You’ll be spending a summer learning about business and writing cases for the Commoncog Case Library.

The Commoncog Case Library is a library of business cases. A business case is a narrative of between 1000 to 5000 words, constructed from publicly available sources — books, podcasts, newspaper articles, and industry reports — about specific business situations.

What’s the Goal?

The long term goal of the Case Library project is to build the world’s largest library of business cases, organised according to business concepts.

You will be researching businesses and creating new cases for the Case Library. Over the course of three months, we will train you to look out for business concepts in books, podcasts, and articles.

The cases you create will be read by executives in billion dollar companies and investors in billion dollar hedge funds. These investors and operators are paying members of Commoncog.

The case library itself is built on top of some cognitive science, developed by the US military.

What You’ll Learn

You’re mostly going to learn about writing and about business:

• You’ll learn how to write better. We will be editing your cases with the goal of improving your writing.
• You’ll learn about business. I will train you to see business concepts in the wild, teach you how to dig into businesses narratives, and give you resources to turn into cases.
• You’ll also get to learn some Cognitive Flexibility Theory — the theory of expertise we are using to build this library. Ideally, after this internship, you will never read history the same way again.

About You

You are, in order of importance:

• A good writer. You should enjoy writing and reading. You’ll be evaluated for writing skill as a prerequisite for this job.
• Someone who enjoys getting to the bottom of things, in order to get at the truth.
• A hard worker — reading and writing things that you enjoy is all well and good, but we expect you to put in the hours to get good. We promise to train you; we expect you to hold up your end of the bargain.
• We prefer writers who are not too far off from Singapore, due to timezones. Singapore’s timezone is GMT+8. You should be able to attend remote meetings held in the afternoon, on Singapore time.
• (Optional): History majors are a plus!
• (Optional): You are curious about protocols or crypto and want an edge in protocol investing.

How Much?

You’ll be paid S$1000 a month. This would be a full-time, fully remote internship, that will last the length of the summer (about three months).

The job scope:

• You’ll spend your time consuming and chasing down source material: reading books, listening to podcasts, doing research on the Internet, and writing.
• You’ll be talking to me and to other Commoncog folk.
• We’ll be doing editing calls together — you’ll edit either with me or with another Commoncog writer.
• You’re expected to attend a weekly editorial meeting. This will be a video call.

Next Steps

If you’re interested, email me at cedric [at] commoncog.com and include a resume. Your email title can just be one line: Interested in [name of job (grab the title of this job posting)].

(To reiterate: we currently prefer working with folks in the same timezone, with a preference for Singapore at the moment.)

You’ll receive two tests.

• In the first test, I’ll require you to submit a short writing sample about a personal experience.
• If you pass the first test, I’ll pay you S$200 for a second test. This will be a test case, which is not too difficult, but representative of the kinds of cases you’ll be doing during the internship. This test case will not be published, but you’ll still be paid a small amount as renumeration for your time.

What kinds of writing am I looking for? You may take a look at Commoncog, or browse the existing cases in the Case Library. In short, the writing I expect you to do is best described as: non-formal, optimised for clarity, using an active voice, in the classic style.

You’ll receive a response within three days of receiving the second test.

Who Am I?

My name is Cedric Chin, and I’m responsible for Commoncog.

If you’re in Singapore, the following references may make sense to you: I helped create the NUS Hackers back when I was a student. (I created Friday Hacks and organised the first Hack&Roll). More importantly, I did the org design for the club, which persists till today.

From late 2014-2017 I ran the Vietnam engineering office for a Singapore company, where I helped my boss pivot the company from consulting to product, and then helped him bootstrap the business to S$4.5m in annual revenue. At the end of my tenure there, I hired three people to replace me and left. In 2019-2020 I helped Holistics reposition their company and doubled their annual recurring revenue in eight months, without any additional marketing spend.

I spend most of my time working on Commoncog’s Case Library, and a small amount of time on other bets. The Case Library is likely going to be a multi-decade effort. Training you is worthwhile for this reason: this is both a way to test training methods, as well as an investment in the writing ecosystem that Commoncog has access to.

I look forward to working with you.