Nassim Taleb gave a talk today at Google. He opened by stating that he gave a talk six years ago at Google in Mountain View, and that it seemed that the average age in the room today was about six years older. I don't know if he meant it this way, but it made the point for me that people really never leave Google (and that says something about our culture).
He said later in his talk that all corporations decline, and that some of that is because we get farther away from the customer. He recommended that we all start our own companies.
He also discussed the Lindy Effect. Wikipedia defines it as: The Lindy effect is a concept that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.[1] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. In contrast, living creatures and mechanical things follow a bathtub curve where, after "childhood", the mortality rate increases with time. Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival.
