went up (although the photos people keep posting are lower than pre-war in California). The Pentagon just asked the White House for another $200b […]
Because if the most important day at your company is someone’s first, then the second most important is their last. My favorite scene in Moneyball is Brad Pitt teaching Jonah Hill how to fire a player. Not only does it give some good practical advice, but it also shows just how hard this conversation actually is; Hill’s […]
The secret to effective scaling is all about planning for the relationship between probability and periodicity. At Oceans, my leadership team likes to joke about Matt Math; it’s shorthand for my tendency to use the same syllogism about scaling over and over. The premise is simple: if something happens once a year with 100 people, […]
You can’t hear your workplace accent but it may be stunting your growth. Earlier this week, I was helping a post-doc prepare for a few upcoming interviews, mostly at big tech companies. And as we role-played her answers, I noticed a recurring pattern: no matter what question I asked, she consistently sounded academic. An easy example is […]
At Oceans, our talent acquisition process has always been fully human: every resume reviewed by a trained recruiter, every interview conducted in-house. But as our application numbers have drifted up (over 20k last year!), the wait time for candidates has gotten longer and longer as we struggle to meet the demands of a company where the […]
Last week, Katie Scarpa sent me this article on “peanut butter” raises, which seem to be the compensation strategy du jour. Apparently, half of companies surveyed this year are considering giving all their workers the exact same percentage increase, regardless of performance. Which, while it isn’t the laziest/racist/sexist compensation strategy I’ve ever heard of, is pretty close. And it […]
Recently, one of my leaders (the fabulous Katie Scarpa) went deep with a candidate for a role on her team here at Oceans. Katie had reservations about their tone in an interview but after much discussion (my advice: “Tone is both coachable and easy to get wrong in singular interactions”), decided to send an offer. The result? […]