Wayback Machine

Reverse-engineer companies to fast-forward experience

Shaan's research stack for studying companies: Wayback Machine for old homepages, TechCrunch sorted to a company's earliest mention, and Twitter advanced search to surface a person's most-liked old posts. The goal is to download data points fast because earning experience the slow way takes decades.

“And it's not that you can copy it, but it's just data points. It's a way to fast forward experience because experience the hard way is slow. It takes like decades to get good at things and to learn and to like, figure out what's normal, what's not, what's fast, what's slow, what's good, what's bad. And a better way to do it is to like download a whole bunch of data points quickly.”

Steal thisUse Wayback Machine, earliest-TechCrunch-mention, and Twitter advanced search to study how winners evolved and compress decades of experience.