Everyone keeps using the word ‘exponential’ for high growth startups / companies. As it turns out - most of the these growths are actually quadratic, not exponential (from maths POV). Oops!
If you are not a maths person, then may be you can skip this blog, but if you are, the just read this blog - where the author presents n number of examples from Hubspot to Facebook to Netflix - to illustrate his point. Pretty intriguing!
Alright, on to the other two things that I wanted to share in this newsletter…
Thing 1
A nuance to chip-shortage impacting the world
There is something that everyone needs to understand about chips (microprocessors) and their shortage that we keep hearing about. There are two kinds of chips that devices / machines use today - type one is cutting-edge and costly and the other type is older and cheaper.
An article in the MIT tech review nicely explains how it is the demand for laptops, TVs, and cars that use chips made with older technologies - that is at the heart of the current chip shortage (and not the type 1 chips that say go in iphone and macbooks).
This is pretty much at the core of what one of our clients - Mindgrove - has been saying. Below is a short video we made around this theme. It is always insightful to listen to these two speak. And it’s a privilege to help Mindgrove with story-lend marketing & brand consultancy (what we do at CoreVoice).
Simply put, a majority of chip customers can’t afford—or don’t want to pay for—the latest chips; a typical car today uses dozens of microchips, while an electric vehicle uses many more. It quickly adds up. Instead, makers of things like cars have stuck with chips made using older technologies.
What’s more, many of today’s most popular electronics simply don’t require leading-edge chips. “It doesn’t make sense to put, for example, an A14 [iPhone and iPad] chip in every single computer that we have in the world,” says Hassan Khan, a former doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who studied the public policy implications of the end of Moore’s Law and currently works at Apple. “You don’t need it in your smart thermometer at home, and you don’t need 15 of them in your car, because it’s very power hungry and it’s very expensive.
Thing 2
Rainbows are not arcs - actually they are full circles! Now you know!
May be they taught us this in school. May be they didn’t. At least I don’t remember learning that rainbows were actually full circles. But now I know. So do you. Here is the explanation.
The shape of a rainbow isn’t a “bow” or an “arc” at all, but rather a full circle. The only reason you see part of that full circle, under most conditions, is because the Earth itself (or other foreground features) are in the way, preventing you from seeing the entire rainbow at once.
Great, so now you know that exponential growth is actually just quadratic (doesn’t sound as fancy; I know) + 2 more things. See you soon. In the mean time, hope you get to do more of what brings you joy (like watching rainbows?) and less of what sucks it away. Best wishes!