Currently: Chief of Staff at Paraform, studying talent
Location: Bay Area
About me
I grew up in the Bay Area, graduated from Yale majoring in History, and briefly worked in public policy before making my way into startups. Since then, I’ve worked across telcomms, healthcare, recruiting tech, and B2B SaaS, and been on the operating and investing side. I’m also a classically trained violist and conductor.
I have a newsletter focusing on talent: https://linuslu.substack.com/
My bookshelf
What I’m currently interested in
The paradoxes of talent search and talent development
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Coaching and mentorship is a very ineffective market. Many people seek it, and many people are happy to mentor and coach young talent. But relative to its potential impact on individuals and productivity, it seems much less efficient and effective than it could be. Since its very nature is 1:1 or 1:few, and depends on many intangible aspects for a great coach/coachee match, is this a problem that tech/software can solve? Is there a marketplace or platform solution?
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Traditional talent signaling is very expensive and outdated. Whether it’s a $200k degree, or working at FAANG for a couple years (in terms of opportunity cost), or a Thiel Fellowship, we’re incentivized to pursue legibility instead of actually developing talent, and we’re also reliant on these recognizable signals to evaluate talent. Are there other credentialing or evaluation systems that offer cheaper, higher-signal ways of indicating talent across many, diverse parameters?
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Talent cold-start problem: everyone wants to hire and work with already identified and legible talent. This creates a situation where underpriced talent gets way fewer opportunities relative to risk (partially because of high transaction costs and compensation inelasticity). Society benefits when talent price discovery is efficient, but the price discovery mechanism (actually hiring people and seeing how they perform) is very bad, and not designed for that purpose, resulting in a tragedy of the commons
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Does talent have a normal distribution, or more of a power law distribution? Is it different across different disciplines or skillsets? How should the education and talent development system be tailored to fit whatever distribution is the case?
Sacrifice in modern society
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I’ve been struck by the prominence and importance of sacrifice in pre-modern societies since reading a few books, including The Ancient City and The Ruin of Kasch. Animal sacrifices, feast offerings, even human sacrifices. It’s honestly one of the few basically universal practices across all human societies until around the Axial Age.
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Now we live in a fundamentally sacrifice-less society. What are the implications? What does it mean for us? Is this sustainable? Are there invisible psychic costs that we’re incurring
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Tentative observation: practices of externally enacted sacrifice seem correlated with higher trust societies
Why is the world full of bad listeners?
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It’s understandable that society naturally rewards good talkers. But I find it difficult to accept that we should just resign ourselves to being so collectively bad at listening, and collectively outsource listening to therapists and coaches (and even then, many of them are still terrible listeners!).
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Why is poor listening such a pervasive issue? Is it a values issue (people are too selfish, and don’t see its importance)? Is it a mental framework issue (they don’t view listening as a primary component of having a conversation)? Is it an education issue (it’s not a skill that’s well taught in schools or at home)?
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I believe that improving listening skills can be a 10x societal unlock. Whether or not that’s a tractable problem to solve is another issue
More about me
Book recommendationsHow can I help?
Always looking to connect with other curious, fun people.