¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Build in public. Trust the process.

Being ok accepting the wisdom and the joy of failure is a gift of the universe. Being humbled opens your mind to the full process of learning. And you have to be willing to suck at something for a while, until you decide to get better and improve.

I’m this incredibly connected world, anyone that endeavors to stay “current” drinks from a firehose of information. And, from that fountain, it’s arguable how much of any individual drop makes a difference in our lives. But, for so many reasons we continue to try. Some for entertainment. Some to commune. Some panhandling for little bits of gold that might change this lot in life.

For most of my life I would frame this as a novel problem. But, over time, I’ve come to realize that everyone suffers from the flywheel effect created by humanity. You have billions of people spending their lives to make things go faster, cost less, scream louder, and push on our dopamine centers just a little harder. And in this great Darwinian morass a few people make outsized discoveries. And when they do, the volume ratchets up and the world seems to spin faster. We create our own collective cultural suffering.

In this lies the challenge. If you spend all your time trying to understand the edge of culture, you aren’t spending much time thinking differently. And “thinking differently” is not a programmed task. It’s consigning to wander around alone, learn different/offbeat things, and generally be misunderstood a lot.

This is why contrarians and sociopaths do so well as founders. The physiologically aren’t wired to care what others think. And, trying to think like a contrarian is a skill I want to develop. I don’t want to lead as a contrarian, but looking at markets and opportunities and I need to build the skill to more fluidly look at all sides of an idea. (Finding consensus is a natural skill for me, and on this case my Achilles heel…I’ll never do anything special if I can’t think differently.)

Living, doing, and thinking different is something to be cultivated. We’ve been made to think it’s easy through purchasing the right product and dressing certain way. But that’s just another form of co-opted conformity.

(Listening to this podcast)

Recruit – Work of recruiting more than any other activity. Awesome people bring you more awesome people. They push your thinking and raise your standards.

Influence – Your ability to drive change is about the quality of your relationship, not your place in the hierarchy. At many times people with the most influence don’t follow the order of the hierarchy.

Digital breadcrumbs – look for things people have done, it’s the best ways to show how they think. Look for old writing/likes/relationships, etc. In the average all these interactions are this person’s potential.

Look for Primitives – lots of writing & conversations focus on new/edge/interesting. Look for the primaries that have longevity below the surface.

Avoid Transactional People – slow down & play an infinite game. This frustrates transactional people and they move on.

Build APIs to other people’s brain – It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters what people hear. Thing hard/deep about what these people want and what they care about. Use this to make sure they hear/see you.

Nice thought from Julie Zhou (her words below)

The job of data is to help you understand the ground truth of what is going on (with your product, user behavior, the market, etc.) Intuition works if you’ve studied something deeply, but it does not serve you well in:

1. Making decisions for contexts you don’t understand
2. Generalizing predictions at huge scale / complexity
3. Optimizing the impact of many tiny decisions

“Treat with design” means that once you understand what is happening in detail—what is the problem? What’s possible (from benchmarks)? Where are the opportunities? Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. 

I’ve been thinking about how AI could make small business make smarter choices. But it begs a question about growth/success. If you had to choose, does success come from better than average hygiene/decisions, or does it come from operating at a scale that makes bad decisions less lethal?

Obviously you need both. But, if you built AI business intelligence for a small business making ~5M/yr, could the intelligence be valuable enough to move the needle? I love the idea of building a company that helps small businesses punch above their weight, but a lot of that weight comes from scale.

I guess you could start by making individual components if SMB better, as other successful companies have done…

• Lower cost on acquisition – Hubspot, mailChimp, googleAds, FB Ads
• Better cash mgmt- quickbooks/peach tree, etc
• Ecom store/ops – Shopify

The question I’m wondering is if there is a layer that lays over these systems helping make better decisions? Or does that layer only develop with scale, and the smaller you get the more it’s just a kit if parts?

It’s not surprising to me that almost every movement in tech is correlated with some sort of oversupply.

• Dotcom boom – huge supply of people flooding the internet wanting to explore, shop, be entertained
• Mobile boom – huge expansion of connected hours with people in smart phones, and cost of risk was low b/c the economy was poor from GFC
• Crypto boom – people had excess time and money from pandemic and stim checks
• AI boom – lots of laid off tech workers who know how to build, and it takes less effort to build (supply of brains and time.)

Businesses are built on demand, but booms are fueled by supply.

I heard a nice analogy to AI this morning: Coca Cola needed refrigeration before it could build its business.

I think this platform flows to AI. All sorts of businesses will be rebuilt and reimagined using AI. This is where incumbents have the advantage. But if you built an AI migration agent, you could pretty easily move data away from one app to the next schema. (And create accounts that need to be reviewed if the data doesn’t look correct.)

So back to the original point, spending time following all these niche evolutions is how you learn. And everything with AI right now is learning in public. This won’t always be the case, once this hype cycle substitutes for the next, much of the learning and experimentation likely goes back inside the companies.

I have to imagine it’s very tough to be in a Series-B/C stage start-up at the moment.

You made it through the pandemic and probably even raised a really nice round because money was just sloshing around like crazy. Then all of a sudden, growth dies up, the money dries up, you probably had to do some layoffs, and your product roadmap is packed. You have a lot of tech/product people who have worked really hard to rationalize all the features they’re working on, doing more with less. And in the process, they’ve all become very committed to the path forward, so they aren’t interested in changing the plan.

Then, almost out of nowhere, this rush of AI happens, stunning everyone. You know that if you had your head around the technology, you could probably operate more efficiently/faster. Your developers definitely start using co-pilot, which just proves the point of how powerful this could be. But it was so hard to hire people over the last few years, you really don’t have any depth to go run after AI-based features. More than this, you’re not sure yet what would move the needle with your customers. And your team is emotionally committed to very gradual product improvements.

It reminds me of the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Arc when Indiana Jones has just rescued this idol that he’s been searching for and researching forever. (The idol, in this case, is your valuation/funding/reputation/prestige.) And you can’t get out of the cave and escape the boulder rolling after you because you left your bullwhip at the entrance of the cave. The only person (or in this case, AI) who could help you get out of your predicament is holding your bullwhip just on the other side of a large pit you need to jump over. “Throw me the idol, and I give you the whip”, he says. Do you give up all your fame in order to fight on, or are you so in love with your idol you stand there in a daze and get crushed by the boulder?

Easy to decide when you’re watching the movie, but the decision isn’t as obvious when you’re playing the role.

OK, in the span of my morning workout, I’ve managed to get fired up about this idea, spin up blog and a twitter account, and sync them all on my phone between sets of exercises.

God we live in amazing times.