Tim Cook

Tim Cook, when the idea was pitched, asked why anyone who spent a whole life getting people to pay for music would give something away free. After the then-new album landed in people's iTunes without asking, the giveaway turned into a debacle people were mad about, and the same objection came back.

Bono says the band was experimenting. They wanted Apple, or another company, to pay for the music and then distribute it the way a record label does, because fixing music is going to take experimentation. Pay for other musicians is astonishingly small and frightening. Bono sees it in his son's band, Inhaler, a really successful outfit, and it is still very hard to imagine how a young band like U2

Soon everyone would be able to invest in private companies before IPO, enabling your everyday normal people to benefit from the crazy growth potential of companies like Uber and Airbnb.

On Recode Decode, talking with Jason Calacanis, Kara Swisher said her children's school already dislikes her because of homework. She tells the kids not to do it. The workplace does not care about those assignments. It cares about teamwork, so she tells them to skip what she called the stupid homework. The same conversation argues that the school day is too rigid for parents who cannot pay for child care, and that a parent should be able to leave a child in a good classroom from early morning until evening. Her point on the assignments was narrower: if the job will never ask, do not give up the evening.

Childcare is exhausting and to better as a society, we need to enable everyone to access great education, even if they cannot afford it.

Dexter Learning is a self-paced school out of Texas that aiming to get private school education affordable enough to the top-70% of people.

If it comes down to Bernie Sanders vs Trump, it would be a very hard choice for a lot of people in Silicon Valley to vote for Bernie, and Bloomberg could be the solution to it.

According to Jason Calacanis, inability to make good money from facts and unbiased reporting has driven journalists to pick sides and to focus on click-bait headlines.

According to Jason Calacanis, Capitalism and entrepreneurship is the best system to run humanity, but people are starting to hate it right now.

The solution to that is for people who have benefited the most from this system to start behaving better to people who have the least. Stop grinding people on the margins and be generous where it matters.

Jason thinks Bezos continuous to grind people for optimization in situations when he does not need to.

Instead of being generous to low-wage employees, he overworks them. Instead of helping out a struggling city, he strings them along, and then still puts Amazon HQ2 in a city that does not need any more support.

If you are the richest man in the world, it might be a good time to stop grinding and to start giving, like the Gates family did when they were at the top of the list.

Jason Calacanis says that lower orbit satellites have the potential to connect another 1-2 billion people to the internet, which would be huge for SpaceX future.

Jason thinks that micro mobility is the future but it does not stand on its own, bikes and scooters are going to become a free/low cost offering from bigger players like Uber, and that's it.

If you give great founders with vision a lot of runaway, they are going to take it.

Jason Calacanis, an early investor into Uber, explains that massive amount of private money enabled Uber to grow rapidly in the early days, ignoring some of the realities at the expense of getting to scale.

Once they IPO'ed, the company had to switch from focus on massive growth, to focus on profitability. It was a big shift, and it will take time to transition.

However, as long as they can differentiate, and people love their product, they will figure out how to adjust their margins to give public markets what they need.

John Cook tells Geek at Sea that the strain at home shows up when GeekWire pulls him in too many directions to do all of it well. Asked what his son makes of that, Cook says there is a give and take. His son likes some of what his father does and recognizes it. Other parts bother him, especially the times Cook cannot be present. Cook calls that a struggle, then wonders whether he feels it more sharply than his son does, because he is the one keeping score. The balance he describes is the same one he has been negotiating since he co-founded GeekWire and became a father in the same season of his life.

Asked on Geek at Sea what he would do if GeekWire were sold, John Cook says he would slow down, spend more time with his family, and then get restless. He loves the media business. He calls it fascinating, and he loves telling stories and connecting people through those stories. He would stay near media, perhaps by helping the next reporters and media founders. He also says a free press is under attack, hopes that is temporary, and calls a free press imperative to democracy. Storytelling plus that civic stake is why he does not picture himself retired from the work.

John Cook sees dramatic shifts and anticipates that work will look much different in 20-30 years compared to now. Our society is becoming more entrepreneurial.

On Geek at Sea, John Cook of GeekWire says access to the best sources comes from staying in the relationship after a fight. CEOs get angry about the tone of a story, or about coverage of a lawsuit or a layoff. He has been in the Seattle tech community long enough that some well-known executives who were furious with him, or with GeekWire, are now reliable sources. He credits his mother, a newspaper reporter, for the habit of not dropping the relationship. The people who are upset with you today, he says, can be the ones who tell you what is actually happening tomorrow.

On Geek at Sea, GeekWire co-founder John Cook says he is satisfied, and that he tries not to forget how unusual that is. What he has been given, a company built around work he loves and the freedom to do it, is not what most people get, and he thinks he has to use it. That knowledge is part of what makes him happy. He describes himself as not a materialistic person. Satisfaction comes from his family, his friends, having fun, and doing a good job at GeekWire. The rest, he says, is clutter. The advice is to keep that order.

The hiring process of a cook is effective and fair. They set up a station for you to work for the restaurant for a day, feed you afterward, and give you an offer if they were satisfied with your work.

Robert Wang tells Get Together that cooking is social. You cook for family, friends, and a party, and if the dish is good you brag about the tool. He cites Jonah Berger's Contagious for a split he remembers as about 7 percent of word of mouth online and 93 percent offline. By 2015 Instant Pot was on its fourth generation, with nearly 100,000 reviews, though a new model wiped the old listing's reviews. Support tickets outran the team, so he asked customers to help each other. A consultant who was already a fan helped build the official community. The Facebook page dated to 2010 with no strategy. He held off on a newsletter because it felt too in your face.