CEO and co-founder of Kief Studio. Full-stack developer and strategist. Perplexity AI Business Fellow. In tech since 2012.
https://ameliasgagne.com146 articles
A single disruption to lean, just-in-time production cost the global auto industry an estimated $210 billion in lost revenue in 2021, per consulting firm AlixPartners. An antifragile business reads a shock like that differently: not as a catastrophe to survive, but as information to...
Roughly 15,600 developers from more than 1,400 companies have built the Linux kernel, described by the Linux Foundation as the largest collaborative project in the history of computing, and no manager ever assigned most of that work (Linux Foundation, 2017). The mechanism underneath...
Survivorship bias overstates the typical mutual fund's reported returns by roughly 1.6 percentage points a year, according to the University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices: surviving U.S. stock funds averaged 8.8 percent over the decade ending 2003, while counting...
In a set of experiments published in 2011, people who assembled a plain IKEA storage box valued it 63 percent higher than an identical prebuilt one. The IKEA effect, named by the researchers who ran that study, is the bias that makes you overvalue what you built yourself. It quietly...
The safest record is the one you never collected. Data minimization treats retention as liability, not free storage, and builds deletion in as a default.
An MIT study found 95 percent of AI pilots showed no bottom-line impact. The AI last-mile problem is why: the demo is easy, and the integration into a real workflow is the whole project.
Every system has one bottleneck governing its output. The theory of constraints explains why improving anything else is wasted motion, and why the constraint always moves the moment you break it.
Give people a felt safety margin and many of them spend it. Risk compensation shows up in ABS brakes, MFA, and backup tools alike. The fix is to build so protection is invisible and cannot be traded away.
In a randomized colonoscopy trial, a longer, gentler-ending procedure was remembered as less unpleasant. That is the peak-end rule: memory is built from the peak and the end, not the average. Here is how to design both on purpose.
Automation is worth it for repetitive, reversible work. But the tasks you should never automate hide accountability and remove the human who catches the exception.
The whole industry optimizes to remove friction. But the case for friction is that a deliberate pause, a verification step, a rate limit, a cooling-off window, filters bots and bad actors, cuts regret and fraud, and protects the user.
A newly exposed cloud server gets its first probe in about 52 seconds. Small website attacks are automated and constant, not a big-company problem. Secure-by-construction absorbs the baseline.
