Blog on Nate Sullivan

education, not training

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:59:03 -0400

If I read another article talking about how kids “need to learn how to use AI to succeed in the future” I’m going to lose my mind.

First of all, these people are all talking about LLMs and non-deterministic, prompt based tools. They’re not talking about, you know, building a photo recognition data pipeline or whatever.

But that means that you don’t have to learn HOW to use the tools. You can’t learn how, because it’s a language powered black box. You just USE it. What you need to do to use AI well is:

(A) know something about what you’re asking it to do, because it doesn’t actually know anything and has trouble detecting that’s the case

(B) understand how LLMs work, so you’re not confused, deluded, or enraged by them

You don’t need ChatGPT class or whatever, and the second someone proposes it I know they have no idea what they’re dealing with.

Beating the System

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:40:59 -0400

I find software and technology very interesting, and I’ve worked at related startup companies for most of my career. But I’ve become less and less interested in what most companies are building, and definitely less interested in what the companies I’ve gotten to work for have been building. For a long time, it’s been hard to explain what I find so uninteresting and occasionally distasteful about the direction of things. While there are plenty of well documented ill-effects of technology to talk about, even working on the inside (albeit not in consumer facing scenarios most of the time) it was hard to come up with a quasi-unified theory of what was poisoning everyone’s brain and the larger culture.

Then, I figured it out. I’m sure other people have, and have probably written about it more eloquently, but for my own mental health I thought I might try to articulate it here.

The theme, over and over again, is an escape from responsibility. At this point, almost every idea seems to be an attempt to take an existing task, or job, or function, and reinvent where the person who gets paid for doing it is somehow insulated from whatever effort or accountability existed in previous versions of said work. This is not a comprehensive list, but if you just follow the key innovations of the Millennial Internet Experience, this pattern becomes pretty obvious.

Napster: you get music, for free, from other people, through a platform that facilitates this exchange but takes no accountability for it, and denies that it exists to facilitate this exchange

Facebook: originally built for connection, Facebook quickly evolved into an information platform, where it distributed and actively promoted things to you that you would normally get from newspapers, television, magazines, etc. without any accountability for what those things were, whether they were stolen, false, scams, etc.

YouTube: exact same removal of accountability for distribution and promotion, but the main focus was on taking control of distribution rights from people who made video/film/tv content, and then negotiating a profit share with those owners from a position with all the leverage (i.e., “we made a million dollars off your movie, would you like $20k or not”)

Crypto: anonymous, unregulated money, mostly to commit crimes with

Gig Work: we don’t have employees, we just make money off of dashers and drivers and day laborers and everything else, but these people are not our responsibility in any way

Metaverse: what if there were no building permits, no infrastructure, hell, no physical environment at all? Everything is pretend, and pretend things don’t have rules!

LLMs: a little bit of YouTube (normalizing theft), and a little bit of Facebook (“we didn’t do anything, it’s the algorithm, here’s how you can nudge it slightly, so honestly this is actually mostly your fault”)

Which brings us to “Agents”. We’ve had automation forever — we used to call it “programming”, kids — but never for one second did we think that we weren’t responsible for automations we programmed and then deployed. Even for things more complicated than giant if/then decision trees, where our program “decided” something, like who was in a picture, or how aggressive to be in a board game simulation, obviously the guy who set all of those parameters and thresholds (and, in our weaker moments, random number generators) was actually responsible for what the software did, right?

… right?

I should have known, given the history of technology and my proximity to it, what everyone’s fever dream would be with something like this — total lack of any accountability whatsoever. After all, you can dodge a ton of responsibility by positioning yourself correctly as a “platform” that connects two sides of a transaction where you don’t actually do anything, but ultimately there’s also a limited amount you can claim to do, and thus charge money for. But what if you owned a piece of software that could do everything a person can do in a given situation, and was understood to be completely independent from you, but couldn’t be held accountable like one? Obviously you can’t be held accountable for the actions of a completely independent, decision-making entity working on behalf of someone else, right?

… right?

The utility of any of this has always been vaguer and murkier than the utility of not being responsible or accountable for anything your product does, even when your product is out there doing stuff in the real world. This isn’t a technology innovation as much as a societal one, and from a societal perspective, it’s a bad innovation. A world where no one is responsible for anything is a bad world, we know this, we’ve experienced it, and yet capital has this absolute obsession with getting itself there. It’s literally all they care about now.

How do you get people to accept an obviously crappier social dynamic, though? Well, go back to the list.

Napster: All the music that was made because people could pay for it — well, you can have it now! For free!

Facebook: See what your friends are up to! Maybe get famous!

YouTube: Watch and share whatever you want whenever you want! Maybe get famous!

Crypto: Commit crimes! Get rich by doing nothing!

Gig Work: Be your own boss!

Metaverse: Be what you wish you were, not what you are!

LLMs: Pretend to talk to someone who knows you! Generate tons of plausible looking stuff with no effort!

These are all carrots used to make it impossible to say no to a new arrangement (even if that new arrangement is logically dependent on the old arrangement like Napster was and YouTube probably is), just because the value is so high. Some of these carrots are better than others, and you can see their impact in the uptake of things. Crypto is sort of languishing in its normal niche of criminals and speculators because the mass market doesn’t really want to commit crimes or spend their money on confusing, erratic assets. The metaverse failed because it can’t actually deliver the experience it promised. YouTube took over the world because (a) an endless pipeline of every video you’d ever want to see is awesome, and (b) it inserted itself into the way video makes money, but didn’t completely undercut it right away, so there are still good videos to be had.

LLMs and other generative AI tools are testing their proposition now. I’d say it’s a mixed bag; the number of people who want to pretend their computer loves them is more than I’d like to see, but not high enough to build an empire. The benefit of shooting out effortless work paste at the click of a button is immediately and viscerally countered by the fact that you also get this crap from your bosses, co-workers, clients, etc., and in general people absorb more than they send so the sentiment appears to be pretty negative, and getting worse.

So back to Agents. In their own way, agents are supposed to remove most or all of the responsibility for taking action in the world, which is an absolutely massive societal change that, honestly, I think almost no one really wants. It doesn’t matter if an agent goes from 65% success to 95% success, the entire thing hinges on the fundamentals of who is responsible for the action being taken. If that were addressed to people’s satisfaction, there are a million things you’d accept a 65% success rate for. If it’s not addressed to people’s satisfaction, 99.95% is not going to be good enough, because these things are computers and are going to do trillions of things, which means it’s going to break fifty billion times or whatever and all those people are going to demand recourse.

If the capital and companies pushing Agent Society so hard had a clever answer for this, or were clearly running some sort of Manhattan-Project-style effort to figure one out, I’d probably be really interested in working on agents and both the technology and society behind them. But they don’t (otherwise we’d be hearing about it), and they aren’t working on it because they don’t care. The purpose of agents is to remove responsibility and accountability as efficiently as possible. If that means pushing it to you, or the government, or the legal system, so be it, but those chips are going to fall where they may, because like YouTube, the appeal of Agent Society is going to be so overwhelming to people and businesses that they’re going to accept it.

Now, you won’t be surprised to hear that I happen to think this is wrong. Not unlike the immediate negative counter response you get from sending lazy LLM slop to coworkers, where everyone ELSE uses LLMs to send YOU lazy LLM slop that you have to deal with, accountability-free Agents make you feel the pain of their existence pretty quickly. When you send an agent to buy something, and it buys the wrong thing with your money, are you getting a refund? Will the agent do it? Will it battle with another agent? What if it fails? What if it lies? What if it buys MORE stuff with your money? Who is paying for all of this?

Just keep following this down the obvious rabbit hole. Maybe you have to approve every purchase. Okay, fine, but obviously that cuts into the productivity benefit of this. And in that case… what else do you need to approve? Does it bring you hundreds of stupid little approvals? Does it go down stupid paths that burn compute, or worse, your actual real-world resources? If you need to approve while it’s asleep, what do you do? What if one approval is necessary at the very beginning of a time-sensitive project, and you leave your agent unattended? Were you aware of this? Is anyone responsible for making you aware of it? Not today!

Again, you could go on with this forever, and a world where we’re trying to figure this out or solve it in a more realistic way than “the model will be so good it will figure out how to solve it” is a world where I probably want to work on this stuff. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not why there’s such a maniacal focus on this particular set of technologies. “The model will become so good…” is the only real answer from the industry precisely because it’s the only one where they can all wipe their hands of responsibility and pass it off to something else — the technology itself. They’ll just own it, and rent it. You can argue with your computer about whose fault the bad outcomes are.

If it’s not obvious, (and I suspect it’s not) this is not an anti-AI rant. I have a lot of specific AI beef, but ultimately that comes with any technology. Instead, it’s almost just a sense of melancholy over the direction of my industry, and the realization that a lot of my friends and colleagues just don’t really care about any of this. For them, there’s no pattern here, no real intent — it’s just progress, and where the animal spirits have taken the world. You can be anti-AI, or anti-Big Tech, or whatever, and there’s a mental model for that just because so many people are angry and exhausted by the world today, and the world is dominated by a couple of key technology players. But the lack of character in the industry — not just outright morals, but like, I dunno, a shared sense of responsibility not just for world-ending science fiction scenarios, but basic decency in how what we do will impact the society we were able to grow up in — is just gross, and as somebody now in my mid-40s I can tell you that it’s slowly been getting worse for a very, very long time. It’s not that things shouldn’t evolve or change. It’s that changing them thoughtlessly, or making the consequences of those changes somebody else’s problem without telling them, is just a crappy thing to do, and that should be obvious.

After two decades of consistently doing so, I haven’t worked for a tech startup since the Summer of 2025. I’ve looked at a lot of jobs since then, and to be honest, the vast, vast majority of them feel gross and uninspiring. It turns out that being desperate to make ends meet really helps you look past a lot, and in that way, not being desperate has been a huge problem for me. Maybe that problem will get “fixed”, and good old “there but for the grace of God go I” American society will kick me in the crotch, as it often does to so many people. In that case, I’ll be back to making landing pages for AI-powered debt collection call centers or whatever because I can’t afford not to, and life will go on.

I’ll probably have to delete this post, though, if I’m being honest.

"Vote for This Sleazy Lunatic"

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:13:08 -0400

Maybe I should just continue endlessly posting societal questions that were answered thirty years ago by The Simpsons. It's a rich vein to mine, honestly.

At any rate, here's Spencer Pratt, a reality TV "actor"/producer who is almost my exact same age but who doesn't appear to have ever had a job of any sort, running for mayor of Los Angeles, because why not?

“On the phone a few minutes later, Pratt sounds relaxed, candidly acknowledging that he doesn’t have an “answer to every question. That’s why I go around and I try to talk to people and hear what people’s issues are.” He’s a neophyte politician but seems to have a natural ease when talking with voters. “I don’t ever feel like I can get trapped because I don’t know the answer to something. I’ll tell somebody, ‘I don’t have the answer to that. I’ll look into it. I’ll get back to you.’"

We've done this. Not just the whole "elect the reality TV guy because we're bored" thing, but more importantly, the "I am tired of dissatisfying answers, let's get some satisfying ones" protest votes. There's another line in that Post editorial where two voters agree that "at least he's change". Sure! Why not vote for a tree stump? The current mayor is not a tree stump! No mayor has EVER been a tree stump!

But don't take my word for it. Listen to Springfield Sanitation Commissioner Ray Patterson. I know we're going to continue falling for this over and over again, forever, because that's just what we do. But every once in a while I like to remind people that it is, technically, a choice we make.

Are they saying "boo" or "boo-urns?"

Mon, 18 May 2026 16:05:57 -0400

Sometimes I find it hard to motivate myself to put together my thoughts about society into thoughtful, coherent arguments simply because it's unnecessary — all you really need to do is watch the first 9 or so seasons of The Simpsons and you'll understand everything around you.

Do the people hate the movies? Maybe. Do the people hate Mister Burns? Probably, I guess? But it doesn't really matter, because they definitely hate movies that reflect everything they hate about Mister Burns.

On a completely related note, this exact scenario is happening all over the place as rich, powerful people lecture new graduates about artificial intelligence technology they, in all likelihood, understand very little about. Booing a commencement speaker isn't the kind of thing that gets me riled up one way or another, but I think the media reactions to this are a useful illustration of how everyone is interpreting what this kind of thing means, and I think they happen to be wrong about it.

For one, I don't think a lot of these kids are mad about AI taking jobs. I certainly don't think the idea, or the ceaseless messaging of it helps, but the idea of a career is still a weird, ill-formed thought when you're 22-ish and sitting at your graduation. Jobs come and go, and it's not like it's ever been especially easy for a new graduate to just jump into a job, let alone one they don't despise.

But I do think almost all normal people are absolutely done with being told how everything is going to work by a pretty small group of people who (a) don't have to live inside this new reality, whatever it ends up being, because they already have enough money to build whatever kind of life they want, and (b) never face any consequences for being wrong about these predictions, which they're constantly making. People like that talk a certain way, and it sounds like this:

“You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

This is an insane way to talk to anyone, but an especially insane way to talk to a bunch of people who just spent four years on college diplomas. Schmidt sounds like a third-world dictator, and if you've forgotten, those guys are not usually very popular. But I bet you're not allowed to boo him in most of the places he talks, so maybe he was caught off-guard by the reaction.

“Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with.”

I'm sure he did. And while I appreciate the sentiment, Eric Schmidt is not debating anything with these people — he's lecturing to them while they have to sit there and wait to get their diplomas! And just so it's clear I'm not picking on Eric here, this is how all these guys talk. Yes, they're excited about the technology, but much more than that, they're just obsessed with getting you to build your life around it. In case you're too young or have forgotten, we had lunatics pushing internet adoption back in the 90s, too. But that excitement was almost entirely powered by possibilities (and, not coincidentally, a bunch of non-profit, open source protocols and technologies owned by no one) and really didn't require anyone to do anything they didn't want to do. For every Comic Book Guy arrogantly telling you that you'd be buying your groceries on your computer, there were hundreds of nerds just excited to show you how a message board worked, or who were happy to simply use the internet without you.

This is what brings up people's guards, and eventually turns to anger. There is just an underlying lack of real, organic belief in this technology by its biggest advocates, and you can smell it a mile a way. It's a bunch of already rich guys telling you the world needs to change in a direction that benefits them even more, and that you really, really need to make it happen.

If your hand tightens around your wallet when you hear that kind of thing, no one should blame you.

Layoffs

Tue, 05 May 2026 21:53:08 -0400

To downsize, or not to downsize? That is the question, apparently.

See, my theory is that this is because tasers are real, and Coinbase is not. Real things — workers required. Pretend things? Sure, agents. Do everything with agents. Or don't! Who cares?

The Journey

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:29:03 -0400

Struggling to make software work is a really specific type of experience, and you either get that mental place or you don't. As an objectively poor developer, I avoid writing code whenever possible, which is why I spend a lot of time using stuff like Bubble. But I'm not vibe-coding — every time my application doesn't do what it was supposed to, it's because of me. And when I actually figure out what's wrong, and change it, it stays that way and I move onto something else.

I think one of the reasons I've found LLM-based vibe-coding so unsatisfying has been the fact that it fundamentally alters this experience. If you're purely looking to make a computer do something, and you're not very good at that (I qualify for that designation), I get that just asking for it to happen a couple times may be a faster and ultimately better way to make the computer do it.

(It's also entirely possible that it's not faster and/or not better — this is a different discussion, but an important one for another time.)

But... it's absolutely not flexing the same muscles as building with a deterministic system. It's not using them less, it's actually not using them at all. If you've never flexed them, you might not notice. You might have a long back and forth with a chatbot, iterating on some idea, and think you've entered the sort of "flow state" your developer friends have talked about. You have not. Seriously, I am telling you, you have totally not done this. You may be in some other sort of state, and maybe that state has value, or maybe it's the future of work, or maybe you're just a guy hitting "refresh" and hoping for a different outcome, but you are not doing the thing.

Again, it's not about code. It's about systems, learning them, altering them, and ultimately mastering them. You interact with a lot of systems with code, and I suck at that, and I know that I suck at it because I've done it more than I probably should have, and I've been evaluated and coached and critiqued (heavily) by people who are really good at it. For me, failure was common, but success did happen sometimes and it's an unforgettable feeling. When I vibe-code decent stuff, it doesn't feel anything like that.

The Agency Model

The best thing I can compare this sort of thing to is working with an agency. If you've never been able to hire one, suddenly having Claude or whatever at your beck and call is probably thrilling. And sure, you can tell a chatbot to interact with you a certain way, to "partner" with you, or pretend you're pair programming even if you don't know how to program, and it will indulge you. But guess what? So will a lot of agencies. You're the customer, dummy! They'll tell you whatever you want if you let them.

I've had more or less involved roles with different agencies. I've sat there and barked orders, I've been hands off, and I've tried to save money by doing pieces of the work myself. It doesn't matter — asking for stuff is different than figuring out stuff. Really building software is not asking for things; it's doing things and creating iron-clad decision trees for things and tweaking things so that they must do what you want. No one is coming to help you. No one is going to just make it work, especially not your computer.

It doesn't have to be about building apps, either. People configure complex IT or DevOps systems, CRMs, automations, and other stuff this way, and a lot of those people get the same runner's high when they master these systems and bend them to their will.

I can't predict the future. But I can't shake the feeling that regardless of how anyone feels about any given tool, moving these experiences, these journeys, to non-deterministic finger crossing is going to create more problems than it solves. I think there's a reason many of the people most excited about eliminating the journey are people who aren't on it very often.

Narratives

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:23:55 -0400

I've had a lot of fun and done some cool things working at companies that lose more money than they make, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's the healthiest environment. It is — by definition — an inherently untenable situation, which creates both urgency and nagging sense of existential dread. Maybe you find that motivating (I do, sometimes!), but more often than not I've found it eventually lead to paranoia and panic.

Even weirder, success in this world is often more distorting than failure, because it's so tied to fundraising and valuations. That might seem reasonable enough, until you consider that the first thing is just "someone giving you money with no oversight or rules", and the second thing is using the first thing as proof that you're making progress.

I've been doing this for a long time now, but I've never quite seen an environment like this, where two companies operating entirely inside this sort of business mirror dimension are just throwing billion-dollar-losing haymakers at each other in the hopes of being... declared the winner, I guess?

As of this post in March of 2026, it seems clear to me that Anthropic is clearly winning the perception war. Maybe that's because they're inherently less shady (although possibly more fundamentally deluded) than OpenAI, or maybe it's because they were smart enough to focus on selling to non-users (business people) instead of today's broke-ass consumers. Or maybe it's that OpenAI has been around longer, burning money longer, and is simply closer to reaching the logical, obvious end state of a company like this where it starts flailing around and trying to monetize things people only like because they're free.

Either way, Anthropic is "winning", and that means OpenAI is "losing". Are they both losing unsustainable amounts of money? Yes! Are they both relying on fundamental changes to society that don't appear to be happening yet (mass AI adoption and huge productivity improvements across white-collar work), while ignoring fundamental changes to society that do appear to be happening right in front of us (the internet it needs to function/improve turning into a cesspool of AI spam)? Most certainly, yes!

But... Anthropic is winning, you see. They're WINNING! Claude is COOL, man! It's got momentum! Have you made your crappy single page custom notes app, yet?

(Oh, I have.)

Look, a lot of this is fine. Startups need to spend money, take big swings, and figure it out later. I myself have advocated for this many times, in fact. But this whole era is taking the concept beyond even my wild desires for the ambitions of venture backed companies, largely because I never envisioned the entire economy placing one large combined bet on, essentially, one technology spread out among maybe five companies, two of which have never been in the black for one second and have no clear path to ever getting there and seemingly feel no obligation to even consider the issue.

The "winning the narrative" thing is like "winning free agency" in sports. I get where it comes from, and I get why people get excited, and I get the relevance of the challenge on the actual results of the real games that occur several months later. But we give free agency the level of primacy it gets because we're bored and there are no games at the time. We don't just replace the season with it. There are actual games to be played that matter way more!

There's a lot of hand-waving going on with the AI industry, and tech in general right now, for sure. But even when Amazon was sinking money for years and years, they could very clearly and cogently explain that choice to you. The upsides, the downsides, and how if push came to shove they could pivot to making money in a matter of weeks or months.

That's just really different than where we are now. I kinda think the people in charge know that, but the longer this goes on, the less sure I am about it, and the less confident I am in any kind of graceful landing here.

Major Scale

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:14:53 -0400

One thing I think a LOT of smart people misunderstand is that the power of computers is always SCALE. Computers are very fast, don't get tired, and they have no shame. If you are smart, you can point those characteristics in useful directions — and people have been doing exactly that for decades.

Large language models — especially the really, really large language models that dominate discourse and investment in 2026 — are definitely an example of this. Computers can't understand things, but they can identify extremely subtle patterns in data sets that are too massive for a person to even comprehend, and then simply respond to inputs as those patterns would. How they use those patterns to formulate output can be tweaked, or adjusted, or even randomized because all of that is just math and computers will never get tired of doing math, no matter what boring or weird or disgusting thing you make them turn that math into.

People respond to patterns too, although people are both much better and much worse at pattern recognition. They're worse because they'll never operate at the scale of a computer network, but at the same time they are vastly better at finding patterns outside of prescribed data sets, or even working with completely unstructured data they've never worked with before.

Basically:

People are slow, but they can be "prompted" by literally anything, including things like feelings, instincts, and other elements of existence that we can't even fully articulate.

Computers are very fast, but you have to structure things for them (you can try to get a computer to structure things, and sometimes with enough patterns to consult it'll figure it out, but it'll miss tons and tons of relationships that are obvious to any person).

There's a huge mistake being made (and frequently published) by even very smart, often technically competent people. That mistake is believing that human thinking is simply this kind of pattern matching done at almost incomprehensible scale, but that if we're able to build software that can do it, we'll have computers that work like people. I'm not a neurologist (or whatever the appropriate discipline is) so I can't prove this point academically, but I have spent most of my time working with software engineers, data scientists, and venture capitalists, so I can tell you that this is exactly the kind of mistake these people have been making their entire careers.

But I'm not here to judge. Instead, I'm here to warn everyone — again — that the world-shaking impact of generative, model-based software ("AI") is not going to be its ability to replace what people do, because despite what everyone is extrapolating, we don't have a ton of evidence that a lot of important work can be done effectively by a pattern matching robot, no matter how much training data it has. I guess anything could happen, but the reason I'm not that interested in it is because "high competence" is not the most likely effect of scale. We didn't see it in cloud computing, social networking, cryptocurrency, or anything else we threw money at.

Instead, the most likely effect of scale is (1) more supply, and (2) more trash. It will probably become very, very, very cheap to get an image of basically anything you can describe generated by a computer using pattern matching. If you're willing to accept VC/hyperscaler-subsidized pricing, we're already there. An entirely separate question is "how good of an image can you get from pattern matching", which depends on everything from what the image is, to how you define "good", to whether you believe in the existence of any sort of intellectual property rights. That question is extremely important if you are looking to replace the actual image creation skills that exist today with cheap, high speed pattern matching, but it's not important at all if the goal involves making tons and tons of pattern-derived middling trash.

And that's the thing! There are many business models that involve leveraging the ability to make middling trash much more quickly and easily than before. The most obvious one is spam, which is both a huge business and something predicated entirely on scale, low-cost, and finding the minimum level of plausibility necessary to work. Sure, spam is also a huge social and economic problem because it exhausts people and erodes trust, but if you make money by making spam that's someone else's problem.

Music & Spam

Music now has a spam problem. More accurately, music's existing spam problem is now exponentially worse, to the point where it's challenging the viability of the entire economic enterprise. Now, I happen to think this will get slowed or resolved simply because there's so much money in music, and it's an industry that isn't new to the idea of protecting its intellectual property. Not all of that money is smart, but I think Spotify + Labels will be better at teaming up to protect their shared interests than an army of small-time grifters.

But there's a lesson here for other industries that might not be as ready to fight spam. This is the challenge that AI will create, and it's much scarier because unlike a lot of AI doom scenarios, it's not speculation or based on extrapolating massive capability improvements that don't exist yet but maybe seem possible if you squint or just raised a Series C. AI tools can generate better spam, more spam, and forms of spam that weren't viable five years ago, and it can do it right now. The spam is stupid, of course, but almost all spam is stupid, so it doesn't matter. In fact, while AI spam is stupid, it's often less stupid than non-AI spam, not because AI is so great but because spam is so bad. It's a legitimate revolution.

Honestly, I think the term "slop" for the AI detritus we're all seeing everywhere is pretty good, so I don't have a lot of pushback on it. But I do think we should remember that in most cases, slop has the same objectives as spam. It's not to replace the work we do, but instead to overwhelm society with scale so it can collect the economic value that ordinarily would go to the superior, "real" product. When spam succeeds, it's because it is so overwhelming that the distinctions between "good" and "merely plausible" go away, and whoever gets more at-bats wins by default. Spam always gets more at-bats than real work, and AI will always get more at bats than real content.

For all of the futurism and noodling about guaranteed income or whatever, there's no real reason to think this technology won't plug into actual, current economic behaviors and systems, and simply find the shortest path to money. That's how capitalism works, especially when unchecked, and the American capitalism of 2026 is more unchecked than any in my lifetime. So maybe AI will iterate for however long it takes to generate music as good as what people make, or to become a useful workflow tool that actually improves the work musicians do (please, please, learn to mix and EQ my tracks for me). But there's no maybe about it that AI will be used to extract value from existing markets at the expense of that market, its buyers, and its sellers by third parties, because it's an incredible tool for that.

It brings me no joy to predict this, but if I'm being honest, I expect this exact type of problem to be the defining legacy of everything we're calling "AI" today.

"Am I so out of touch?"

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:00:04 -0400

Some time around my freshman year of college, my Dad's company gave him a phone with Windows CE on it. It quickly became a running joke in my house, because the phone was both kind of incredible, and the dumbest thing in the world. Dad hated it, surely in part because he didn't like the idea of work trying to bother him at home, but also because he was an engineer and the phone was a truly bizarre collection of choices in resource allocation. It had a bunch of Windows-style bells and whistles that made it sort of feel like Windows, but was laughably bad at basically any task you'd ever actually want to do on the phone. It took forever to turn on. It was impossibly slow. Even getting and responding to an email was a huge chore with a fiddly little plastic stylus. If you had asked us in 2002 whether smartphones would take over the world in less than a decade, I think we would have had a good laugh.

The two major shifts that changed that trajectory were the Blackberry, and the iPhone. I never had a Blackberry, but I remember my wife's office giving her one temporarily for some reason, and the difference in philosophy was obvious. I have no idea how many different things the Blackberry did or presumed to do, but it was really, really good at reading and sending short emails. I know this because my wife (at the time) had zero experience doing anything productive on a smartphone — I'm not even sure we knew how to text each other yet — and within a couple hours she looked like a legislative aide trying to push a bill through committee. She was hooked to that thing, to the point that I made her promise not to keep it if they let her. But as a pure messaging product, the Blackberry was a home run because (at least at first) it made vastly better resource prioritization decisions and focused entirely on making the useful experience of triaging emails while on the go better.

The iPhone was an even more impressive achievement because it made Blackberry-level allocation and optimization decisions in service of Microsoft's much more ambitious goal, which was mobile, general purpose computing. And while, without a doubt, there were (and continue to be) amazing hardware innovations that made the iPhone idea work, they were all in service of software that was extraordinarily well-designed and built for the task. Multitouch hardware is cool, but multitouch hardware attached to an entire platform built around pinching and pulling and tapping actually solves many of the problems Windows CE simply stared at blankly and hoped people would accept.

Today, it's easy enough to think about my Dad's old phone (or "Pocket PC", or whatever it was called back then) and think that Microsoft basically had this right and just dropped the ball. But they never actually had it, because their "it" was just "small computers". They could have banged away at that for another twenty years with incrementally better hardware and made the horrendous, Start-menu-clicking Windows CE experience marginally better, but they never actually would have figured out what we have today. They were never going to solve a problem that required transcendently great software because they make shitty software and they don't think that's a problem. Instead, their solution was to push their laughably bad devices (sorry, "partner devices") to corporate customers and try to pressure the world into adopting them. In fact, it's a credit to Microsoft's incredible sales and distribution skills that people like my Dad even had these devices in their hands at all, as they provided almost zero utility, were pretty expensive, and generated absolutely no mainstream, organic demand. They were stupid, fundamentally broken, almost nobody wanted them, and yet through sheer force of dollars and executive desire, they were a real product category and frequently discussed in business media as "the future".

Sound familiar?

"No... it's the children who are wrong."

Ultimately, I think mobile "happened" because the software that powered it and defined the experience for the people using it made those massive leaps. The Blackberry made people realize the "tiny Windows PC" concept was stupid and insufficiently useful, and the iPhone gave people a fundamentally different way to interact with small devices that made them not just usable, but so usable that people became comfortable using them instead of desktops and laptops in many (most?) circumstances. There was no "adoption" problem because the products made obvious sense. In fact, at the enterprise level, the problem was backwards — companies didn't know how to deal with the fact that everyone wanted to use their mobile device for work, and they actually dragged their feet and tried to slow the whole thing down.

One of the massive red flags about this generation of "AI" technology is the increasingly frequent (to the point of being almost constant now) reference to those pesky "adoption" problems. I get a little salty about "adoption" because it's the kind of thing people complain to Product Marketing about, and feel like my team should be able to fix, or have prevented in the first place. And sure, every so often, there's an awareness or education problem, and that's something we can tackle. But much more frequently, people are aware of what we want them to do, and they do know how to do it. They just don't want to do it, dislike the process of doing it, or don't think it's worth the effort. As a last ditch effort, I can always argue with them about it, but the honest truth is that if you're arguing, you're losing. We probably just made something no one wants or needs, or maybe even something that is actively bad.

Windows CE had adoption problems, too. I guess we could have written op-eds about how the world of 2002 needed to "transform itself" into a "mobile-first" world — I assume people wrote these, honestly — but none of that actually happened because the world wasn't going to reorganize itself to mitigate the problems of new, unproven products caused by shitty, uncreative software. In reality, the world only grudgingly adapted once transcendently great software made these products shockingly, undeniably useful for interacting with the world around them. Adaptation is a reaction, after all. Businesses don't preemptively adapt to anything unless they really enjoy wasting time and money.

If generative AI actually matters, its utility or ease of use will force the changes today's investors and consultants are insistent that we make ahead of time — a trail to be blazed, so to speak, versus a red carpet to be rolled out. To the extent those changes exist today, they have very little to do with legitimate business and a lot more to do with society, as generative AI's most dramatic efficiency improvement so far has been the creation of spam, slop, and disinformation. The world really is scrambling to adapt to massive adoption of the technology by bad actors, because their preferred workflows really are better with software that uses this technology. It's disgusting and gross, but it's not illogical, and it doesn't require think pieces on adoption.

But these use cases, in addition to being socially dubious, are also pretty niche in the grand scheme of things. For returns that justify the investments being made, it's going to take great, innovative software that turns whatever value exists in probability-based asset generation into something useful and accessible to people. Hilariously though, the one legitimate area this technology seems to be impacting is... creative software development! That's right — creating derivative, marginally customized versions of software that have existed forever is now incredibly cheap, and incredibly compelling to companies. So while what the industry desperately needs is a completely new set of original software ideas, that same industry is aggressively discouraging craft and originality in software. In short, I don't believe generative AI will really matter to the broader economy (outside of unsustainable data center expenditures) by remixing old ideas and conventions. It's just not that kind of innovation. We got away with — and I personally profited from — twenty years of building cloud-based versions of things that we knew people wanted and needed. And while it didn't work every time, there were tons and tons AND TONS of cases where that made sense, and simply bolting "internet" onto something useful made it better for a variety of reasons. That same approach is clearly being taken by today's AI founders (stick AI onto things), but the benefits of AI are way, way more nebulous, the downsides more obvious, and the costs higher than anything in the cloud era, and you're seeing that manifest in the "adoption problem" that simply isn't going away.

There's some amount of time you can just charge ahead and hope some version of Moore's Law becomes apparent and everything just becomes easier on its own. That certainly seems to be the plan, albeit one crafted and promoted by a bunch of executives my age and younger who have been drafting off of the actual Moore's Law their entire professional lives. I'm not sure they know what else to try, which is yet another reason why I think this is going to end very, very badly.

Push, push, push

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:00:39 -0400

Football has always had problems, but from a fan experience perspective, it was basically the perfect setup for a long, long time. The sport simply owned Sunday afternoons, and in many ways, Monday night, not just because it was popular, but because it was so well engineered. No baseball/basketball/hockey-style fatigue or regular season grind, everything happening at once, everything important all the time. The league printed money, dominated TV and culture, and set whatever terms it wanted in everything it did.

But... it wasn't enough. And it never will be. Now, football is on too much. Thursday night games suck. There are random bad games in Europe at odd hours. The 16 game schedule is now 17 games, with a corresponding increase in injuries that make the results a little less about skill, and a little more about depth and attrition. Instead of just being "on", games are gated behind stupid services like Peacock, and Amazon Prime. Things are basically the same, just a little bit worse every year.

People can feel it. Football is still a dominant money machine, but almost no one is a fan of the direction the league is moving. And even that's not enough, because nothing is enough. Now the owners want 18 games, consequences be damned.

"I want to tell you guys that we're going to push like the dickens now to make international [games] more important with us," Kraft told the "Zolak & Bertrand" show. "Every team will go 18 [regular-season games] and two [preseason games] and eliminate one of the preseason games, and every team every year will play one game overseas."

I gotta tell you, I hate that everything is like this. We sometimes reprimand my intense, ambitious daughter for constantly pushing the envelope in an attempt to get the most out of things, or move them in the direction she wants. "Push, push, push", my wife will say, to remind her how exhausting it is to have even wonderful things stretched and exploited and distorted until they become frustrating facsimiles of themselves.

For our sake, we hope she reigns it in as she grows up, but if I'm being honest, I don't think it's a quality that will keep her from being successful. Maybe she'll own an NFL team.

Abolishing Things

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:48:16 -0400

I get why people are hesitant to abolish large parts of the government. I also get why, despite this, more and more people want to abolish the Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE) agency.

While ICE's recent psychopathic-clown-show tactics have put it under a particularly bright spotlight, ultimately I think people want to "abolish" it for the same reasons some people wanted to "abolish" various local police organizations in 2020. At some point, it starts to feel like the safeguards on positions of state power are entirely voluntary, and that the people with that state-granted power are the ones who get to decide whether to obey them or not. Those aren't really safeguards! For all the talk of rounding up people who "broke the law", regular-ass Dads like me have been watching videos of morons in tactical gear blatantly violating a wide variety of rules, laws, and even Constitutional rights with absolutely no consequences whatsoever, let alone appropriate ones.

For instance, I'm sure I have seen over a hundred videos in the last six months of ICE and CBP employees doing something that made me think "that guy should go to prison for that", or maybe even "I think you're supposed to go to prison for that", and none of those guys are going to go to prison for those things, or even lose their jobs. Personally, I don't think it's weird for someone, at a certain point, to just say "the hell with all of this" and demand a fundamental rewrite of this part of the social contract.

Immunity as a Given

Many policy debates are essentially an exercise in trying to make people accept certain "givens". One given that's been pushed forever is the idea that law enforcement, for the most part, needs to be in charge of regulating itself. If someone from the government with a gun does something that looks or feels illegal, it should basically be up to a bunch of people who have the same job to decide whether there should be any repercussions, and usually the answer is "no".

Now, you can make an argument for this. You can say a world where law enforcement is held accountable by some other function, and not allowed to be given vast immunity to a host of otherwise criminal actions, would be a world where laws could not be enforced, and everything would go to shit. You can say that if police, or ICE agents, or whomever is zip-tying you today could not operate with absolute confidence that if they get scared, it's okay for them to shoot whatever they are scared of, that there would functionally be no policing at all. You can argue that! However, I do not find it especially compelling.

What I think is much, much more likely is that most people have done some math in their head that goes something like this. If a policy makes the police 5% more effective at protecting you from things you don't like, but 5000% more likely to hurt, rob, or kill innocent people while they do so, that seems like a bad trade. BUT, if you think the 5000% increase in abuse will happen exclusively to people who you are not concerned about, that trade seems fine. I mean, it shouldn't really seem fine, morally, but I would guess that it probably does, in fact, seem pretty fine to a lot of people. But this is just run of the mill "leopards eating faces" stuff. The point isn't "no real-world accountability breeds bad outcomes for state power", even though that's also true. The point is "if you've removed all real-world accountability you can't fix bad outcomes by adjusting the particulars of accountability".

In this case, that's the whole "do we fix ICE or get rid of it?" argument, which is a good argument to have. From my perspective, though, it's also not a very complicated one. ICE — and unfortunately, most 21st century law enforcement — have insisted on building policy around the idea that law enforcement cannot be held accountable the way regular people are, and in fact need to be fundamentally immune to almost all of the consequences a normal person would face for doing various violent or grossly illegal things to another normal person. That's non-negotiable, apparently. And now, with that principle in place, let's make some rules!

See why this is a waste of time? There are already lots of rules! They're simply being ignored because they can be ignored, and the only answer we can come up with are more rules that will also be ignored, because underneath it all too many of us still think law enforcement should get to decide if it did something bad or not.

In my heart of hearts, I think this is what animates people who want to abolish various law enforcement functions. I don't actually think — in most cases — it's some hippy-dippy belief that crime doesn't exist (although it really would help if the police solved more crimes) or that there is no need for law enforcement of any sort. Instead, it's a rejection of the idea that these organizations should exist as so many of them do — self-regulated, armed, well-funded, unionized, highly political groups that receive massive judicial and legislative deference in almost every scenario.

I think a world where turning off your legally-required body camera, for instance, and then arresting someone, was potentially a form of criminal negligence is absolutely unthinkable to a lot of people. But I think that position understates the seriousness of the task given to armed agents of the state. I didn't invent it, but I think the idea of "higher standards + real accountability + much higher salaries" isn't crazy even though it's not a panacea and the devil's in the details. Law enforcement is hard, but so is nuclear physics — and we don't let nuclear power plants self-regulate or operate with the knowledge that everyone working there will be immune from almost any criminal charge if they decide to kill a bunch of people.

And those are real cops! ICE makes the disconnect here even more obvious. What utility are we even getting out of these goons? I'm not going to stand around and listen to a theoretical argument about utility ICE might have if the people who work for it did their job in a completely different manner than the way — given carte blanche to do whatever they want and total deference from local authorities — they choose to actually do it. I'm going to take it as it is. They don't follow rules. They lie constantly. They willfully commit sociopathic violence with no consequences. Logically, how would you even fix that? Find some magic politician who will be our benevolent dictator and use his unaccountable army thoughtfully?

We had versions of that for a long time. No, not an actually benevolent ICE (imagine that, lol), but one that put at least some limits on itself because the idea of just telling the public, in every... single... interaction, to eat shit and die seemed... unseemly. But it was only a matter of time before thugs and goons would be drawn to the warm flame of unaccountable, masked violence and bullying, and now ICE simply is what it is — a relationship defined by its lack of boundaries, which means we can't fix it with boundaries. It just has to go, and then we try again with something completely different.

Resolution 2026: Like The Phoenix Except It's Still Currently in The Ashes

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 15:15:10 -0400

It's been a while, hasn't it? Well, not much has changed. Resolution remains stable, functional, and operated by a non-business that loses an extremely small amount of money every month. For anyone poking at Resolution in 2026, go nuts! Everything still works, and will continue to work unless... I dunno, something important breaks? The internet ends? At any rate, Stripe handles payments and they're not going anywhere either (I don't have or want your credit card information), so this thing pretty much runs itself at this point.

That being said, as I hunker down for a long, unprofitable future of running this thing for no reason other than ego, pride, and a stubborn sense that I'm still right and everyone else is still wrong, I've taken a few cost-reduction maneuvers.

All my awesome walkthroughs have been deactivated. This is a huge bummer because they're all really good and hilarious (says me!), and run by a great service called Product Fruits. Unfortunately, it was costing me $100 a month which is, by far, the most expensive part of Resolution (lol). So now you'll see the still very functional Model Index where you used to see the Examples page.

I canceled Sentry. Sentry is enormous and doesn't need my endorsement, but it worked really well, especially when we were mucking with things. Not so much mucking anymore, and I save thirty bucks a month.

That's basically it! All I really do now is pay Fly.io like, 20 bucks a month and a little bit for web hosting. We're good. Until this thing becomes too popular for basic infrastructure, everything should be solid for your model-making needs. And so far, obscurity is something Resolution has been able to count on!

Is there a future, here?

There's always a future, friends! Seriously, though, I am a non-developer trying to build software, which means I need a lot of money or to become way, way smarter than I am. If I'm being honest, neither of those seem even remotely likely anytime soon. I think about Resolution all the time — and not fantasies of it being popular or anything, but actual use cases, improvements, etc. — but some ideas just have very high bars for minimum viable product and I clearly don't have the resources/skills/wherewithal to brute force that.

Software is in a weird place anyways, as not just the investment zeitgeist but even user culture has really moved away from tinkering and exploring and into basically barking demands at various devices and expecting an answer, which is exactly the opposite of not only how Resolution works, but how it's supposed to work even it's sexiest, theoretically VC-fueled form. So as a technology innovator, I may just be one of those guys my Dad always referred to as "rubber roads, cement tires".

I am very interested in open-sourcing Resolution. Like, very interested. But I don't really know how to do that right, so it's not going to happen on its own. If anyone is good at that / aware of the potential pitfalls, please reach out. Maybe there's a future here after all, even if it doesn't involve me looking down disdainfully at everyone from a private jet with my face on the tail.

Actually, Hacks are Bad

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 12:58:45 -0400

If I may — a "hack" is not a good thing. At their best, hacks are clever, temporary exploits that get you where you need for the time being, or if you're a criminal, a way to bypass security that (by definition) you aren't supposed to be bypassing. Most hacks are just crappy, lazy, unrealistic implementations that obscure cost, sometimes deferring it but also usually increasing it in the process. The worst ones are literally scams.

Don't aspire to come up with hacks. There are way too many hacks already. Aspire to come up with real, thoughtful solutions, and advocate for the time and resources to execute them.

Rage as a Service

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:18:37 -0400

Trolling people is easier than being funny or clever. This is not a new challenge, but here we are, once again pretending that failing at it is a tactic and not a weakness.

“Some advertising and marketing agencies are now intentionally leaning into the volatility of the current political climate, not to take a stand but to manufacture outrage,” said Mikah Sellers, an advertising consultant who has worked with major brands including Booz Allen Hamilton and Carfax. Companies are tapping into cultural rifts and driving wedges in hopes of capitalizing on the strife, he said.

How will they capitalize on pissing people off? Unclear! In fact, here are the companies (sometimes a generous classification) referenced in this article that are allegedly getting exactly what they want from this tactic:

Friend
Nucleus Genomics
Skims (Kim Kardashian's clothing brand)
Sabrina Carpenter
Pippa
Cluely
Clad Labs
Artisan

Leave the pop musician and the reality star aside, because I understand the commercial viability of trolling in those industries. But the rest? These companies are not successful. They can scream all they’d like about how they’re getting what they want as they slowly (or quickly) go out of business, but this largely startup-fueled delusion that life is either TikTok or the Trump administration, and you basically need attract eyeballs at any cost and then go from there is not actually backed up by the facts or financials.

And the thing is, the smart counter to bland, play-it-safe branding isn’t stupid, insecure edge-lording. It’s staring you right in the face — it’s CostCo, dammit! If you want to be edgy, get your name in a story like this, which has spread around the internet organically so much on its own that it has its own Snopes article confirming its authenticity:

"I came to (Jim Sinegal) once and I said, 'Jim, we can't sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends.' And he said, 'If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out."

Just an incredible quote. No notes. This is the kind of shit people want. That they feel. It's not generation or culture-coded, other than the fact that people are constantly being screwed by companies acting in their rational, best financial interests at our expense, and here's a guy running a company who is just MAD about it, stomping on everyone's least favorite title ("CEO") and even threatening (tongue-in-cheek) violence over it!

None of this is new. How about this Dollar Shave Club launch ad, from over a decade ago?

It's the same thing. It works because (1) it's violently pro-customer, and (2) it's about what the company actually does to/for those customers. The edgy tone is fine, but the cause of that edginess feels more like genuine excitement about what they're able to do for customers, and anger at the worst, most anti-customer aspects of their competitors.

When everyone was watching this ad and talking about how they needed one just like it, we didn't have to figure out what percentage of them were hate-watching it, because it was zero. In fact, when everyone tried to do this, the problem they ran into was (a) they weren't actually this passionate about their business or, more specifically, their differentiator, and (b) they're not fun, creative, or funny!

Conversely, this latest run of pathetically click baiting people into looking at you for a second, rolling their eyes, and then, as they walk away, shouting "Ha! You're in the funnel now!" completely misses the point. It fees like it comes from a generation of attention-grabbers who have spent too much of their lives on phones, in feeds, and quantifying every aspect of their social experiences. And while generational preferences adjust (I'm sure much of their audience is afflicted by this same problem), we're not talking about music and language choices here. We're talking about whether people want to feel happy or angry, like a great new day is dawning or the dumbest, most obviously wrong person in the world just slid into their DMs.

Nobody wants that. My kids don't want to feel that way, and neither do their friends. When they do feel that way, sure, it's hard to escape. But they hate it, and banking on people who hate you and what you represent to become customers (let alone repeat customers) is insane.

Accountablli-Buddy

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:07:56 -0400

My Theory of Productivity

Allow me a theory. I probably didn't invent this, but if I did, bully for me.

Work output, when increased beyond the amount of available accountability, without a matching increase the available accountability, will never generate a lasting increase in productivity.

Here's what I mean by all these terms. Work output is the amount of stuff you make or things you get done. Maybe you make toys, maybe you insure businesses against floods, maybe you send emails. Work output is necessary but not sufficient to generate productivity, which is often why doing actual, productive work is challenging. If all you needed was raw work output, you could just jam out whatever all day as quickly and easily as possible and solve lots of problems. Nothing works this way.

This is why we have accountability. Accountability, in my parlance, is sort of a backstop against work output. It doesn't necessarily guarantee that all work output is good (that would be "micromanagement", which is a great way to drive work output to zero), but it ensures that for every kind of bad output, there is time, energy, and brainpower available to figure out why that's happening and take on the responsibility of preventing it. In other words, mistakes are okay, but just making the same ones over and over again at similar (or increasing) rates is not.

Productivity is when these two things align. If work output goes up, and a person, system, or process is available to make sure that work output is positive (or at least not negative), you will almost always see a commensurate improvement in productivity. I define that as whatever positive outcome your organization is trying to accomplish (usually whatever gets us paid — the insuring, the toys, the emails, etc.)

Accountability as a Limiting Factor

As we are frequently reminded by people trying to get us to invest in ~~insane~~ exciting things, the world has gone through many productivity revolutions thanks to various technological innovations. While some of things improved the quality of things, or the safety of the people making them, the most obvious impact of the biggest ones is a large, comparatively inexpensive increase in work output. My new factory can make a thousand pairs of pants in the time it used to make a hundred, resulting in both cheaper pants and higher margins for me. Everyone wins. My new corn can grow on land that used to be barren, and using water from far away brought in by pumps that didn't exist before. More corn, less useless land, everyone wins, at least until I start growing fake, inedible corn to take advantage of massive agricultural subsidies.

I am a huge fan of these developments in general, and always have been, even though I am not an industrialist but merely a simple 21st century office drone. I am constantly seeking ways for technology to improve my work output, because when I succeed at this, I usually receive praise (and occasionally promotions!) for actually doing less work. It's fantastic, and if you'll allow me, just very American in the best way.

(music swells)

But there's a catch. I mean, it's not really a catch so much as a limiting factor. My technological innovation can't increase my work output beyond my ability to make sure my work output isn't actively harmful. Have you ever sent out an automated email to a large customer base that said "Hi, {FIRST NAME}"? Obviously I haven't, I am totally asking for a friend. But that's an example of the risk of increasing work output beyond accountability bandwidth.

Now, in the case of the embarrassing auto-email, we make that tradeoff 10 times out of 10, but there's still accountability. Just ask... my friend! When you send that stupid email, you're going to hear about it. Recipients will respond and yell at you, co-workers will forward angry customer replies, and eventually you're going to hear about it from your boss. If they are a bad boss, they will tell you this is unacceptable and maybe call you an idiot and then walk away and start working on your Performance Improvement Plan so they can fire you. If they are a good boss, they will help you figure out some way to audit the "Name" information in the CRM, or use "no data fallback" feature in your email designer. But either way, these emails will not just blast out with FIRST NAME on them forever. And that, my friends... is accountability.

Innovations that increase work output must, by the rules of my theory, be paired with innovations in accountability, or else that automation will not generate productivity.

By and large, this is exactly what has happened with most work output-increasing technological innovations, otherwise they would never have stuck around. Various technologies have improved our ability to review things, reduce random errors, and more quickly and easily work with various problem solving experts in the event that something goes wrong. These are good things, even though they are less sexy than, you know, the cotton gin or the assembly line or whatever. Hell, unions are an accountability innovation in a lot of ways; an organizational check on the staggering increase in work output (and some of the resulting bad effects) resulting from the Industrial Revolution.

First Salads, Then Robots

Okay, so as legally required by Internet Rules of 2025, let's now apply this to artificial intelligence, or more accurately, large language models, image generators, and maybe (if you squint) "agents". There is a funny little dance going on when we talk about these things, because we can't quite decide if they are supposed to replace us, or be used by us. In general, I find that the conversation — whether about society in general or in a sales pitch for some AI tool — tends to start with replacing, only to then inevitably downshift to "it's a just a tool/massive force multiplier/etc." as details and reality begin to weigh down the conversation. The tech industry has been able to dodge a lot of difficult logical questions by flipping this bit back and forth as it suits them.

"Layoffs in the streets, force multiplier in the sheets", if you will.

But here's the thing — it actually doesn't matter because accountability is the limiting factor in either case. Think of it this way. You'd never hire someone with zero accountability. Maybe their accountability is generous, or forgiving (maybe they're a cousin, I don't know, I'm from Rhode Island), but unless you're talking about a legitimate charity case, there's gotta be some. Even something as simple as saying "if you screw up badly enough, you'll get fired and then the paychecks will stop" (again, optional in Rhode Island) is a form of accountability, however crude.

So there's at least an element of accountability in every function, or it's simply not a productive job, because if there's no accountability, you're effectively saying the output doesn't matter. And that means the accountability bandwidth thing comes into play with every function as well. Somebody was responsible for every caesar salad I made in the summer of 2001 at 22 Bowen's Bar & Grill. Mostly it was me, but it was also my boss. That doesn't mean I couldn't make a mistake on any given salad (oh Lord did I make those), just that you could take any one of those mistakes and say "who is dealing with this by either fixing the cause of this or leaving the organization?" and there'd be an answer every single time. But the system we had in place was predicated on three college kids making every salad to order, by hand. There were only so many we could make, and thus there was a hard cap on both our possible work output and the accountability needed to ensure the value/utility of our output. In short, three college kids who didn't want to get yelled at or fired in the middle of the summer, plus a full time assistant chef who really didn't want to get fired, together, could handle the task.

If for some reason the restaurant exploded in popularity and we needed ten guys making salads at once like a Chopt in Midtown, or if the three of us got magic AI salad machines that let us spit out hundreds or thousands of salads a minute, this system would need to evolve for us to use it. Either those machines would need iron-clad safeguards in them (making them effectively error-proof), or you'd need a massive investment in quality control to hold yourself accountable for making good, edible salads. You wouldn't just 10x the process and say "look how productive we're being" without anything in place to make sure people weren't just getting dirty bowls hastily filled with handfuls of chick peas.

Okay, Now Robots

The fundamental business promise of generative AI has a giant, accountability sized hole in it. So far, many vendors have dodged this by making accountability sound like ethics, which many companies will discard for a big enough ROI, but this is a major misread of how business works. Accountability can be about ethics, but it's really just about outcomes, and there is no reason to think that businesses are willing to throw away their control over outcomes because generating a lot of arbitrary, uncontrolled outcomes now requires little to no human effort.

Bluntly, if you're selling a massive increase in work output without some way to also massively increase accountability bandwidth, you're essentially proposing one (or maybe more) of four possibilities:

1. Workers have plenty of unused accountability bandwidth now, so a huge increase in work output is actually great

This doesn't sound like 2025 to me. Companies have been finding new and more creative ways to avoid being held accountable for things for decades now, with "innovations" ranging from binding arbitration clauses, to liability shield laws, to shutting down support lines and dumping people into user forums. The accountability that remains is almost entirely related to raw financial performance. Companies have been talking about "doing more with less" for years now; I find it hard to believe people are sitting around checking their work twice for lack of anything else to do.

2. It's worth it for businesses to pay increase accountability bandwidth to meet the huge increase in cheap work output

Is it, though? Every marketing department has to figure out things like "the right number of campaigns to run" precisely because it's often not worth the cost of installing sufficient accountability. It wouldn't be worth the cost of doing thousands of additional hours in post-mortems and data analysis just because you could now afford to spin up those campaigns for zero dollars. Then again if we're not 100x-ing our output here, what's the value of this innovation? What I could really use is one automated campaign manager who was just as accountable as my human ones...

3. Accountability bandwidth can be increased with the same types of technologies that increase work output

... but that is not a thing, because computers are not accountable. They don't care. They don't need to eat. They don't need to make their parents proud. They don't need anything, because they're not alive, and being alive is a non-negotiable part of giving a shit about anything. You can program rules into software, but rules are not the same thing as giving a shit, which you will immediately realize if you ever have to work with someone who doesn't give a shit about work, but is sufficiently capable of following rules. In some ways that kind of person is just a slow computer, but more importantly, every computer is just a really, really fast version of that annoying employee. There are lots of ways to get different kinds of people to give a shit about different kinds of things (this process is called "middle management", ask ChatGPT about it), but there zero ways to make computers give a shit about anything. In fact, one of the reasons software can work/write/execute a decision tree so quickly is that it doesn't give a shit about literally anything, so nothing slows it down.

4. Accountability is irrelevant if you scale work output enough, or it's just irrelevant in general

Lastly, despite it being a running joke for — I dunno — a hundred years or so, there's an increasingly weird, inexplicable interest in the "a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters will eventually write the greatest novel ever" approach to work. Maybe it's because some of the world's most successful high margin businesses are automated, algorithmic trash dispensers with seemingly no limit to how big they can scale. Maybe it's because we've over-financialized basically everything at this point, and we can't conceive of any system where "N" has some sort of fundamental limit. Maybe it's something else! But I'm here to tell you that you can't scale any work output to the point where nothing matters. Facebook is certainly going to try, but for the rest of us, there are only so many places to show your infinite, dynamic ad variations. So even if the numbers are large, they are still numbers, and they still require some form of boring old accountability for results.

Good Automation is Still Good, Bad Automation is Still Bad

Automation is an incredibly valuable thing, but one of the many downsides of the blind rush to automate anything we can find is that some of the most important skills in making automation decisions seem to be atrophying as we race to lower the marginal cost of arbitrary work output. For instance, my little event management project automates the gathering and tracking of events and their related deadlines. You just give it a website, and it goes and finds all the events, all the deadlines, and organizes everything. I hate doing this, it takes me forever, and I make a lot of mistakes, so in general I like this painless increase in work output.

But there's obviously an accountability issue here as well that I don't want to ignore. No one is going to want my application to automatically grab tons of irrelevant events and deadlines and shove them into the system. They won't even want me to automatically grab events and deadlines that are sort of relevant. They want the right ones and only the right ones and since events are not labeled on the internet as "ones you should care about", there is no ironclad, computer-powered way to do this with 100% certainty, which pushes accountability to my user. So I actually throttle the process by (a) separating the process of finding events from finding deadlines, and (b) making you confirm which ones you want in each process. I could increase the number of events and deadlines you find, and reduce the time and effort it takes to do so (wheeee, work output!), but that would be dumb and counter-productive because it would ignore how difficult that makes the unavoidable challenge of making sure those things are correct and useful.

This is a really simple, small example, and it's not something I'm doing because I'm some product genius or especially sensitive to user needs (history would indicate that I am quite bad at this, actually). I'm doing it because I actually care about the true productivity of using this application, because when I originally needed it, I was held accountable for effective, intelligent event management and having good, accurate answers to logistical questions. No one cared how long my little tracker spreadsheet was, or how many columns it had, or whether I knew the load-in dates for events we shouldn't be going to.

The problem 99% of generative AI uses cases I see have is that they don't really care about true, accountability-supported productivity and outcomes, primarily because they don't have an answer to the accountability bandwidth problem they themselves are creating, and their business models and cap tables dictate they make a 1000% impact, not a 50% impact, so being held back by the bandwidth is simply unacceptable.

But that's a vendor/product/business model problem, not the market's. If you're trying to sell these things as solutions to actual, functioning organizations who care about outcomes, or ideally, thinking though how to build them before you do that, I'd keep that top of mind.

Sure, Jan

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 11:32:08 -0400

The story of 2025 continues to be — never concede anything. Just stare ahead as you plow into the merge and the other guy will yield.

In that spirit, here's Sam Altman, turning up the music and accelerating as he rapidly approaches the oncoming produce truck of reality.

As if this wasn't hand-wavy enough, keep in mind I'm reading this the day after OpenAI launched, with great fanfare, Sora 2 — "deepfake TikTok", if you will — which is literally just a slop machine for making fake AI videos of "your friends", which actually means "people you want to see in fake videos".

This company is the mullet of technology. Business in the front, party in the back. Scientific discovery in the streets, ShitTok in the sheets. Whichever one of those things gives them enough money to survive (the Department of Defense, or advertisers) first will be what they claim is what they wanted to do all along.

And if, as more than a few people are starting to suspect, neither one happens? Well, it's... it's gonna get real ugly.

Incredulity

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 11:28:08 -0400

Every day, there are many things I don't do because I think they are fundamentally wrong. Some of those things might get me something I want, or closer to something I want, or away from something I don't want to do, but I find them wrong so I don't do them. This does not make me special, this just makes me a functional, civilized adult.

However, I don't see myself as some inherently perfect paragon of virtue. I really do try to operate outside of simple, transactional self-interest, but simple, transactional self-interest does affect me. For example, my very self-righteous, Protestant-work-ethic desire to be employed and financially productive has wavered in direct response to how badly I need money. I measure my words online and at the office in large part because I (reasonably) fear the short and long term consequences of saying whatever I think whenever I think it.

In other words, I do a lot of things the right way because I have morals, but there's a gray area where even I don't know if I do some things because they are right, or because they are safe. That's why, as a society, we try to make the right things safe, and the wrong things dangerous. It's moral hazard!

Steve Ballmer and Moral Hazard

Steve Ballmer bought the Los Angeles Clippers a few years ago because he has effectively an unlimited amount of money. Despite this, he can't just do whatever he wants with his team (like spend his infinite money to just sign all the best players), because he's part of an association that has rules and restrictions on that sort of thing. Ballmer is in trouble because through some excellent journalism, it's come to light that his star player Kawhi Leonard has been getting huge amounts of endorsement money from a weird, unprofitable startup owned by Ballmer and his Clippers ownership partner, for doing nothing. Effectively, this looks like money laundering to avoid the rules on how much teams can spend on their salaries, which is a pretty massive deal in the NBA.

Ballmer has denied everything and pleads ignorance on everything from his investment in this company to the particulars of how Leonard was compensated, but as more evidence is revealed each day, things are looking worse and worse for him and the team. Like, a lot worse.

When this story initially broke, one of the loudest forms of skepticism that I heard can basically be paraphrased as such — "Steve Ballmer is really smart, and this whole scheme seems incredibly stupid. While it's nominally money laundering, it's lazy, ham-fisted, and the idea that a kajillionaire business magnate who clearly loves owning and operating his basketball team would risk so much strains credulity."

On the one hand, this is a pretty reasonable take. But it's actually just a great reminder that culturally and morally, there is a huge disconnect between our expectations for how the world should/will work, and what's required to ensure that it does that. While there's this sort of baked-in assumption that these activities are risky for people like Ballmer, is that assumption actually valid? One of the first social science things I learned in college that really raised eyebrows was that while people spent a lot of time arguing about criminal punishments, the real driver for crime was whether people got caught at all. We focused on sentencing because it's easy -- those people have been found and convicted, so putting them in prison for any amount of time is trivially easy. One year, five years, a hundred years, whatever! However, actually catching people who commit crimes is much, much harder than you would think. It requires more than power and authority; it requires skill, resources, and lots of hard, boring work.

It's hard to catch — really catch — people doing bad things, which is why so many bad things have been discouraged with penalties like shame, embarrassment, and reputational damage that don't necessarily require a famous or powerful person to get truly, legally, undeniably caught. Historically, simply being associated with something like a corrupt, self-dealing cryptocurrency or shady real-estate scam has been harmful to people with big ambitions, regardless of whether it's been specifically proven that they did whatever bad thing that association implies. It's not "go to jail" harmful, and it never should be — the power of the state to take someone's freedom away is enormous, and dangerous. But one of the reasons people lost their minds over "cancel culture" is because the non-legal, indirect consequences of people believing you are bad are really potent, and people don't like when they have to pay them.

(As an aside, as with many social punishments, I don't have a fundamental problem with "cancelling" famous people from fame and media exposure. I just sometimes have a problem — as many/most people do — with when we do it and who we do it to. That's a boring answer, but I'm quite confident that it's the correct one. The idea that as a culture, we should continue to focus our attention on the same people even if they say or do awful things is obviously stupid. It has nothing to do with free speech, and everything to do with bad, unprincipled editorial choices.)

But here's the thing — just like we lack the physical resources to bring every criminal accusation to trial (and thus depend on a system of plea bargains just to keep the lights on), we lack the same resources to adjudicate every terrible thing that powerful people are capable of doing, so we depend on shame and yes, the threat of being "canceled" (it's just... such an eye-rolling term, my God) to keep the world working the way we expect it to. In a shameless world, though, the system starts to break, and it makes sense for people with a ton of resources to simply fold their arms, deny everything, and demand the system adjudicate everything to the full extent of whatever the law is, because the law alone is actually pretty easy to survive if you are rich and powerful.

So I don't know what Steve Ballmer did or didn't do in this case, but I do agree he's not stupid. However, given what a ruthless, smart, powerful person might see as his best option to move forward in 2025, I think Ballmer's savvy might be as much of a potential explanation for his guilt as his innocence, which is a bad sign for everyone.

Real-World Vibe Coding

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:17:45 -0400

It's been a couple years since I took my first look at generative AI and concluded that the most likely use case for this kind of technology, by far, was "better" spam. Since then, despite all the activity, investment, discussion, and model releases, nothing has really fundamentally changed my mind about that. While image generation is dramatically better, text generation is dramatically cheaper, and the tooling for all of it is simpler and more available, this stuff continues to be an inch deep and a mile wide. The strongest utopians and doomers share a tendency to see revolutionary changes to work they don't actually do themselves, or even understand, and much less impact to things that they have real working knowledge of or true responsibility for.

Charlie Warzel wrote a few days back about an idea that I've felt has been inevitable for a long time — what if this technology is basically mature?

"This is the language that the technology’s builders and backers have given us, which means that discussions that situate the technology in the future are being had on their terms. This is a mistake, and it is perhaps the reason so many people feel adrift. Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with a different question: What if generative AI isn’t God in the machine or vaporware? What if it’s just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? Right now, the models don’t think—they predict and arrange tokens of language to provide plausible responses to queries. There is little compelling evidence that they will evolve without some kind of quantum research leap. What if they never stop hallucinating and never develop the kind of creative ingenuity that powers actual human intelligence?"

I think this is exactly right, and I think it's been inevitable almost from day one given what this stuff fundamentally is underneath. Warzel then gets into the part that's probably way more important, which is the socio-emotional impact of this stuff being everywhere and baked into everything (the whole piece is very good), but I'm going to stick with answering a much simpler question — what's a potentially valuable use case from plausible looking, computer generated content with no guaranteed connection to reality?

The Test Data Robot

My latest half-baked idea involves LLM parsing of emails, and spitting them out as structured data. It's a potentially dubious concept at its core due to all of the apparent limitations of this technology described above, but it's one of those interesting "well, maybe it'll work?" concepts that you really have to try to understand. Unfortunately, since we can never really understand if a logical prompt "works" or not (because no matter how carefully we write it, our prompt is not programming — it's just natural language going into a black box, and then something comes out of the box), the best thing we can do is test the hell out of it. Give it tons and tons of emails, see what it spits out each time. You're unlikely to get to the root cause of those test outcomes (because again, there is no root cause), but you can get the success/failure rate and see if you're comfortable with it.

Now, while it often feels like I have an unlimited number of event emails in my inbox, this is not literally the case. I also don't feel like making them up for test purposes, certainly not with all of the fluff and structure that makes them look, feel, and function like real test data, and at the scale that I need them for testing. But you know what has plenty of time on its hands? Yeah you do.

Just Prompts (v1.0)

I started out the way most people probably do, by simply talking to Gemini and asking it to make me these sort of emails. The output was... kind of annoying, and didn't look or feel like ones I actually got at work. In the spirit of giving the LLM as much to work with as possible, I proceeded to feed it a bunch of actual emails from work, hoping that it would pick up some patterns. While this sounds like a good idea, there's a pretty big difference between being a machine learning engineer writing custom models, and shoving a bunch of stuff into a chatbot, and the results certainly bore that out.

While I got some initially promising results, there was a clear drop-off once I gave it around five emails where it started to ignore previous ones in the "training set" (I know, I know, this is not an actual "training set" of anything) and it became clear it was just aping whatever I gave it.

I started over, and this time, I didn't give it any training material at all. Instead I just said what I wanted, had it write examples, and corrected a few bad tendencies or examples of it ignoring my requirements. The emails are still obviously, almost painfully fake, but structurally they're fine (if a bit unrealistically repetitive) and I actually started testing our event, task, and date extraction with them.

The Infinite Garbage Machine (v2.0)

If you've tried any of the many productivity hacks floating around the internet these days, many of them involve working directly in ChatGPT or something similar. One fairly major annoyance, though, is the end state of whatever you make — the bot can't do very much, so you're often given something and told to copy and paste it somewhere else. So when I got tired of asking for ten HTML emails at a time, scrolling around to find the right one, pasting it into a text file, renaming the file with an .HTML extension, opening the file in a browser, copying the rendered HTML out, and pasting it into an email to send, I decided to try something slightly more sophisticated.

Behold.

This version does a couple of things that are legitimately useful for me:

It generates an entire event "object" (for lack of a better word") that I can then generate additional "deadlines" for.
It lets me make multiple emails that reference the same event.
It lets me make a deadline specific email.
It lets me assign dates and URLs to the event and its deadlines.
It lets me provide custom instructions for any given email (very helpful for testing).
Gives me a button to download the .HTML directly (which I then have to open, copy, and paste into an email, but still)

To be clear, these emails are still hot garbage. They are barely plausible, fairly repetitive, have the absolute bare minimum of design to them, and the little event fantasy world I'm asking it to maintain in the background often devolves into nonsense with deadlines occurring in implausible orders or having ridiculously short or long amounts of time between two given deadlines.

But... that's okay! I'm not sending these to anyone. They're just to test my application's ability to extract and structure information correctly, and while ultimately what matters is my ability to extract real information from real emails, this is a great combination of pretty easy and clearly better than nothing. So I am declaring success with this project, and labeling this as an actually useful implementation of vibe-coding that was totally worth the cost of... well, I got Gemini Pro included with the Workspace package I needed to buy in order to turn on the domain-wide authentication my experiment requires. So basically, the marginal cost was nothing, but... the utility was real!

Vibe-Coding Reality Check

It was certainly kind of funny to use completely black-box vibe coding to build a tool designed to help us build an application we were developing in a much more traditional manner (with Python and Bubble) at the same time. Progress on the "real" app was often painful, slow, and required thinking through what wasn't working and why. Progress on the Infinite Garbage Machine was sometimes incredibly fast, but totally unpredictable, and the results were almost always exciting at first, and then slightly disappointing once the reality of what had been delivered set in. And while the whole point (as far as I understand it) of vibe coding is to not have any idea how anything works, there are a few development concepts you should be aware of if you're going to try anything like this.

Version control. The default Gemini interface is pretty capable, even though as mentioned, it's sort of odd to run everything in the little "Canvas" widget. (I very lightly kicked the tires on Google's "Opal", which is apparently intended specifically for this sort of application development, but it didn't do a very good job of interpreting my requirements and I gave up.) But one enormous problem I ran into was the lack of an easy way to go back to prior versions of your application. This is especially important because you really have no idea how any request you make will be interpreted, what it will do, or whether it will completely wreck what you have. I didn't find an easy, obvious, reliable way to "undo", which made me very hesitant to change things if they were working at all.

Things fall apart. In a related vein, my vibe-coding experiences faced a bit of a paradox where iteration was clearly the only way to get what you really wanted, but that the more you iterated, the more the system started to lose sight of other, older, but no less critical requirements. That's not really iterating, then, is it? It got bad enough that even though there are obvious ways I'd like to improve the Infinite Garbage Machine, I feel like it's reached the optimal point of maturity and that the risks of asking for refinement outweigh the benefits.

It's not very good software. My application barely does anything and it still feels like it's stuck in the mud. The interface is crappy and very brute-force reliant, the whole thing is ugly, and whatever it's doing with Gemini in the background to generate things is a lot slower than doing it directly in the app. In theory, I could try to refine these things, but I guess my application is complicated enough that when I started trying to do that, it began to generate worse, more repetitive emails. It's fine as is, given what I'm going for, but I do think if you expect people to use your vibe-coded tools (I certainly don't, this garbage is for ME and me alone), you may be surprised by how frustrating and generally poor the end-user experience is, and I don't know if bragging that you don't even know how to code will make that any easier for your audience to handle.

In conclusion...

Like "AI", "vibe-coding" means way too many things and is too often discussed by people who don't know enough about the source material, and it's hard to have a real discussion about a vague topic with slippery definitions. That being said, I certainly found "non-deterministic, natural language application generation" to be useful in the fairly narrow, but non-trivial niche of generating simulated test content that met a bunch of relatively simple but important requirements.

So basically:

would it help to have a computer do something?
is the accuracy & precision of the "something" not really the point?
is the user experience basically just "put stuff in, different stuff come out"
is there some prior arrangement that makes this cost-effective for you (i.e., you already have access to a decent LLM)?

... if so, you should give it a try, at least before the bubble bursts and the price of doing all of this explodes.

Uneventful

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 13:20:14 -0400

For the last year, I've had to do a bunch of event logistics for work, and... I really did not enjoy doing this work. It's not a huge deal or anything (I wasn't exactly working in a bauxite mine), and it really was the most useful thing I could have been doing in my function, so I did it. That's startup land. But the work is a combination of uninteresting, repetitive, bespoke, and relatively easy to screw up in impactful ways that make it not really great for anyone, but especially challenging for me.

As I worked on this stuff, the most frustrating thing was that I didn't really seem to be getting that much better or more efficient at it, mostly because it's just not that kind of work. Unlike production processes where there are creative and technical workflows that can be improved and a level of quality you can aim to surpass with each project (even if you don't have to), event logistics are often about just not forgetting some stupid little thing you have to do, or making some small resource allocation decision that no one probably cares about but maybe someone really cares about.

To make this even worse, one thing about me that I usually keep close to the vest at work is that I absolutely loathe letting people down. It's a huge source of stress for me, particularly when I find the work I'm doing itself to be uninteresting, and the main thing driving me forward is just the intrinsic need to be a good teammate and keep other people from getting blocked. And when it comes to third-party event attendance or exhibiting, the pain you -- or your colleague who's sitting in some convention center in the middle of nowhere -- feel when things don't go right is a lot greater than the joy you feel when things go okay.

Despite all of this, events were not going away, because in the space we were in events are how you talk to buyers. It's just that simple. While the direct, dollar-in/dollar-out justification of any given event remains incredibly hard to track (as with anything that isn't PPC, it seems), the long arc of lead-generation, deal-closing, and account renewing really did seem to validate the effort and cost of going to a lot of these events. So I decided to, in my spare time, start thinking about what (if anything) would make this work easier, since no one was coming to take it off my plate anytime soon.

The Problems

System of Record

As with a lot of information entry and retrieval jobs, one of the obvious sources of stress I had was no single, central workspace to wrap my arms around. I had a huge email inbox full of mostly junk, but also a bunch of really important stuff, a couple clumsy Google sheets of dubious reliability, and the information discovery nightmare known as Slack. We weren't doing tons of tons of events -- a busy month maybe had two, and whole months would go by where we didn't have any -- but many of them would have anywhere from five to twenty individual tasks with their own deadlines that had to get done over the course of several weeks or maybe months. So there were these sort of streams of activity that went on for months with long stretches of inactivity for any given event, but really no break from always needing to have a firm grip on what was going on with events in general. Tasks tended to sit around, too, because they often required some vendor to respond to a question or blocker, or an internal (non-me) person to make a decision or commitment that they'd refuse to make a decision on for weeks or longer. Normal stuff, but when you add it up it's just incredibly easy to lose track of some dumb thing and end up paying a late fee for renting a power strip or whatever.

Now, where I've been doing this work, we have basically no central project management of any sort besides people's random spreadsheets, which didn't help matters. I ended up building out my own system using Airtable, which definitely helped, but Airtable had a lot of extra cruft and didn't let me do exactly what I wanted to. It was really hard to make certain bits of information stand out, or feel like I was showing things in the context I wanted to. It felt like I was putting in enough work to design the custom front-end of an application without the actual benefits of having a custom application. I'm a little bit of a nut about this stuff, but then again that's the only reason I was willing to put in the effort to build something with Airtable, so if it's not working for me I'm not sure it's really working for anyone.

Extraction

My Airtable task list held up okay when things came to me in the form of URLs, usually from coworkers in Slack. It wasn't great, but at least it gave me an anchor to put in my task list ("see if we want to go to _____") so I didn't forget about it.

Unfortunately, most things came via emails that contained more than one thing to do, more than one URL, or maybe no sufficiently comprehensive URL at all. In other words, I basically need the email, or I need to transfer a bunch of information from the email into a bunch of different fields in my system of record. This is... well, it's really boring work for starters, and it's also easy to forget to do, or to screw up. This is especially true as stuff changes, and suddenly I'm rooting around for an email from a month ago that I think I got but can't seem to find.

Basically, I want the process of extracting useful information from emails and putting that information in a permanently relevant, highly structured place to be as effortless as possible.

Event-Adjacent Information

Customizing the crap out of an Airtable instance gives you ability to literally map almost any kind of relationship -- this is why I like Airtable -- but I had to admit that it all felt a little cold and removed from my actual, real world of work. With events, I basically have to keep track of three types things:

the event itself (sponsorship, registration, rules, submissions, scheduling)
any people involved (their availability, their status, anything they need to do)
any of our related physical assets (signage, laptops, booth material, collateral, swag)

Then, of course, I have to keep track of the money attached to any of those things. And this is all just to know what we're putting into this!

I haven't even started talking about measuring or assessing outcomes, which is a whole different conversation between you, me, and your CRM. But even then, I'm going to need to get back to this information. So the point is that we're talking about a lot of funny little categories of things that have really specific relationships to the events. There are a bunch of dedicated micro-workflows and views I want of this stuff so I can decide what our options for a 10x10 booth are, or whether it makes sense to ship a bunch of stuff to Florida.

Is this actually a technology problem? And if so, does anyone want to solve it?

This is a question I ask myself all the time, mostly because I already did the "I have this problem, and I built something to solve it" thing with Resolution, only to find out that what I had done was (a) solve my problem, and (b) make something that would solve a problem I have with other people if they used my product, which they probably won't.

As I did this work from 9 to 5 every day over the weeks and months, it didn't get any more interesting, but I started to have more and more conviction in what the fundamental jobs-to-be-done were, or more accurately, the job-to-be-done. Bluntly, that job is automated, comprehensive data extraction, assuming extraction includes both pulling data out and sticking it somewhere permanently actionable (my definition does include both of these, but I'm not a computer scientist so apologies to any of them reading this if I stepped on a reserved word there). That's it. And since I was extracting natural language, and we have all these fancy, highly-subsidized large language models out there, I figured I'd give it a try.

The other thing I learned from Resolution is that while this breaks my heart, it's just really hard to go to market with a general purpose business product. It's not impossible, but I'm not very good at it and I don't really want to spend any money on this, so if this is going to do any good for anyone else, the best thing I could do was focus on a niche. In this case, I'm okay with that because I actually believe that while a VC-targeted macro-solution ("automatic extraction and data structuring FOR ANYTHING") sounds sexy, like most things the utility here is heavily dependent on nailing the last mile, which is turning your structured data into really useful, workflow-specific interfaces for people to actually click on. So while I'm not really an events guy by choice, I decided to keep the focus there instead of trying to generalize the problem into something I had to explain.

How Uneventful Works

Uneventful is a basic, browser-based CRUD application I built with Bubble. You can do a bunch of normal things in there, like add/create/edit your upcoming events, add deadlines and expenses to any event, manage sponsorship options, or assign people to go. This is the system of record part. There is nothing particularly special about it other than that it's built specifically to stay on top of managing a bunch of third party events for your organization.
In the background, Uneventful is connected to an email inbox. If you send it an email, Uneventful will use an LLM (and a bunch of custom code, more on this in a second) to pull out any events or event related deadlines, structure them, and add them to your account.

Basically, you can shovel all your annoying transactional emails to Uneventful, and you'll end up with a list of places you need to be and things you need to do, organized by when they have to be done. The system also grabs things like associated URLs and basic descriptions so it's a little easier to do whatever you need to do, and even grabs a copy of the email that you can reference to double check any deadline or event in your list. I basically copied this idea from Rippling, except they do it with expenses, and it was an absolute life-saver for me.

For now, that's it. As Uneventful stands right this second, it's already a big improvement for me, but there are a number of useful things I'd like to expand on that aren't outside the realm of technical possibility, even for our crack team of "one burned out product marketing guy" and "a retired electrical engineer". These include:

a web scraper where you throw a URL at it, and Uneventful grabs the event and a bunch of related information about the event.
event discovery based on what you do and what events have worked for you
"reporting" (eww, lame), but actually good -- this is an example of where this is pointless if you just do standard stuff but could be awesome if you really get biz-dev events
some way to manage contacts and interactions at a given event; maybe it's just raw numbers because I don't foresee this little guy becoming a CRM, but you never know.
related but different -- some sense of goals and goal management. Since numbers weren't always a good indicator of value, we'd often try to set up specific goals for an event ("talk to the assistant secretary of ____") because it was actually easier to quantify revenue impact that way.

"DOES IT AI?" (sigh)

Uneventful does use an LLM in the form of the Google Gemini API. When I first started trying to do this as simply as possible, I rigged Airtable's new-ish "AI features" to go and grab me descriptions from events I gave it, and it sort of worked. But that was just spitting out a text description for a human to read -- it couldn't really "break" or "fail".

Uneventful is much more ambitious, and our original plan was to use Gemini to both (a) extract relevant objects from an email, and (b) determine whether those objects were new, existing, or existing and sufficiently different to be updated. As it turns out, Gemini is pretty damn good at the first thing, and maddeningly inconsistent but generally pretty bad at the second thing, even in really simple scenarios where we were using structured schema output from our extraction sequence, and then basically asking Gemini to simply compare two (very, very simple) JSON files. Maybe we're stupid, but despite trying this over and over again, tweaking prompts, and doing as much debugging as a black box LLM will let you do ("please explain your justification for each conclusion you make and put it in this field"), we just couldn't get this to work consistently. My Dad -- my go to technical resource for all my random projects -- is both less cynical about AI than I am (mostly because he's 75 and doesn't give a shit about the tech industry one way or the other) and much more comfortable than I am gritting his teeth and solving problems with brute force Python. He went from being pretty enamored with Gemini to borderline disgusted by this failing as it became apparent that we just couldn't rely on it to perform comparisons. However, it works really nicely for extraction and now that we've built out our own comparison logic everything is cheaper and more efficient, so it's probably for the best.

The front-end of this is all Bubble, which I really think more people should play with. As discussed ad-nauseam here, I am both very much not a real developer AND someone who has taken some computer science classes and written a decent amount of terrible code across BASIC, Pascal, Java, Python, and weird stuff like ActionScript. I can look over my Dad's shoulder and help him figure out what a loop is doing, but I'll be damned if I can actually make what I want with code. It's just too hard for me. If you're stubborn enough to code and build out data structures, but suffer from the same sort of code-blindness that I do, Bubble is weirdly perfect. You get to wire things up, define objects, build logic and workflows, and even make API calls, but it's all through configuration panels and settings. There's a real learning curve, to be certain -- this is my second major Bubble effort and I did a bunch of small, broken experiments before I got to those -- but I really think it's worth it. You can make cool stuff, and do many of the fun internet web/app things everyone is talking about. I could never build something like Resolution with Bubble, as it's impossible to make truly unique, custom UI objects with this approach, but most applications aren't like that and you get a surprising amount of flexibility.

Want to try it?

Now that it works, I'm interested in getting other people responsible for this sort of work to try it out in a controlled environment (i.e., no more than like, ten of you, and all people comfortable enough to let me fix things, rescue lost data, etc.) to see if this is really useful, or even if it's close enough to being really useful that I should put more time into it. If that describes you, let me know at hello@resolution.biz and I'll get you set up!

Competence Theater

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:14:00 -0400

I have worked at many places. Without exception, the biggest challenge every one of them faced during my time there was either:

not enough people wanted what we were selling, or didn't want it badly enough
collectively, we continually did stupid things, or did good/neutral things in stupid ways

That's it. When we addressed these things, we did better. When we didn't, we did worse. Heck, even my own company was like this! I continually refused to address the first problem, and as a result, my company was not (and continues to not be, to this day!) very successful.

Thing number one really is an important problem, but to be fair, it's also hard to solve. You have to know what to make (anyone saying "JUST LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER" can log off right now and go back to LinkedIn, thank you very much), be able to make it, and be willing to make it. Man, I get tired just writing that and thinking about it. Thing number two — doing stupid things, or doing non-stupid things poorly, or in a stupid way — isn't as existential or exciting, but it's usually more solvable, and boy is it absolutely everywhere.

My hilarious, fulfilled, and generally very successful Dad has given me various bits of advice over the years, but none better or more applicable to everyday life than my favorite:

"Don't be an idiot".

It's really an amazing philosophy, and I've put a lot of effort into living it every day, even in the face of investors, coworkers, managers, customers, vendors, and countless others almost constantly pressuring me to, in fact, be an idiot in some way. It doesn't always make me the easiest person in the world to work with, but in the end my dogged insistence on not being an idiot has done wonders for me and many — if not all! — of the companies I've worked for.

Despite this, "don't be an idiot" has not caught on with the business community. Maybe it's not sexy enough. Maybe it sounds too harsh (although I thought it was cool to be harsh again, I dunno). Maybe, just maybe, high-visibility business ventures increasingly require key stakeholders to act like idiots more than we'd like to admit. But either way, "stop doing important things in stupid ways" just doesn't seem to be a rallying cry employers are comfortable building their workplace cultures around. Instead...

For whatever reason, we keep coming back to this fantasy that if people work EXTREMELY HARD (not just "hard", but "so hard that a description of the work makes the Wall Street Journal think people will stop and read about this and feel like something significant is occurring in the world") the things they do will be extremely, powerfully not-stupid, and thus those things will have value and progress the business forward towards, you know, glory and what-have-you.

Well... let me assure you, as a seasoned professional with 20 (!) years of high-tech (well, mostly high-tech), growth company experience — working super hard and being a counterproductive idiot are not, I repeat, not mutually exclusive. In fact, the whole reason work-life balance even exists in a country where everyone is obsessed with their career and terrified of not being rich in the event they ever encounter even a moderate medical challenge, is because working too hard actually causes you to become an idiot and do stupid, counterproductive things at work. These things range from bad ideas, to yelling at people, to forgetting important things, to major industrial accidents, to being Boeing. All of them are bad, and businesses would almost certainly make more money and deliver improved customer experiences if we did/had less of them.

"Companies are in control again!" Eh, I dunno. I think companies were kind of always in control, since most people work for companies not because it's fun, but because they are financially dependent on those companies for survival. Really, companies have just gotten tired of trying to create environments where their employees don't do stupid things, probably because doing so is a vague, difficult and emotionally unsatisfying process.

Sending a picture of yourself pretending to sleep in your office to the Wall Street Journal is pretty stupid — you might even say "idiotic" in the context of building a successful technology product — but it's not vague, it's not especially difficult, and to people who feel limited in their ability to actually improve the performance of their businesses, it's probably somewhat satisfying.

Again, I've been working for a long time. And I know that overworking can be a thing really competent, awesome people do that, if managed very carefully, sometimes leads to amazing results that are hard to get in normal working cadences. I totally concede this, and I have allowed myself, my wife, and even some direct reports to occasionally overwork, knowing that I am running the risk of encouraging idiocy in myself or the people I care about. I do understand the tradeoff, I have pulled all-nighters, and I have in fact produced things that came out so good, and so cool, that they made me laugh deliriously at some ungodly hour of the morning. I'm sure I sounded not unlike... an idiot.

BUT, in general, most idiotic things aren't the wild-eyed second-order effects of genius leaving the body. They are just... stupid, and bad. Things like the worst kind of bloated PowerPoint, hundreds of poorly considered, off-the-cuff Google Doc comments, charts in SaaS apps that don't make any sense, the entire HubSpot user interface, and other unfortunate outcomes.

Making overworking a requirement, instead of something to manage effectively and with some degree of caution, doesn't open the floodgates to genius. It opens the floodgates to charlatans and delusional go-getters who are willing to sleep in the office after a long, exhausting day of making bad, impulsive decisions and generally making everything harder for everyone else, including you and your customers. If that's what you're going for in 2025, I'm neither all that surprised nor especially interested in hitching my wagon to your future success.

Work is Weird, Weird is Hard

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 14:53:20 -0400

One cool thing about life, or at least my life, is that as I've gotten older and moved around, I've gotten to know some people who do jobs that I've always been aware of, but actually know very little about. The challenge with these kinds of jobs (and there are a lot of them) is that people tend to conflate awareness that the job exists with any sort of actual knowledge about how to do the job, or at least what the challenges of doing the job are. In reality, other than things that affect all jobs ("we are overworked, our boss is an idiot who hates us", etc.), most of us have no idea.

"Air traffic controller" is a great example of a job like this, although to my knowledge, I don't personally know an air traffic controller. But it checks all the right boxes for confusing the public -- air traffic control as a concept makes sense, we've all been affected by it directly, it's in the news, it's in movies, we play little video games about it, and so forth. When I think "yeah, I get what they're going through up there" (and sometimes I do this) I'm obviously wrong about that, but I think my misplaced confidence is at least understandable.

The thing is, I'm just a guy. The fact that I lack high-level self-awareness of my gaps in how the national air traffic controller network works (or does not work) is not a huge problem for society, as long as I don't vote for idiots, I guess. Unfortunately, there ARE people who are in charge of large, sweeping decisions that affect — and are affected by — the actual work of being an air traffic controller. It does matter if they lack this kind of situational awareness, and according to the Verge, evidently they do.

Because of this whirlwind of activity, Rocheleau expected that Newark would soon be able to increase its flight volume by 25 percent, or nearly 12 additional flights per hour.

Or, as Kirby put it, “This is such a seminal turning point for not just the near term but the long term of Newark.”

Within two days, all three men were proven wrong. On the evening of June 4th, a shortage of air traffic controllers forced Newark to issue a ground stop, delaying more than 100 flights for several hours. Another staffing-related delay occurred four days later. Optimism alone cannot solve infrastructure problems that have been decades in the making.

The Verge piece continues, explaining that despite a brief, reactive surge of technical resources and equipment, a massive shortage of air traffic controllers — people — ultimately took down the system almost immediately.

"If your job is so complicated, how come you work for me?"

People's fundamental misunderstanding of on-the-ground effort feels like the root of so many problems today. We have strong opinions about manufacturing, but we don't know how actual things get made. We have strong opinions about immigration, but we don't know who these people actually are or what they actually do. The management class (a group I belong to, theoretically) is in the throes of a truly bizarre delusion that has them convinced content parsing and generating algorithms are about to take over useful, necessary work from people, and have actually started preemptively reducing headcount needed to do this work today.

The blind spot I'm describing is really just human nature, I guess, but it does seem to dominate problem-solving more than ever before. Some potential social factors encouraging this are well-documented, like the fact that modern America was built by a generation that collectively participated in a giant global conflict where everyone left was just glad they didn't die, whereas today the military is highly professionalized and most people never serve in it at all. Maybe that's it — Stephen A. Smith Hot Take Culture (tm) and every other modern example of people popping off without feeling the need to really understand the topic at hand can all be traced back to that, but I don't know, and it does seem like it's getting worse. Algorithmic, short-form-video-world isn't helping, but I can't tell if it's a cause, or an effect of this whole thing that just happens to reinforce the trends that inspired it.

I'm not sure what the solution here is. It's equally absurd to restrict opinions or observations to people with direct experience in something, so to me that's a non-starter. We can't all become experienced in everything (this is why the "I do my own research" thing is such a problem), either. For me, getting into management was really helpful because it was in a field and with a team that had me as a direct contributor, so I was under no illusion I suddenly knew how to do my former peers' jobs better than they did (they were also not under this illusion, and more than happy to express it to me when I needed to hear it). But authority actually seems to have the opposite effect on a lot of people, where it instead makes them comfortable dictating the larger strategy or resources behind a function without even a basic, existential awareness of the work itself. For me, leadership was consistently very humbling, but instead I frequently see leaders using their position as a leader itself to justify whatever their decisions turn out to be.

And maybe that's ultimately the issue. There will always be a need for someone to make decisions they don't have a lot of first-hand experience with. How things go for a business, or a society, or even a family are going to be determined in large part by how those decisions get made, and more specifically how those decision makers handle not knowing enough to make the right one.

Life is not a real-time-strategy game. It's not designed to be solved by one, brilliant person. The pieces are way more complicated, and unique, and weird, and sometimes the same piece that literally doesn't do anything for half the game becomes incredibly, existentially important when you least expect it. So many things that need to get done are weird, and specific, or stupid and broken and require someone to make a decision or concoct a good-enough solution that simply doesn't exist in any "training data", whether its used by a machine learning model or an MBA candidate. Trust me, I work in digital marketing right now. If I'm being honest, I do a lot of repetitive administrative work that should be automated, in theory, but the reality is that most of the automations built (by me or by vendors) with the intention of doing so are broken and unreliable because the inputs (and outputs) are bespoke and inconsistent. No one wants to do this work less than me, but I keep doing it, because I know how to ingest a typically random scenario and cobble together an environmentally-appropriate answer. Whether you're sponsoring an event or landing a plane, that's... that's the work, man! Forget it at your peril.

The Nothing App

Sun, 04 May 2025 09:12:31 -0400

I'm 43 years old, and I've been consuming technology products and working in tech basically my entire life, minus a year and a half where I worked for a catalog that sold garden gnomes. Nobody's perfect.

But the "tech industry", if that's still a thing we can demarcate, has some real existential problems right now, the main one being that it appears to be completely out of ideas. Well, maybe not so much out of ideas, but out of ideas that aren't just various commercialized versions of tech products and platforms senior executives read about or saw in movies as kids.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are two of the most well-capitalized guys on the planet. No matter how much money they lose, for whatever reason investors are happy to continue shoveling money into whatever they want to do, and that comes at a pretty significant opportunity cost -- try getting a job in technology right now that isn't about generative AI, for instance. It's doable (I did it!), but it's really, really hard. But these two guys are really sucking up just an almost incomprehensible amount of venture capital and pouring it into... I guess NVIDIA? And that definitely has a non-trivial effect on the marketplace of available ideas.

Still, the worst part is that... none of this is going anywhere, at all. These companies will probably, for a fairly long time, have really high paper values that these two guys (and others) will be able to use as collateral to borrow money, avoid taxes, and live like kings forever, sure. People will use ChatGPT, other people (probably less) will post on Twitter, and all of those people will make stupid cartoon pictures of themselves through prompts. Musk is cynical enough to know he needs to be integrated with the government -- and in particular, defense -- to generate the guaranteed, endless revenue stream he needs to finance his nerd fantasies, and he may succeed at that.

But... "the everything app" these guys are obsessed with is not coming. They're not going to build it. No one is! There's been a lot of corporate consolidation over the years (too much, in fact), but one thing that remains extremely numerous are apps. In the 2010s, Facebook clearly wanted to be "the everything app" — maybe it still does! But they had years to figure it out, infinite money, and an ambitious, sociopathic super-dork running the show, just like these guys -- and they got nowhere at all with that.

We don't need an everything app. We have an everything device, the phone. And all this capital is going towards trying to put an unnecessary, platform eliminating app layer on top of it even though (a) there's nothing in it for consumers, who control some parts of their phone experience, and (b) there's nothing in it for Apple or Google, who control the rest. The most incredible achievement Sam Altman has pulled off is convincing Wall Street (and the media, and even Apple and Google to some extent) that chatbots somehow undermine this moat, when they do not, at all, in any way. I mean... Facebook even tried to make a phone! They knew what was up!

(Search is different. Google dropped the ball on search and now their offering is bad enough, and hard enough to get value from, that ChatGPT's bullshit machine is good enough for people, which is just an incredibly damning sign for the quality of search in 2025. But there's actually money to be made/lost in someone getting search right, or at least less wrong than it is right now.)

This whole Ready-Player-One everything app idea is just a giant waste of money that will never turn into anything real. And real, interesting ideas and iterative improvements to things you're actually going to use will continue to wither on the vine until we accept it and move on.

Wholly Lawless

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 21:17:37 -0400

This is an insane sentence to read in a story on a federal court ruling:

There is little to no evidence to support a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once in the MS-13 street gang, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. And in any case, she said, an immigration judge had expressly barred the U.S. in 2019 from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Xinis wrote.

I'll put this bluntly. There are many policy positions you can hold that — even if crazy — can fit inside the framework of American society and government prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. You can call different ideas "left-wing", or "right-wing", or talk about the importance of "liberty" or "security", and in most cases that can fit inside some still-defensible idea of how the United States could/would work.

However, the idea that the executive branch can unilaterally declare someone removable from the country, provide no proof, ignore the laws and procedures that legally require them do so, send them to a prison in El Salvador, and then declare that the person cannot be returned because they are now outside U.S. jurisdiction is fundamentally incompatible with not only the U.S. Constitution, but the basics of western law and morality that predate the formation of the country. It is, with zero exaggeration, a blank check for the administration to do anything they want to anyone with no repercussions. They just have to say you are in this gang, and you can be whisked away and never seen again.

For America to function as you expect it to (whether you are aware of this or not), the executive branch absolutely must provide some justification for what they are doing, and there absolutely must be a defined, pre-described forum for providing it and allowing for some form of pushback or counter-argument from the person that it is being done to, and all of this must be overseen and adjudicated by someone who is not the executive branch. It doesn't matter if the person is a citizen or not, because if the government isn't required to do this for everyone, they can just declare that someone is not a citizen and do whatever they want to them, because in that world ICE or the Army or the State Department or the USDA or whoever would apparently have the right to simply take any action they want and then wash their hands of the situation because the person has been sent off to some godforsaken prison hundreds or thousands of miles away.

This is so stupid and obvious I can't even believe it needs to be stated. If you can't understand this, I sort of feel bad for you, but mostly I am enraged you are such a useless, non-contributing member of our democracy, because it is so unbelievably uncomplicated that I struggle to see any reason other than willful, borderline malicious ignorance for not finding this completely outrageous and unacceptable. You absolutely do not need to be some political egghead to wrap your arms around the idea that the people and institutions who get the guns and the keys to the prisons need to have absolutely ironclad limitations placed on them and that those limitations cannot be defined or interpreted by them. If a bunch of farmers and shopkeepers and blacksmiths were able to figure this out and do something about it 300 years ago (at tremendous personal risk!), I feel like you can get there too.

And hey, if for some reason you can't get around the idea of non-citizens having rights of any sort (that's your problem to figure out, but I won't die on that hill here), remind yourself that this is not about anyone's positive rights, this is about fundamental restrictions on what the government can do. It's a check on them, you dummies, not a perk of being a citizen, because if they can do this they can just take away your perks whenever they want and they don't have to give a reason or explain anything about that reason to you, a judge, or your freaking family, who will never see you again.

Good lord. I spent four years sort of lazily piling up credits and stumbling out of college with a political science degree, and for the most part I felt silly because it seemed like all I learned was "how America works", which I sort of knew anyways, and which seemed like something everyone here would have to learn just walking around and living life, or else society would collapse. And maybe I was right, because now that most people don't seem to know any of this, the Republic does actually appear to be in some form of collapse.

Intentionally Spread Thin

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:01:11 -0400

OpenAI is shoving more stuff out the door that seems very early, very ambitious, and very janky.

OpenAI is releasing a “research preview” of an AI agent called Operator that can “go to the web to perform tasks for you,” according to a blog post. “Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling,” OpenAI says. It’s launching first in the US for subscribers of OpenAI’s $200 per month ChatGPT Pro tier.

Operator relies a “Computer-Using Agent” model that combines GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with “advanced reasoning through reinforcement learning” to be able to interact with GUIs, OpenAI says. “Operator can ‘see’ (through screenshots) and ‘interact’ (using all the actions a mouse and keyboard allow) with a browser, enabling it to take action on the web without requiring custom API integrations,” according to OpenAI.

One thing I learned working in all these tech startups is that the easiest way to solve extremely difficult "last mile" problems is to get distracted by something else and work on that instead.

The Employees You Want

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 22:14:34 -0400

Max Read has a secondary potential motivation (other than sucking up to an incoming Presidential administration) for Mark Zuckerberg suddenly reinventing himself as the least intimidating, least plausible right-wing tough-guy reactionary ever conceived:

"News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context--as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action.2I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”--but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)."

Honestly, I have no real reason not believe this. It's not a stupid theory — it's a fairly compelling theory proposing that someone weird (and maybe, in their own way, stupid) is doing something stupid.

It's stupid for a couple reasons. It's stupid because you can already get whatever kind of workforce you want, and Facebook has been hiring what it wants for twenty years now. It wants "100x engineers", best in class, A-player, blah blah blah. That's what it's been hiring for better or worse. Never in Facebook's notoriously money and power hungry history has it said "we want this place staffed by a bunch of bleeding heart liberals". That was always the price of getting the people they wanted, and it was a price they paid happily to print money for, again, two decades.

This bring us to the second reason this is stupid. This is America — as much as corporations (especially tech companies, for whatever reason) seem to love coming up with elaborate, too-cute-by-a-half justifications for dumping workers, it's not really necessary. Americans have very few labor protections, and it's not hard to get rid of tens of thousands of workers. Traditionally, that sort of thing has hurt the stock price of public companies, but who knows if that would even happen now. So if you don't want most of your employees to be Facebook employees anymore (and the posturing of the last two years sure makes it look like he doesn't), just do your job and get rid of them. You don't even have to pay severance! I'm sure most of these people, like me, are at-will employees.

But... there is one little problem. These are still the kinds of workers you want — you just don't want them to be annoying or have principles or make you consider things you don't like. You want truly talented engineers and smart, technical business people who just love money and winning and crushing it, but... also people who thrive working inside a massive organization with huge egos, interdepartmental conflict, and often incoherent or incompetent upper management.

See where this is going? The first set of problems is very real, I get it. I once watched an intern launch into a rant at an all-hands meeting about how our executive team's answer on diversity "was frankly not good enough", and she was only there for the summer and didn't even do any work. But that's an extreme outlier. I've been working at tech companies for almost as long as Facebook has existed, and the best, most innovative, most effective employees I worked with (other than the occasional ruthless salesperson or actively hostile DevOps guy) were all basically kind, thoughtful, intelligent people. There's a type, man, and it's not AI-crypto-libertarian edgelord. Some of those people really are very intelligent and potentially very productive, but they generally don't scale well, they hate the bureaucracy and rules inherent in running a billion dollar business, and honestly, they're just a different kind of a pain-in-the-ass, and one you tend to run into a lot quicker. In other words, they'd all love to work with Mark Zuckerberg, as long as they can have his job where they can say and do whatever they want, change their mind on a whim, and never be held accountable for anything. As my uncle reportedly said when they reinstated the draft — "sure, I'll go to Vietnam. Just make me a general."

That's not who Zuckerberg and the rest of the "I'm a libertarian because I'm winning" crew actually want as mid-level product managers and data scientists. It'd be chaos, and far more insufferable than the occasionally eye-rolling left-wing status quo. Instead, these guys are just delusionally pining for their manic pixie dream girl — in their case, a brilliant, kind, innovative, competent professional who puts customers first, is willing to disagree and commit, and who also has absolutely no problem watching terrible, amoral shit go down on their watch as long as their boss says it's fine.

A few of these magical employees might exist, but there aren't nearly enough of them to staff Silicon Valley, which is why the only fantasy more appealing to these guys than a tech company staffed by obedient, professional, submissive right wing sociopaths is one staffed by large language mod-- sorry, I mean "AI Agents".

Three Pointers and The Angry Mob

Tue, 24 Dec 2024 16:01:20 -0400

John Hollinger is the first big, respected basketball name I've seen take a counterpunch at the puzzling (and omnipresent) narrative that the NBA is in some kind of death spiral.

Declining TV ratings. Endless fourth quarters thanks to timeouts, replays and clock stoppages. One-sided blowouts. A new December tournament format struggling to compete with the NFL colossus.

I’m talking, of course, about college football. Back in my day, there was real variety — Oklahoma won a national title running the wishbone! — but now everyone plays the same way. It’s all about passing, and whoever throws it better wins. No wonder ratings are down.

(*Sound of record scratching*)

I've been a pretty avid NBA fan for a long time, now. That includes some stretches where the basketball was... not very good. The immediate post-Jordan years, watching my 2002-era Celtics grind out brutal 81-78 playoff victories against the likes of the Al Harrington Pacers and the Jason Kidd Nets, the non-beautiful version of the Spurs (the Bruce Bowen era), and so forth. For the life of me, I just can't understand how any quasi-serious fan of the game could take this three point panic seriously, given the various ups and downs the league has been through over the years.

As with a lot of things, a big part of the problem is just a failure to accurately assess the situation. There are a lot more three pointers being taken now than even just a few years ago. That's an objective fact. But I definitely get the sense from people who are concerned about this trend that they either assume or believe from limited amount of game footage and YouTube clips that "three pointer" means basically pulling it up and chucking from far away, as some sort of alternative to traditional offense where you try to find an open shot.

If that were actually the case, I'd agree that there really was a problem. In fact, that really is my least favorite kind of basketball, but it's not limited to three pointers. It's iso-ball, a style best (and most efficiently) represented by peak-James Harden and recent-vintage Luka Doncic dribbling around with four guys spread around the court and looking to make something happen (and often succeeding). There are a lot of threes in that style, especially of the step-back variety. Just as importantly, there are a lot of foul shots, which are way more boring than threes. Worst of all, there's a tremendous amount of everyone else standing around.

But that's not the only way to shoot threes, and it's not powering the increase in threes we're seeing today. Instead, as Hollinger points out, a bunch of high usage players have started shooting 24 foot threes instead of 20 foot twos, with similar success rates but a lot more points. Hollinger also notes that spreads the floor for other things, to wit:

This is an important distinction when people talk about “too many 3s”: Shots at the basket are the same, and dunks — the most exciting play in the game — are the same 4.7 per team per game that they’ve been for the past two seasons. That may seem counterintuitive, but more 3s equal more spacing, which in turn equals more runway for dunks.

Look at the Celtics. When they lean on "dribble dribble shoot", it occasionally works, but most of the time the offense grows stagnant and they're beatable. But when they play basketball -- as they usually do -- their ability to hit threes turns into something almost indescribable.

You can see the way the aggressive use of three pointers befuddles even hardworking, hustling defenses, but it certainly isn't somebody scared of contact resorting to "dribble dribble shoot".

And while there are definitely loud, "too many threes" critics who are also pretty sophisticated basketball fans, I'd be lying if I said I didn't notice a correlation between much of the "too many threes" crew and the equally angry "the league is too soft" crew. But Hollinger addresses this as well -- after an initial gasp at the sudden physicality added to the game in the middle of the season last year, everyone seems to have forgotten about that and simply moved on to complaining about threes again.

I feel like I’ve seen my fair share of awesome games this season, both in-person and on TV, and that’s pretty much been the case ever since the league decided at last season’s All-Star break that it was going to chill on calling so many fouls when players drive to the basket. The result has been some of the most watchable, entertaining and stoppage-free basketball of the last quarter century.

That, to me, is the story: that the league enacted a fairly sudden change to make its product massively better. An underwhelming postseason likely prevented many people from noticing, especially the generalists who parachute into the NBA in April.

I actually think there's a relationship here, but it's not what the overlapping part of the too-soft/too-many-threes Venn diagram wants to hear. I think the two trends are actually related -- the more physicality you allow near the basket, the more it makes sense to shoot threes. Allowing defenders to grab and pull underneath the basket makes driving to the basket or playing in the post more difficult, and less efficient. It might hurt three point shooting a little bit, by simply allowing defenses to focus more on threes, knowing they are more likely to get away with simply clobbering anyone who gets by them, but it impedes the things people claim to want to see even more. At some point, I'm not sure what some of these casual fans even want, or if they'd recognize it if they got it. If you want to see Shaq post up and run people over, I mean... we've got Giannis, right? He's a different player than Shaq, but he's incredibly well-known, one of the leading scorers in the league, and he absolutely lives in the paint!

(I know this clip is old, but nothing's changed here -- if anything he's even better at this now.)

Would it somehow be better if somebody like Nikola Jokic couldn't shoot threes? Wouldn't not being a threat from all around the court just make him a less interesting passer (Arvydas Sabonis was amazing, for instance, but Jokic is just a better, more broadly effective offensive player)? And can you seriously make the case that modern guards and wings are somehow less broadly skilled than prior generations, or unable to do anything besides cower behind the line and heave up prayers?

This just seems like yet another one of these "I know it when I see it" complaints about the NBA that the league seems inherently susceptible to. I'm not interested in hockey, and I tend to get bored when I watch it, but I don't have some laundry list of things I think the NHL is doing wrong, nor do I think the NHL has "lost their way" and needs to return to some glorious prior age. I have lots of thoughts on pass interference and offensive holding occurring on every play, but until ex-players actually started killing themselves and leaving behind suicide notes begging their families to have their brains examined for traumatic damage, I didn't think the NFL was in some existential crisis.

But everyone has a hot take on basketball. It's hard for me to believe that for many people, there isn't some unspoken, subconscious connection between how undeniably minority powered the league is (the biggest stars and best players are generally black americans, europeans, or increasingly, black europeans) and how endlessly critical and pearl-clutching we always seem to be about the direction the game is going, no matter what that direction is. For years, grumpy old white Dads would complain that no one could shoot. Today, those same grumpy Dads see the proliferation of exceptional long-distance shot making not as a return to graceful, skill-driven basketball, but as something that needs to be stopped by any means necessary.

Year in Review (sort of)

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 22:35:00 -0400

This isn't quite an end-of-year post, but technically, we are approaching the end of the year, so why not. At present, there are some things I'm high on (ideas, not substances), and some things I'm a lot lower on. In an attempt to stay positive, I'm going to counter each of my lows with a high. I know, I know -- but this is how hard I have to try sometimes to keep my grumbling at bay, or at the very least somewhat moderated.

Low: Generative AI

I mean, do we even need to go here? I tried. God, I really, really tried. But this thing reeked of disingenuousness and hand-waving almost from the day it hit the zeitgeist, and now we're here. The whole thing hasn't collapsed yet, but the general mood has soured dramatically even in just the last couple of months. We're certainly getting the downside -- spam, shitposting at scale, customer service chatbots, people repeating made up nonsense from ChatGPT on national news broadcasts, plus massive (and needless!) energy and water use. But the upside continues to be utter vaporware, breathlessly described by a bunch of grown up Ready Player One dorks again, and again, and again, but never actually turning into anything people can use. Even in the enterprise, white-collar knobs like me are subjected to endless prompts to use "AI assistants" in already awful, user-hostile business applications that (1) do not work, (2) do not know whether they worked or not, (3) constantly promise they will get better, (4) never get better.

This is going to take forever to wind down, because so much of this is motivated by ego and funded by entrenched companies that print money doing something completely unrelated, so there's no forcing mechanism to make any of them give up the ghost. We could be here for a while.

High: Not-Generative AI

The Photos app on my TV is really pretty amazing. I spent a couple hours in my late 20s teaching my (long since discarded) iMac what a bunch of my friends and family looked like, and then eventually added my kids. That's all it took, apparently, for THE MACHINE to provide me with a lifetime of whimsical albums, slideshows, and movies about so many awesome times in my life. Sometimes it's hard to even go to bed, with so many good memories available to enjoy (and after around 2012, to enjoy in pretty consistently high quality).

Low: Most Software

The web is a disaster -- search is useless, everything is computer generated chum, and social networking is dead for anything other than pissing matches and engagement bait. Despite that, web browsers are where we spend all of our desktop computing time, using crappy apps built with generic, high level frameworks that are slow, battery-soggy, and easy to turn into even crappier desktop apps. DO NOT GIVE ME A DESKTOP APP WITH A "RELOAD" BUTTON IN IT.

We're really stuck with this now, aren't we? We have no good HTML to view in our HTML viewer, and yet somehow that's the application we use all day, every day. Two menu bars for everything. I still can't believe it.

High: Some Software

God bless you, indie developers. Rogue Amoeba, I just bought your entire $200 bundle thing. Do I need it? Probably not -- I needed Loopback, but everything you make is just so beautiful, and thoughtful, and functional, and faaaaast, I couldn't say no. There are also some gems in SetApp (along with some weird stuff, but whatever) like CleanShot, the venerable MarsEdit, OneSwitch, Permute, and a few others. And of course, Logic and Final Cut continue to grind along like the champs they are despite coming from a massive corporation, and the general eyebrow-raising quality issues that have snuck into a lot of Apple's software over the last few years. Here's to hoping they don't ruin Pixelmator.

Low: The News

It's rough. Plus, I canceled my Washington Post subscription after nearly ten years thanks to Jeff Bezos' truly groveling decision to block the paper's presidential endorsement at the last minute. I'm not saying it mattered, but I'm not subsidizing that guy's vehicle for sucking up to Donald Trump.

High: Other... news?

Hey, somebody has to do journalism, which means I need to pay for it. I'm currently subscribing to The Village Green (my extremely local newspaper) and The Verge, which just rolled out subscriptions and has slowly evolved from a run of the mill tech dork website to a legitimately thought-provoking and investigative entity. Good job, guys.

Low: The New England Patriots

Drake Maye = pretty good! Everyone else = pretty bad! No one should (or will!) feel bad for us, but those twenty years of regional dominance were pretty fun if you were from the region, as I am.

High: The Boston Celtics

WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW? WHAT THEY GONNA SAY NOW????

Low: I'm Not in a Band

This is quite the drought for me, but I did put out the first of two short acoustic albums, and that was fun. The second one's basically done, but I need to sit down and mix everything, because AI isn't real and can't do it for me despite it being a common, theoretically low-skill grunt task that is basically a bunch of math.

RESOLUTION LIVES FOREVER

Did I have to get a job again because I'm a coward, and built the most conservative version of my passion project possible, largely driven by a fear of failure that almost certainly played a role in my project largely... failing? Probably. AND YET! This coward's conservatively constructed application is still 100% live and accepting payments, friends! I use it all the time, even for my real job that actually makes money, and the monthly costs to run it are laughably low. No state of the art GPUs required. Even for Brian?

Yep, even for Brian.

Never Good Enough

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 15:04:02 -0400

For some reason, WordPress has decided to incinerate itself. It's true, but not really true, because WordPress is a million different things. It's an open source CMS. It's a hosting provider of said CMS. It's the flagship product, of sorts, of an extremely successful and (on the surface, at least?) cool looking tech company. It's also an ecosystem of service providers and product companies that aren't affiliated with that tech company, and that's where it's all decided to come apart.

Basically, the people (person, really) who control WordPress have a problem with how much WPEngine, the very profitable company that hosts this website, contributes back to the open-source WordPress project. After that, everyone's opinion sort of goes into a black box and there's copyright infringement accusations and plugin seizing and all kinds of nonsense, but it all sort of stems from the feeling Automattic (and more specifically, Matt Mullenweg) have that WPEngine is free-riding off an open source project that Automattic effectively leads development of.

Are they right?

Not even a little! I really, really, truly do not care about the financial specifics of the slowly advancing WordPress project, or who makes money from it. That's the beauty of it being open-source! If I felt like things were moving too slowly, I could go work on it, or give someone money to work on it, or whatever, but that would be entirely up to me. As it happens, I feel (or felt) fine about WordPress until this entire thing blew up, so like Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard, I do not care.

Unfortunately, now I have to care for several reasons.

This site is hosted by WPEngine, an entirely unsexy and uninteresting IT provider that has generally served me well over the years here and elsewhere. Whether they like it or not, they are now in a protracted legal and PR war with Matt Mullengweg, and thus WordPress.org, which does not appear to have any sort of governance outside of doing whatever Mullenweg says.
I left WordPress once, but came back years ago and was planning on never switching again. If for some reason this place starts to fall apart for reasons beyond my control, I might have to rebuild all of this on another CMS. Please... don't make me figure out Ghost or something, I'm old now, everything takes longer.

Annoying logistics aside, the real bummer is Mullenweg, the heart and soul of a company that represents so many cool things on the internet, either (a) going completely insane, or (b) taking off his "I love the internet mask" to reveal the same egomaniacal tech bro persona ruining everything else in tech. I guess I'm rooting for the second one just because I have a hard time rooting for the existence of mental health problems in a person, but man, that's a depressing outcome. Do they not have enough money over there? Can you not just continue to be profitable and make cool things? Automattic runs the journal I keep track of my kids childhood with, for God's sake. Somebody take the wheel over there, and fast.

Planning Your Digital Advertising Strategy with The Unstoppable Irony Machine Known as Resolution

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 17:42:24 -0400

As previously decided, I'm now hard at work at my full-time, undisclosed occupation, saving up pennies to do cool things to this app. But another thing I've thought long and hard about is actually spending some money on promoting what's here today.

I've delayed doing this kind of thing forever, mostly because I've worked in digital marketing for over fifteen years and I'm mind-bogglingly cynical about most channels. I've always told bosses/founders/etc. that they have to be prepared to light some money on fire if they want to get attention -- the fantasy world of knowing exactly what we're going to get for each dollar and then just only doing the things with an acceptable return on investment doesn't exist today and never really has, certainly not in my lifetime. But it turns out that when I put myself in those (fancy, probably leather) CEO shoes I didn't like that answer either, so I didn't spend any money at all. This did not bode well for my user acquisition statistics.

However, now that I've been gainfully employed for a while, the idea of subsidizing a small bit of Resolution promotion is starting to seem more plausible, and less self-defeating. After all, despite many of the world's power users earnest pleading that companies take the money they spend on various promotional efforts and put it into product development instead, the sad truth is that marketing is a lot less expensive than product development. At least the kind I'm looking at.

That being said, I'd like to know what I'm getting myself into. If I were to spend say, two thousand dollars on a variety of different marketing channels, what's reasonable to even expect? What happens if I sponsor a newsletter and cut my YouTube spending in half? What if those YouTube clicks are more likely to create an account than people from search ads?

HOW CAN I GET MY ARMS WRAPPED AROUND THIS? WHAT KIND OF INSANE APPLICATION WOULD ALLOW ME TO ASSESS THIS KIND OF THING WHEN I'M NOT EVEN SURE WHAT I...

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQb9ut_OcZw)&t=45s

Oh, wait! I know!

Resolution Ad Blitz 2024/2025

Go ahead -- look at this bad boy. It only took me... 30 minutes? (Yes, this is a shared copy of the actual model shown below, which you can copy and use/change/etc.)

In all seriousness, I really didn't have to shoehorn Resolution itself into this question. It actually made the most sense, mostly because (as I mentioned) I'm not entirely sure what I want to do yet here, and because there are slightly different variables for each channel's respective funnel. For instance, I can spend more money to increase the number of YouTube views I get, but I can't spend money to increase the audience size of a newsletter sponsorship.

Display ads will give me impressions that may or may not turn into clicks, while paid search ads only charge by the click, so for that calculation, the impression stage doesn't figure into my finances. Then, I end up with signups and those all get tallied as a group.

Finally, in classic Resolution fashion, I'm almost certain to want to go backwards, and see what my costs or rates will need to be to achieve certain numbers of signups from certain channels, and as stated ad nauseam, no spreadsheet is going to let me switch the direction of my logic back and forth like that (doubly so with multiple conversion rates that I may or may not be open to adjusting).

Coming Soon: The "I Should Have Bought a New Laptop Instead" Resolution Ad-stravaganza!

Trust me, it's very weird to spend an afternoon trying to figure out a strategy for promoting a thing only to suddenly realize the best way to do that is by using the thing. This certainly isn't the first time I've landed here, though.

So hey, if you're like me, and you've got a budget to spend, and you want to think about where to put it (or see what has to happen for that budget to do anything), start modeling!

Visionaries

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:04:07 -0400

I was ranting to my wife the other night about how frustrating it is that so much energy is going into absurd nerd fantasy when there's just SO MUCH to improve about the actual technology real people use every day.

At some point, I blurted out something about how maybe getting two completely insane platforms -- the internet, and the iPhone -- in less than fifty years was enough. Maybe we needed to get better at those before deciding we were moving onto... whatever this is.

"The computer should be alive. I should be able to wear the computer."

WHOA, WHOA, SETTLE DOWN. There's work to be done here, folks. The singularity ain't coming in our lifetimes, so this is going to be a grind.

Or... well, I guess if you're a billionaire you can play pretend for a few years.

The Theoretical Beauty of the Legislative Branch

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 14:57:06 -0400

I’ve been reading John Roberts rulings since I was a pre-law undergraduate student, and simply put… the guy lives in a fantasy world.

The Supreme Court on Friday curtailed the power of federal government agencies to regulate vast parts of American life, overturning a 40-year-old legal precedent long targeted by conservatives who say the government gives unaccountable bureaucrats too much authority.

For decades, the court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws. That power will now revert to judges, a move experts said could lead to a spate of challenges of federal guidelines and make regulation more unpredictable as different courts assess agency decisions in different ways.

Writing for the majority in the 6-3 ruling in a pair of cases, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Chevron framework has proved “unworkable” and allowed federal agencies to change course even without direction from Congress.

“Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties,” Roberts wrote.

You don’t have to be especially cynical to realize that the United States Congress has had a lot of trouble producing thorough, detailed legislation at a rate sufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. That’s why so many things go to the courts! But Roberts is nothing if not consistent — from his judicial philosophy to his decisions and opinions on the regulatory state, this dude has always believed that the legislative branch should clearly articulate what is and isn’t permitted, and that courts can make this happen by simply rejecting regulatory actions that don’t have express legislative authority.

Cool, cool. But I have to like, live here, man, and the thing you are describing almost never happens. We hate long, detailed legislation! We’ve been told to hate it since the Reagan administration, by legislators waving around giant stacks of papers and lamenting “this 9000 page bill!”, as if the number of pages in a law is a measure for the “amount of government” or something. So which is it? Simple bills, or detailed bills?

I actually believe that Roberts would like detailed bills. He would probably shoot a lot of them down from his position on Mount Olympus, but he would enjoy the back and forth, and I don’t think he’d undercut the few things he actually allowed to pass. It’s not an intellectually incoherent approach to government at all — it’s just a completely impractical civic fantasy that people should be debating in dorm rooms late at night, not suddenly deciding to implement in a country that is already paralyzed and ready to tear itself apart.

Again — "the Chevron framework has proved ‘unworkable’”, says… some freaking guy we don’t even vote for. I mean, look, I’m not begging for my life to be micromanaged by a bunch of dorks at the Department of Agriculture or anything, but at least I can vote for one of two extremely old men who can appoint some political hack to get in or out of their way a little bit. John Roberts, on the other hand — I mean, the guy literally has zero accountability. Zero! So don’t start poking at shit, man!

I just can’t take seriously anybody who thinks today’s Congress — we didn’t even have a SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE for weeks for absolutely no discernible reason — is even remotely up to the task of providing the kind of detail Roberts and his coalition have suddenly decided is necessary. This pre-WWII vision of American government guys like Roberts continue to wave around a hundred years after it had any relevance at all is just childishly unworkable, and now my kids are probably going to have to do their own private-sector mercury testing or whatever while the guy puts up William McKinley posters in his bedroom. I’ve been super patient with this dude for 25 years but I think I’m done with him.

"complimentary chiropractic adjustment"

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:20:52 -0400

This is funny, informed, profane, and generally delightful.

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup, and even if you do that all right there is a chance that the problem is simply unsolvable due to the characteristics of your data and business? This isn't a recipe for disaster, it's a cookbook for someone looking to prepare a twelve course fucking catastrophe.

I have no notes. There is going to be some absolutely incredible goalpost-moving over the next five years — unlike crypto, the vague, amorphous “AI” space will be able to declare victory in any number of ways even if the most visible applications never become practical or production-viable. “But Nate, AI is everywhere now!” is a thing you will definitely be able to say without lying in 2026, but also a thing you could have said in 2016 before the market discovered thirsty chatbots and mass-laundering of intellectual property.

AI'll Believe It When I See It

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 10:23:49 -0400

As someone who’s been deep (trapped, often) in the Apple ecosystem since 1987, it’s very important to me that the company not… ruin everything, basically. Then again, one of the reasons I’m still here is that Apple 2.0 has been surprisingly good at maintaining the basic customer experience even as they became far, far too large to punk rock their way through things like “should we comply with the request of this lucrative market’s authoritarian regime”.

Being a big public company in 2024 does not usually allow you to prioritize “wisdom". I get it.

As the Generative AI Hype Bubble Spectacular reaches it’s eye-rolling stage — the part where everyone knows how this movie is going to end except the investor class that’s too deep in it now to get out — Apple has apparently assessed the terrain and decided what it’s going to do with all of this stuff.

Throw in commodity transformer text replacement into the operating system level (i.e., shorten this, make it “friendly”, etc., basically everyone’s AI-app from early 2023)
Bake some image generation into a few low-stakes areas (chats, emojis, etc.)
Give you a HILARIOUSLY walled off integration with ChatGPT where it literally asks you if you want to send this stuff to OpenAI every single time
Use an on-device LLM to theoretically make Siri less stupid when it comes to listening
Invest in a whole bunch of non-LLM stuff at the operating system level to allow apps to give Siri the necessary context to be less stupid when it comes to doing stuff

The first three are very real things that I don’t care about at all, and will probably never use except to troll my friends once or twice a year. The fourth one is a win unless it somehow makes things worse, but talking to Siri is already like talking to an old person who doesn’t speak English very well so that seems unlikely.

The fifth is such a massive, fundamental effort that has so little to do with the kinds of innovations OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have put into the world, it might as well be an entirely different company/product/industry. Throwing all this under the roof of “AI” is so meaningless and self-deluding I don’t even know where to begin.

Anyways, the net impact on me as a consumer is… low. The obvious shareholder-appeasement cruft (ChatGPT integration, image generation) is pretty easy to ignore, and Apple’s been pretty good at not shoving stuff like this in my face as long as it’s not an opportunity to sell me one of their services. This isn’t one, and in fact, might even cost them cloud compute sometimes for no revenue, so I feel pretty good they’ll leave me alone. I am most certainly not upgrading any of the (alarmingly numerous) Apple hardware products in my home for any of this, though. I’ll do that at the same rate I always do, because generative nonsense aside, these products continue to marginally improve in generally positive ways.

Will this make other people upgrade more quickly? I kinda doubt it. Is that the intent? Honestly I kind of doubt that, too — Apple might be just another stupid, next-quarter-minded 2024 corporation like everyone else, but at the same time… they aren’t. They’re the king of the mountain, they print money, and their executives are long-term Apple people shareholders have never been very good at dethroning. So I think they threw those guys a bone (AI! ChatGPT!) in the most non-destructive way possible, and then went on to promote a vision of “intelligence” that is much more inline with what they want to do (the Siri as a real assistant model), but is probably still well outside of their ability to deliver.

Good Things - Bad Things = The Things

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 13:26:30 -0400

This is a pretty incredible look at (among other things) how their best player being such a massive defensive liability is just killing the Dallas Mavericks, whether casual fans are able to see it or not.

I’ve absolutely played on recreational teams with this problem, where our best scorer and most obviously talented guy was pretty clearly the reason we lost. And I’ve seen in it non-basketball scenarios as well, like incredible sales closers who put up big numbers but suck the life out the rest of the teams, hurt our brand, etc.

The real question for Luka is… is he willing to be different? Can he make himself valuable without the ball in his hands, or because he’s less talented in those areas, and excellence is harder to achieve as a result, is that just off the table and everyone else needs to somehow mitigate it?

Instagram: Now With More, Worse Ads

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 10:39:48 -0400

I’ve worked almost entirely in B2B (or B2B2C) software, so I’ve never had the now borderline cliche experience of working on a free application that starts off being exactly what people want, but is unprofitable, and then needs to be made incrementally worse — forever — first just to break even, and then eventually to grow profits ad infinitum.

At least when you just increase your prices, you can try to provide some additional value (as long as it costs less to provide than the size of the price increase) and wave your hands a lot and hope people accept the tradeoff. But with this, Instagram is just… worse. It’s not even debatable — the business makes tons and tons of money doing what it does, but if the product was worse it could make more. So they made it worse.

Writing user communications for this kind of thing seems like it would be absolutely soul-crushing.

Someone Else Further Down the Stack

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 15:37:41 -0400

I mentioned this when I first saw it, but I just cannot get over this ridiculous interview with the CEO of Zoom. Somehow, it manages to simultaneously highlight pretty much all of the major things that are bothering me as I careen into my grumpiest, middle-ag-iest years. It features an incredibly successful (and presumably rich) entrepreneur who sounds completely insane, and utterly high on his own supply. It’s about a company that is extraordinarily pervasive in our professional life — Zoom, dammit! — and yet seems obviously, visibly disinterested in the actual thing that causes us to use them. And finally, it’s got my personal favorite: an ambitious, potentially impossible value proposition for the future that makes absolutely no sense and logically collapses with even the most cursory investigation.

I’ve been working at startups for a long time, and many, many times me and/or my colleagues have made the “giant bong rip” hand motion as we’ve listened to someone visionary explain what they’d like to be doing instead of what we actually do. This is not new to me. But at the same time, it’s also why I’m so hard on my career — I often convince myself that the companies I’ve worked for are less sophisticated or impressive than you might think because they’ve said completely insane things like this, and presumably real companies with real interest in what they’re doing and a firm grasp of what it is would not say those things.

But… here we are. Zoom Communications has a market cap of eighteen and a half billion dollars, and the guy running it unveiled one of the craziest, impractical, and most nonsensical product visions I’ve ever heard to a leading publication without even really being asked about it. He just… said it out loud for no real reason. And it’s fine! The stock is fine. Presumably Zoom still works, maintained and operated by competent subordinates of this man with totally crazy, horrible, unfeasible ideas about what meetings should be like and what would happen if a bunch of large language models added themselves to them and babbled uncontrollably at each other.

Still, that’s not what bothers me the most, or at least what bothers me in a fundamental way that reminds me of so many other things that bother me. For that, you have to go to this section.

NILAY PATEL, The Verge: When you say the hallucination problem will be solved, I am thinking about this literally in terms of Moore’s law because it’s the closest parallel that I can think of to how other CEOs talk to me about AI. I don’t think you spend a lot of time thinking about transistor density on chips. I’m guessing you don’t just assume that Intel and Nvidia and TSMC and all the rest will figure out how to increase transistor density on chips, and Moore’s law will come along, and the chips will be more powerful and you can build more applications. Just correct me if I’m wrong. I’m guessing you—

ERIC YUAN, Zoom: No, you’re so right. Absolutely. This is a technology stack. You have to count on so many others.

NP: So is the AI model hallucination problem down there in the stack, or are you investing in making sure that the rate of hallucinations goes down?

EY: I think solving the AI hallucination problem — I think that’ll be fixed.

NP: But I guess my question is by who? Is it by you, or is it somewhere down the stack?

EY: It’s someone down the stack.

NP: Okay.

EY: I think either from the chip level or from the LLM itself. However, we are more at the application level: how to make sure to level the AI to improve the application experience, create some innovative feature set, and also, at the same time, how to make sure to support customized personalized LLM as well. That is our work. I mean… pardon my French, but… holy shit. This guy is talking about re-centering a successful, eighteen billion dollar video conferencing company entirely around a technology that (a) doesn’t work reliably, (b) may never work reliably, and (c) is completely outside of his control. It’s like Ford announcing that all their cars are going to run on peanut oil, and just saying “eh, I’m pretty sure Exxon can figure it out. Or maybe Penzoil, I dunno."

LLMs having no understanding of what they’re spitting out, but using pattern recognition to make it kinda-sorta hard to figure out exactly when they are wrong — that’s the whole game right now. That is everything when it comes to making this technology, and all the things people are extrapolating from it, worth literally anything at all. Yuan is excited by the “AI” summaries of meetings. Great! Neat! That is an extremely niche feature with, potentially, some real value, which is why he’s not focusing on it but instead using it as an example of how close he is to allowing people to building virtual, digital doubles who speak, argue, and make decisions on your behalf. The second thing is a much, much bigger thing — a world changing thing, honestly — but it should also go without saying that it is infinitely more complicated and difficult to execute since a computer connected to actual, operational actions simply cannot be wrong the way a computer spitting out text for some bored office drone to skim can be. It’s questionable whether present, best-in-class levels of LLM accuracy are acceptable for even the corporate-virtue-signaling email writing tasks they’re starting to be pointed at now. It is not questionable at all that those levels of accuracy, or even significantly improved ones, are totally unacceptable for authorizing a purchase, or even scheduling a follow-up meeting.

I’m sure it’s a lot of fun to envision interesting product scenarios that sit on top of a magical, accurate, Jarvis-from-Iron-Man-like artificial intelligence apparatus with a reasonably priced API sticking out the back. But it’s not “product management”, or business strategy, or really anything more sophisticated than a couple of stoned college guys try to process the ending of “Her” in 2013. The hard part is building Jarvis, not fantasizing about all the cool things Jarvis could do if he existed. We had all kinds of fun concept fantasies and Dick Tracy watch scenarios floating around in our heads going back to the 1970s (or earlier!), but none of them really meant anything until Apple built us an iPhone to run those applications. And honestly, this feels even more egregious, like if somebody saw a rotary phone and started talking about his idea for Pokemon Go.

The Hologram Isn’t The Hard Part, or the Important Part

The largely forgettable movie “I Robot” was randomly on cable the other night, and I watched the beginning for a while, occasionally looking over at my vacuum and giggling. There’s a scene where the dead guy Will Smith is investigating has left behind this sort of interactive hologram, and Will Smith asks it all these questions. He gets some answers, but every once in a while it says something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I can only answer questions that I’ve been programmed to answer”. Which… makes total sense! This thing is important, and was left behind to help a police officer solve a murder, for God’s sake. I love imagining an LLM-powered version of this, answering correctly 92% of the time, but never admitting it didn’t know an answer and just making plausible sounding stuff up the other 8% of the time. “Sure, I was murdered. It was a band of criminals, seeking my money. Robbery gone wrong, you know? How else can I help you?"

This is all a long-winded, oft-made argument that whatever we decide to call AI — giant if-then statements attached to holograms, probability models, whatever — is not going to fulfill the dreams of the Silicon Valley elite unless either (a) it’s basically right all the time, or (b) it has an excellent grasp of whether it’s right about something and it’s at least right about that basically all the time. Again, this is the ball game right now. If you want to launder stock photos and generate spam sales outreach, maybe do some code suggestion, you’re good. Grab your API key and see what the market will bear for your probability driven idea. But if you think we’re going to automate like… actual people? Who make decisions? Who are held accountable for those decisions? First of all, you gotta figure out if LLMs can even do this, and it’s not looking great right now. And then, if not, you’ve got to invent something else.

Nope! That’s “someone down the stack”. Maybe it’s the chip! Maybe the chip will make large language models turn into… something else? Something better, and also fundamentally different. Chips do that all the time, right? Or maybe we’ll get a transparent, visible decision making engine from an LLM provider, even though no language model works like that because they literally add randomness to make interactions feel more interesting and human-like at the expense of predictability and exactitude.

Look, I’ve clearly had it with this LLM nonsense, and that’s in no small part because it stunk to high heaven from day one, if I’m being honest. And it might feel like I’m an ideologue on this, but I’m really not — I’ve done the reasonable thing and admitted where the utility may lie. I’ve even built test applications with this stuff. I have an OpenAI developer account, for crying out loud.

But this is some of the worst, most red-flag waving magical thinking I’ve seen from tech in my entire life, and we just sat through crypto! Apple is frantically trying to get away from having to buy freaking cellular modems from Qualcomm because that apparently limits their ability to implement their medium-term vision for iPhones, a product that exists and is real and has literally changed the world. Meanwhile, Zoom and the rest of these guys are just standing around, taking their huge, imaginary bong rips (or real ones, I don’t know, I’m not there) and waiting — just waiting! — for some band of machine learning elves to make it all possible. And when they do, Zoom will be there, leveraging this fantasy technology for the dumbest, most impractical purposes you can think of.

Disclosure: I have a pretty broad 401k managed by someone else so, God help me, I probably own some Zoom stock.

Dirty Basketball

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:27:16 -0400

When assessing the “dirty” aspect of a basketball play, a good but non-all-encompassing question to ask is “if I did this in a pickup game, would someone fight me”. The play in question one hundred percent qualifies, not because it’s so physically egregious (it’s not), but because it’s such an obvious cheap shot (the ball isn’t even in bounds!) that it’s clear the aggressor wanted everyone to know it was a cheap shot.

This is not “I am a tougher basketball player than you”, this is “I can do whatever I want to you”. And look, I get that a lot of people are horrified by the Matt Barnes-es of the world imploring for some extra-legal, on-court revenge justice. I’m usually not into that stuff either, to be honest. But that’s only when the powers that be are making a real effort to regulate what’s happening to people on the court. If somebody goes after one of my best players, after the play, the league needs to throw him or her out of the game, period. Otherwise, the 12th man is coming out and putting the aggressor into the basket stanchion on the next play, and the league can sort all that out instead.

Can I Do This With MarsEdit?

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:48:28 -0400

I sure hope so. I am really sick of logging into bloated web applications. While we’re at it, let’s see if this can handle photo uploads.

Godspeed, bits.

Zoom Delusion

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:06:16 -0400

I don't know a polite way to say it, but the CEO of Zoom sounds like he's completely lost his mind. You should read this whole Verge interview to experience his bizarre, dystopian, AI-double fantasy for yourself, but also to witness the perfect example of zero-accountability AI-fueled investment hype, pictured here:

"It's someone down the stack." That's the most revealing quote I've heard in a while about today's AI hype.

Anti-Social Media

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 12:39:25 -0400

Quitting social media over the last five years has been a net positive for me, but I do miss having a place for quick observations and small rants. Turns out it's not the audience that does it for me, it's just the therapeutic exercise of documentation. Crazy, huh?

Anyways, I'm adding a feed here for short things like that, and we'll see how it goes. This also gives me an excuse to try hooking something up to ActivityPub.

The Excesses of Art & The Limitations of Science

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:59:08 -0400

When I'm not pretending to be a tech visionary, I work in product marketing. This means that everyone in my personal life (most of whom do not in work in marketing for software startups) thinks my job is basically to come up with cool advertisements, and most of those people have suggestions. Meanwhile, every job listing I'm qualified for is essentially an elaborate demand to prove with 100% certainty that hiring me will make everyone want to buy their product.

This divide has dominated my career, mostly because I came of professional age in the "let the data decide" era. If you squint really hard, every once in a while it feels we just might be able to track everything important, put it all in a big pivot table, and then just... do what it says. But most of the time, things haven't worked that way at all. Instead, non-experts with massive confirmation bias now just have access to an infinite number of allegedly unbiased justifications for whatever it is they wanted to do.

In the words of my AI-generated co-worker Brian:

Anyways, this is already veering into more of an anti-data rant than I want it to, mostly because I've gone on my own versions of those before and the full posts have the necessary disclaimers and squishy "not-all-data!" qualifiers, so just read those if you're looking for that.

Instead, today I'm here to talk about limitations.

The Limitations of Art

I don't know if any amount of squinting is sufficient to view me as an "artist", but go ahead and try. It'll probably go better than trying to view me as anything else. Still, I think a lot of people assume my data skepticism is rooted in my own love of, for lack of a less soulless term, "qualitative creativity". I like to write, I like narratives that make people excited and my kids laugh and my wife remind me that there are other people in the restaurant. I'm guilty of all of that, and it's not exactly a major leap to assume I'm always going to pick a good story over whatever the data says.

But you'd be wrong. I've heard a lot of big, exciting narratives in my time about what was going on with the business and what we needed to do. Eventually, though, I also had Salesforce. Was our Sales data bad and wildly deceptive? Yes, it was. But that just made it take a little more work to figure out what was really going on, and once I did, my interest in exciting stories that didn't align with what the system was logging dropped to approximately zero. Because those stories were bullshit.

That's the downside of relying entirely on the art side of things. Everybody can have an idea, and no matter how stupid or delusional it is, it's probably going to seem great to someone. Even worse, if presented properly and cynically enough, that idea can prey on people's emotions and insecurities and drive you in the absolute wrong direction until you fly off a cliff, hand-in-hand like two fugitives in a convertible fleeing local law enforcement.

My Dad's an electrical engineer who was drafted into the executive ranks when I was in high school, so he rarely had to settle people down with business data. He was able to lean on physics, and explain to his fellow leaders that something was an incorrect assumption because it wasn't how, you know, thermodynamics worked or whatever.

Salesforce data is not thermodynamics. In fact, if thermodynamics was as reliable as your GA4 data, there'd be no way to determine how long it would take to make toast. But if you take proper precautions and analyze things very critically, they can be powerful tools for tethering yourself to reality.

And obviously, science doesn't have to come in the form of numbers. A customer can say they wanted a feature, and that's obviously a more concrete observation than just a feeling that a customer would want it. Is it better to pull out more than a single random anecdote? Yes, it is. Do people who go too far down the art road with their narrative often fail to even do that? Yes, they do, because often that's how far away they are from reality.

In other words, the worst case scenario for leaning solely on the art of marketing is... bullshit. And while non-marketers and casual observers of marketing might think "hey, that's what you guys do!", those of us trying to grow businesses know that drifting into bullshit is usually the beginning of the end.

The Limitations of Science

Weirdly enough, my criticism of people's data usage is often that they're using data incompetently, in quasi-bad-faith, or even outright unethically to advance... well, bullshit. And that is one huge challenge that comes with mass access to data. It's actually why I'm so worried about mass access to generative AI at work -- it's not the "replacing jobs" part I'm worried about, it's the idea of a bunch of people cranking out spam with the lame lack of discipline or literacy they showed for twenty years when given easy access to things like user and buyer data.

But, to be fair, "you can do it wrong" is not really a unique limitation of data or science -- it's just easier to dismiss bad art than bad science. Most people feel comfortable dismissing art that they think is worthless, but the language of data and science carries with it an authority you have to overcome with your own knowledge of the material. Hipsters and scenesters who didn't think my band was punk rock enough aside, it's easier to bully with science than art.

Example #1 - Art that some people will find extremely easy to dismiss.

The bigger, more impactful problem with data as your source of inspiration is that it rarely leads to truly new, outside-the-box ideas. Maybe you don't collect the relevant data, which makes sense because you don't actually do it yet. Maybe there's a benefit or impact that isn't consistently shown in the data, or it's only shown in broad measures like customer satisfaction that don't confirm specific assumptions about your product. Either way, there's a fundamental limitation on how creative you can get if you're 100% tethered to basing your ideas on observable things that already exist.

I've certainly triggered the art part of my brain with some realization provided to me by data, but I've never had a transformative, exciting idea that was simply telegraphed by the data in front of me. And while that might not seem like an existential blocker to innovation, it's a lot harder than you'd think to get a 2020s-era organization to act on a great idea that was only inspired by data. There will always be a less radical, less artistic idea with more support from data, and in my experience, that's the idea most companies will be willing to commit to.

In fact, this process has happened so frequently, and so consistently in my professional journey that I'm honestly kind of shocked when the opposite takes place, as it has with virtual/augmented reality platforms and generative AI. While you can now dig up some data to justify basically anything at this point (and I assume it's been done with these ad nauseam in various meetings at the companies pushing these concepts), it seems pretty clear that this is coming from somewhere else. The only concrete data points we seem to have about generative AI, for instance, is that ChatGPT got a ton of usage right out of the gate, and that businesses are convinced they want to use AI as long as you don't actually define what its capabilities, costs, or limitations are. Cool, let's ship it, I guess. In some ways, "the computer is a person!" is one of those data-inspired, art-led approaches to product innovation I mentioned earlier. If it's right, you end up with what many in the media and investment world seem to expect -- a revolutionary new platform that, when we look back, will seem too obvious to have missed but required a fundamental, visionary leap away from the past.

Or... you get the opposite. A derivative, copy-cat idea that's then poorly applied to nonsensical use cases by a bunch of people with their fingers in their ears who watched too many of the same movies growing up. Either way, the art vs. science debate won't get resolved, because either approach could plausibly take a good chunk of the credit (or blame, depending on how this plays out). If everyone migrates to the metaverse (or we hilariously and self-servingly redefine the term to encompass something different that people actually want), is that because of a qualitative adherence to Mark Zuckerberg's vision against all indicators? Or will some team of analysts tell us the whole thing was obvious based on a rigorous review of such and such indicators? If we end up in my personal hell arguing with our computers through command lines, does that mean the tech bros obsessed with building the computer from Star Trek saw the future, or was this an obvious evolution from engagement with Siri & Alexa over the years?

I have my takes. I don't think they matter, though, because the entire thing will look different depending on who's looking at it. And my friends will still think I make ads for a living.

Prompts, Web Applications, & the Death of Accountability

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 17:49:22 -0400

I have a theory for where things are going, and I don't like it.

Web Apps

I could write a big giant post about why I have a lot of problems with web applications. I love the web, but I think from a pure productivity perspective, we're using it wrong, and asking it to be good at things that it is fundamentally, technically ill-suited to do. And that's not a knock on the various innovations and workarounds developers have come up with over the last twenty years to make browser-based apps better (and sometimes, borderline really good!) -- if anything, those achievements are more impressive when you consider what the browser actually is.

Anyways, I think for the most part, we have web applications for good reasons. It can be extremely useful to jump into an application from a dumb client machine (maybe it's not yours, for instance). You don't have to update things (although... you can also CHOOSE not to update things, or at least you used to be able to decide that). Plus, people accepted the browser in a way they didn't accept Java apps or other write-once run-everywhere environments because the web added a whole crazy level of connectivity to everything that literally changed the world.

All that stuff matters. But the reason most of us spend all day at work in browser tabs using the same 10 applications and dealing with page reloads and clearing our cache and getting logged out isn't really for any of this -- it's because it's cheaper to develop one compromised, least-common-denominator app and deploy it everywhere than write multiple dedicated applications for different platforms. That's it. It's just money, and time. I should know, because I paid to have a web application developed and I absolutely LOVE native desktop applications. However, Resolution, like most web apps, remains a web app that is accessible to 100% of the total addressable market, but optimized for none of it.

Of course, nobody cares. I mean, obviously I care, but basically no one cares about this, because over time the lack of good desktop app experiences and the improvement of web app capabilities has created a world where the differences are close enough to be ignored for long enough that we stop realizing they exist. Normal people don't blame JavaScript from a bunch of lame Electron apps when their computer fans sound like jet engines and obliterate their laptop batteries -- they blame their computer. But dammit, I blame JavaScript, and yet I can't get away from it because these are the native apps that get offered to me. The market has decided -- or sort of stumbled into this, I guess-- by simply not putting up enough of a fight as the coolness of the web (blogs!) slowly took over important, less-cool things (powerpoint!) and boiled us like a frog. Now everything sucks and you need to clear your cache but at least you don't have software updates (never mind, thanks Zoom, speaking of shitty desktop apps, way to undermine my entire point).

Prompts

Basically the worst people in technology -- not the profit makers, but the profit maximizers -- got their way with web apps. We accept worse experiences, and in exchange, it's cheaper for companies to develop and deploy software. Obviously the web is a wonderful playground for new businesses and ideas, but the fact that information professionals are sitting there with two frigging menu bars on their screen like idiots at all times is sub-optimal but apparently something we've all decided to accept.

Now, I'm being told that everything is going to be done with prompts. I type what I want, and the computer just does it. This is the future! Why even have applications at all?

There are reasons, of course, to do this. For all the times that natural language is an idiotic, self-defeating way to interact with a computer, sometimes it isn't. I too set timers, ask the temperature, and demand that things pause. It's possible that better linguistic processing could open up some new, useful doors, and that's cool. But... I don't want to edit video with prompts. I don't want to edit photos with prompts. I definitely don't want to build a website with a prompt, for goodness sake. This is madness -- these things are expressions of the human mind; barking your specification (or hand-crafting some bizarre series of hyper-specific instructions like you're leaving a note for your incompetent spouse to remember to water the plants and feed the kids), hitting enter, and then trying again isn't how anyone makes anything of any real value.

However, like web apps, there is a secondary benefit to prompts that I'm scared is going to motivate providers to push them into our lives whether they make sense or not. And that's...

Accountability

Trying to do something with an LLM can work... sometimes. That always seems to be the situation, doesn't it? The things that sometimes work continue to expand, but the part about them only working sometimes never seems to change. You know what else always seems to be the situation? That the bad output is my fault, because I wrote the prompt.

If I want to copy and paste something in Photoshop, there are a couple different ways to do it, but those ways are finite. They also work 99.95% of the time, and in the absolutely incredibly unlikely circumstance that they don't work, Photoshop is wrong and even Adobe would admit that it's Photoshop's fault.

It's hard to understate how financially awesome it would be, in the most cynical possible sense, to run a software company where you were never held accountable for anything your products did in response to user actions, or even how they work. Companies have been trying this for years with concepts like ad-supported, free software that makes money without any of the usual requirements to serve customers -- but this would be a whole other level of non-accountability. In this way, the fantasy of "conscious" software (and it really is a total fantasy right now, let's not kid ourselves) is especially self-serving, because it takes people who design and build software and gives them a bizarre, almost parental relationship to whatever you are paying them money to use. "The software is alive! Yell at it, not us!"

Just like Java, if you rolled this out overnight, people would lose their minds and revolt. You're seeing it with the stupid Humane AI Pin thing, and you're seeing it with Microsoft getting out over their skiis and trying to shove CoPilot into anything with a mouse cursor in it. There has to be a tradeoff people will accept, and since it's probably a bad one, it has to be both very exciting, and occur slowly. With generative AI and prompts-as-UI, that tradeoff is this -- we will let you basically launder other people's ideas and customize them without any skill, and do it cheaply, but you will have to let go of any requirement for granular control, predictability, or reliability. It's your fault, now.

That's the tradeoff. I don't want to make it. But I'd also rather have to remember to upgrade my applications and pick a platform than be stuck running EVERYTHING inside the glorified document viewer posing as an overwhelmed, underpowered application layer. I don't get to choose that anymore, because other people did make that trade. I just really, really hope enough people choose not to make this one, because I think it's going to be much, much worse.

Resolution 2024 (and beyond!)

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:00:10 -0400

TLDR: Resolution doesn't make enough money to allow me to make Resolution better -- which is a problem I need to figure out. However, Resolution also doesn't lose very much money, so it's not going anywhere, and you should continue to use it and tell all your friends and co-workers about it.

I've been working on Resolution full time for a while now. I started with nothing in 2022, and now we have... all of this! When I first quit my job to focus on this thing, there was a LOT to do. I had literally no bits at all -- just a couple drawings and a lot of ideas in my head, plus a certain amount of money saved up for development. For the next year and a half, I spent it building the thing you have today with a bunch of extremely talented people. I very specifically made a bunch of decisions about Resolution designed to insulate it from the (very likely) possibility that it wouldn't generate very much money, and sure enough, that's exactly what has happened. But I'm not made of money, and at some point the cool-but-unfinished application I have today is going to need additional dollars and hours to get any better.

So, since last summer I've been kicking the tires on getting a job. I've done a bunch of freelance work, interviewed a couple places, and basically started to do the stuff I need to start making money again. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing because on the one hand, this is the opposite of working on Resolution, but on the other, it's sort of the obvious next step towards making Resolution better, which is really all I care about when it comes to this enterprise (other than actually helping my wife keep a roof over our head, etc.).

What did I learn?

I've learned A LOT through the process of standing up Resolution. Some of the things I learned are pretty typical entrepreneurial things, and some are a little outside the mainstream, but here are the big ones.

1. Resolution is not really a startup

I have worked at a lot of startups over the last twenty years, and I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that Resolution is... not really one of them, for a bunch of reasons. Most importantly, I never really put any kind of countdown timer on it. Resolution didn't raise any money, and Resolution doesn't burn enough money to justify shutting it down. None of this is an accident. I spent a lot of time at other companies working on fundraising and found the whole process not only incredibly stupid, but at the root of many of our dumbest, anti-product decisions. I also spent a lot of time at other companies spending a ton of money to try to make success happen faster. Money on employees, consultants, systems, advertising, etc. -- money that created "burn rates" that would eventually kill us if we didn't continue to succeed. This is both kind of insane and actually pretty motivating.

Whether it was fatigue from being eternally hunted by financial ruin at work, or just garden-variety fear of failure, this element of "grow or die" is completely missing from Resolution. I didn't mortgage my house to start my big idea -- I waited until I was 40 years old with a significant financial cushion before doing this at all. Then, not only did I not raise any additional money (money for things like, you know, advertising or additional product development), but I didn't even try, despite lacking the ability to do many of these things myself.

Many times over the last couple of years I've been faced with a decision to go for a home run, or play it safe. In a traditional venture backed startup, the decision would have been easy, because playing it "safe" would have meant death. With Resolution, it didn't, so I often chose to play it safe. The best example of this is my most recent development sprint, when instead of frantically trying to add value to Resolution, I spent precious time and money on essentially making it production-ready -- supporting full account management, payments, and other useful long-term stuff. Trust me, there are much more exciting ideas in the hopper, and it kills me every day that they aren't built. If you're about to go out of business, cutting your losses and building out infrastructure would make no sense. But if you can't go out of business because of your cost structure, the decision is trickier and a lot more personal.

2. Customer development is interesting, but not what I want to do

Like all 42 year old white guys from a major metropolitan area, I have read The Lean Startup. It's a cool book, and while parts of it drive me bananas, I've used a lot of its lessons everyday at -- as I mentioned -- a pretty wild variety of early stage companies. One of the core ideas of the book is the concept of "customer development", which I won't try to describe in detail here (just read the book), but involves using the input of your first potential customers to figure out what to build and how to build it.

Don't get me wrong -- we talked to users and prospective users quite a bit, and many of them had interesting, useful things to say. But in general, the very non-startup ethos of Resolution is not about figuring out how people would like to solve a problem (or figuring out what the problem is). It's way more personal (egotistical, even) than that. I have this problem. Worse than that, my problem is actually that other people have this problem, and it adversely affects me. So when you get feedback that your desired target customers don't want to solve the problem, or at least aren't particularly motivated to do so, customer development logic would dictate that you pivot pretty aggressively. If the proverbial fish aren't biting, you move the boat.

That's customer development. Then, there's customer development with me, at Resolution, as shown below.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFYYisKLoEw)

This is obviously a corollary of "this is not a startup", but the main problem is that, in the words of my daughter, "I always listen to the other kids' ideas, but they are bad and mine are better".

The entire point of Resolution is to force people to make decisions and face realities they often refuse to admit or acknowledge. No one wants to do this until they experience the benefits of doing it, which makes the fundamental value proposition of my application inherently user-hostile. If I had a million dollars, I could probably make this go away (or at least mitigate it significantly) with piles and piles of fun, animated surprise and delight, but I don't, so for the most part the first two hours of using Resolution can be a pretty joyless slog until it suddenly clicks and you think "hey, maybe the way I was doing this before really IS stupid!"

I don't want to give up on this, but obviously people are not obligated to fund the continued development of my character-building, "eat your vegetables" web application to the tune of $65 a year. I get it! But on the other hand, Facebook gave you everything you wanted, based on data, and now you all hate it. I'm giving you nothing you want at all, and as a result, eventually you're going to love it. Makes sense, right?

3. 75% of starting a product business is actually just about bothering people

I am demonstrably good at product marketing -- that's why people keep asking me to do it for them! I'm not saying I'm some kind of genius (lots of people are good at product marketing), but unlike playing guitar, I have done lots of product marketing work for lots of real companies, and driven real success with it that resulted in people giving my employers lots of money. I am proud of this!

Zero to one product marketing, specifically, is hard. But I don't think it's outside my ability to do well. However, it does require making some choices (especially if you have no money), and you could make a reasonable argument that when it comes to making those choices with early stage Resolution, I chose poorly. Of course, it's all unprovable -- you go to market with the plan you have, and if you fail, in hindsight every plan looks better because it can't be disproven as long as its different. But you could tell me the home page of this fine web application is either perfect, or completely wrong, and maybe be right.

One thing you can NOT argue is that I have done a great job getting eyeballs on this thing, because I have absolutely failed to do so. I've put in what feels like a tremendous amount of social energy into Zoom calls, introductions, emails, Loom videos, and everything else, along with even more energy into the organic marketing aspect of this -- making tons of search accessible content, product content, comparison pages, and a mix of useful and batshit crazy YouTube/LinkedIn videos. But it's not 2010. People don't explore the open web the way they used to -- things are put in front of them. Some of that is organic, but modern SEO has made that "organic" in the loosest sense of the term, and you're basically just figuring out how to force yourself in front of people without paying for it.

I mean, I tried. I made a Reddit account. I got banned from r/Startups in a couple weeks (for life!) for trying to operate in good faith, because Reddit is dumb and so are a lot of moderators. I made an account on IndieHackers and posted a couple things literally no one ever read. Did I comment on hundreds of posts? Did I inject myself into every conceivable conversation? Did I follow up multiple times with people who clearly had limited interest in what I was working on? No, no, and no. And these things matter. They are the little things we tell 23 year old SDRs to do not because we enjoy making the lives of junior employees miserable, but because in the aggregate these things actually matter! Resolution is proof of that -- I did not do these things at scale because whenever I did them, they had no impact, but from a business perspective, that's a silly, selfish reason to not do them. Which, again, is a good reminder that I have never treated Resolution as a real business, and that's why I should get a job if I want this thing to get better, which I do.

What did I NOT learn (yet)?

Is Resolution good enough?

I am a product person and a problem solver, so my product person brain says "absolutely not". I've got a vision in my head, and while today's Resolution illustrates certain parts of it very clearly, on the whole, this ain't it. There's a bunch of polish and shine I want to add, of course, but the main thing is that Resolution models shouldn't have to be a tree.

This way, you could have all of your expenses on one side of the model, broken down by category, and all of your revenue, also broken down by category, on the other. It's pretty Resolution nerdy, but I can't express how freaking cool this would be, and how many useful scenarios I could render this way.

That's an example of a fundamental operating principle, and there are a few of those that are needed for this thing to reach its true potential. However, there are tons of "features" that belong in here as well -- we have probably 50 of these scoped out and they run the gamut from formatting and usability improvements, to different visualization and reporting options, but they are all things that frankly don't belong in an MVP, so we didn't build them. I don't really have any regrets on prioritization, if I'm being honest.

Lastly, there's the entire "onboarding" process, which I think of more as simply "how is this concept presented to you in the product". I do a lot of explaining with walkthroughs, videos, and stuff like that, but you're asking a lot of the user in an era where anything that doesn't make sense in 5 seconds is usually thrown out the window. It's certainly not the first thing I'd build in a non-startup scenario (i.e., if you think of Resolution as a long term usefulness project and not a customer acquisition device), but I do think there's a cool way to bring people into this concept step by step where each step is inherently entertaining and educational at the same time. We don't have that today, and it's a big part of why I've been so hesitant to pay for eyeballs -- I'm not sure they'd stick around to deal with what we have at the moment.

Are people willing to put in the work?

Resolution is better than a spreadsheet in a bunch of interesting ways, but realistically it's not for people who are actually awesome at spreadsheets and willing to spend all day making and managing tons of them. I know those people are willing to do an incredible amount of work to understand the numbers of their business, because they already do an incredible amount of work. What I'm not as sure of is whether Resolution's intended audience -- people who have slightly less quantitative literacy and would benefit from having a better numerical grip on things -- are actually willing to get their hands dirty in the way that learning really requires. If you get a Salesforce report with a number, and you don't know where it came from and/or can't defend how it's calculated, does that bother you even if you're not very good at using formulas? It bothers me, and when I explained it people I worked with, it bothered them as well. But that's all talk. When push comes to shove, if you really want to know, you'll battle with Resolution even in its current form, as my current users do, and get excited by what you see when you do it.

Again, with a bunch of money, I can make a lot of the work go away, or become easier. Computers and really good designers are good at that. But I can't get rid of it completely, and if people are satisfied just getting numbers handed to them in dashboards or even in someone else's spreadsheet, I don't think they're going to want to go through the necessary intellectual exercise that is at the heart of why Resolution makes you smarter.

But I guess we'll find out! Because all of this aside, Resolution is humming along as we speak, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As I continue to "raise funds" (aka, "work"), eventually I'll get to a point where I can get back to work on development, and we'll see some of these things make it into Resolution. So continue to spread the word, and help me overcome both my lack of dedicated promotional money AND my internal distaste of bothering people.

Huzzah!

DOJ vs. Apple is a Bad Idea

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:26:14 -0400

I'll open with a caveat. This is, unfortunately, how the United States does regulation now -- settlements and consent decrees in response to broad, annoying lawsuits. I wish it wasn't that way, but Congress is full of too many old, stupid, unserious people to keep up with most of the issues you encounter in everyday life, so this is what we get. And if the DOJ is basically just making the biggest, dumbest, most inflammatory lawsuit they can come up with so they can cut a deal with Apple to get what they want, I get it. I'm turning 42 next week, I understand at this point how the sausage is made.

That being said, on its face, this is a stupid lawsuit with a lot of stupid arguments in it, and I'm not even sure what the DOJ wants. A truly bizarre part of Apple's appeal -- something that was very much not the case back in the 80s and 90s -- is that it has very successfully aligned its massive size and weight against a number of the most annoying factors facing consumers. In other words, Apple has used the fact that the phone is everywhere as a cudgel to make elements of life work more the way many (not all, but most) of their users want it to, and it's a huge part of what helped Apple go from "very large tech company" to "the tech company that we give all of our money to". And yet, somehow tech-people seem to forget this.

One of the things you'll notice in both the coverage and the filings itself is a surprising conflation of consumers, third-parties, and developers. The average American is a consumer, but the average American is NOT a third-party corporation participating in one of Apple's many lucrative value chains, nor are they a developer trying to make money from the iOS App Store. Regardless, developer harm is frequently lumped in with consumer harm, so Citibank (not a literal example, sorry guys) not getting to make their app the way they want is assumed to be simple rent-seeking from Apple.

Except... in real life, do Apple's customers want Citibank (again, sorry) to make their app the way they want? Do they want Ticketmaster to make their app work the way they want? Absolutely not!

What the DOJ doesn't get -- and many, many tech dorks with brains forged in the fires of 90s WinTel culture do not get -- is that back in the 1990s, Microsoft aligned itself against things that would cost it money, which usually meant things that threatened its ubiquity. Apple figured out a way to make money by aligning itself against things that most people absolutely hate, many of which are either failings of or representative of the tech industry. Standards that don't work in practice, endless attempts to track and monetize your data, UI conventions that are different for no reason, and incompetent data security are all everyday irritants that people suffered through every five minutes on their Windows XP laptop, before Benevolent Dictator Apple swept in and started banning things.

DOJ sees those "things" and thinks -- aha! These are vectors to compete with Apple! And... they probably are. But they were vectors to compete in 1998, and 2005, and honestly the only thing companies competed over more was who could make the shittiest, cheapest implementation of everything.

Think of it this way. In many cases, less zealous anti-trust people than I often make arguments to me about the benefits of things like vertical integration and the potential benefits of something large if that large something acts as a check on something else. Most of the time, my opinion is that these benefits don't pan out. Again, Ticketmaster/Live Nation, etc., etc., and so forth.

DOJ is going after maybe the ONE major, well-known example of vertical integration creating customer satisfaction and loyalty. There are soooo many places you could go after -- grocery stores, telecom, banks, credit cards, and more -- and you're going after the iPhone. The most popular, successful, influential, beloved consumer product in the last fifty years (maybe longer), and one that people don't even have to buy because Android is the most popular phone platform in the world and has absolutely nothing to do with Apple.

There are lots and lots of things Apple needs to improve. The DOJ is not going after the right ones, and even if it did, mandating them by government fiat is going to be an exercise in incompetence and futility. Apple needs to be pushed by competition. That competition isn't prevented by Apple Watches not working with Android phones -- it's prevented by the fact that Android just isn't what most iPhone users want, and Microsoft threw their hands in the air and gave up.

North Stars

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 15:58:17 -0400

I just happened to read/hear two very different -- but oddly related -- things on the way back from walking my kid to school this morning.

"The Funded Dead", an explanation/summary of VC-backed companies that aren't totally failing but can't raise more money
This episode of the Bill Simmons podcast where he and Ryen Russillo talk about the success/dubious value of ESPN's "First Take" debate show

The Funded Dead

"The Funded Dead" is from Failory, a newsletter/site about startups failing that I enjoy, mostly because it's a good reminder of just how many software startups there are. Failory also does a good job of highlighting small and medium sized startups that don't fail in a well-publicized blaze of glory, but slink away in the face of less entertaining, but more common challenges. It's good, you should check it out.

I found today's explanation of "zombie startups", however, surprising and kind of odd. In my mind, the definition of a zombie VC-backed startup is pretty simple, and I know a few of them. They raised a big pile of capital before interest rates went up, but they were always expecting to raise more -- they haven't figured out their unit economics or whatever else is necessary to run profitably, and the remaining $50m or whatever isn't going to get them there. So they're fine, but they're not, and they're going to die eventually. They're zombies.

That is, however, not exactly how Failory defines the term. Instead, it's this (emphasis added by me):

"You are the founder of a small but promising startup, and after weeks of negotiation, you have successfully secured a big round of funding from a well-known VC. You are happy, your team is happy, and, most importantly, the VCs are happy because they see in your startup the potential of becoming that rare and elusive creature every VC dreams of: a unicorn. Months pass, years even, and you find yourself in a weird spot. Your once unicorn-promising startup has lost its potential. It is not a dead company by any means. It has enough to cover its expenses, it generates a small revenue, and it might even be growing slowly. But it has lost relevance. It is clear now that the company will not be able to achieve the exponential growth VCs are looking for. You realize now that the big round of investment you were so happy about a while ago was a bit of a trap. You have become overcapitalized in your boom cycle and are now unable to generate enough revenue to justify your valuation. Maybe if you secure a new round of funding, you could use the money to get back on track. But VCs are no longer interested in you — they moved on to the next shiny startup and left you behind. You have fallen into the limbo. Unable to generate the necessary returns for your investors. Unable to get more funding. But also not completely broke. Your startup has been zombified."

My eyebrows went up when I read this for a couple reasons, mostly because I had questions about how several concepts were being defined here. "It has enough to cover its expenses" -- presumably, this doesn't mean the startup is break-even, right? Personally, that's what I'd consider "having enough to cover expenses", because many (most?) expenses are recurring, and we're operating a business over here. On top of that, this business is... growing? That's great! Unless it's one of those businesses where it loses money on every dollar of revenue, in which case I'm not sure I'd argue that you're actually growing.

The business having "lost relevance" is a strange way -- to me -- of saying "people are not willing to subsidize a money losing enterprise". While it's definitely real phase real venture based businesses go through, it's also one that I thought had recently fallen out of favor (except for AI, for reasons that remain unclear to me). Raising money is fine, but I think "raising money to raise money" certainly isn't as blindly accepted (required, even!) as an operating strategy the way it was just a few years ago.

First Take

On another note entirely (and then I'll connect the dots, I promise), Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo spent a few minutes talking about First Take, which is a debate show on ESPN where people argue about sports in loud, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes not-so-much ways. Simmons, Russillo, and pretty much everyone else I like listening/talking to sports about all agree that First Take is... pretty stupid, and not that interesting. The arguments are basically dueling monologues that occasionally descend into shouting, none of the topics seem especially important, and most of them are about various people's perception of things that won't even matter by the end of the week, let alone the end of a given season.

I'm never going to agree 100% with anyone's creative efforts (mine are certainly all over the place, quality-wise), but one of the reasons I've generally enjoyed the many projects of Bill Simmons over the years is that he seems to really value making things that are good, and not just things that people like. Now, Simmons is also good at making things (not everything, but things) that people like, so it can be easy to equate the two, but there's a difference. Simmons created a TV show about basketball that an insufficient number of people liked (it got canceled), but from listening to him talk about it in hindsight, he seems more focused on how he could have made it better, versus how he could have made it more popular. If something can't become more popular by being a better version of itself, Simmons does not really seem interested in it, and I have always respected that.

Anyways, Simmons expressed his generally negative opinion of First Take, and Russillo didn't really disagree. However, he did observe that by all indications, the human-interest, gossipy, he-said-this-about-him element is measurably more popular with people than content about actually playing sports. And more importantly, he said this:

Simmons: That's what they're doing these days.
Russillo: OK, but are they doing it wrong? I don't think they're doing it wrong. I think they're doing it right.

Now, this quote could easily be taken out of context, which is not Russillo saying "First Take is a good thing that I like". He immediately makes fun of it in the next sentence! But here is where I'll tie things together.

Dollars Are Not Points

The through line I felt with both of these things was the idea of being failed by "North Star" metrics -- i.e., a quantifiable measurement that says what we're doing is or isn't having the impact we want. Maybe I'm abstracting it too much by not saying "solving a customer need", but I think that's because we hide behind the idea of customer needs to avoid thinking about why we're doing what we're doing. In the case of First Take, they're maximizing viewership because that's how we monetize television, and the goal is (for whatever reason) to make as much money as humanly possible, as quickly as possible. In the case of VC-backed startups, the goal has been to create a company with the largest valuation possible, because VCs make money by selling businesses with large valuations to either other companies or the public markets, and they invest in a large enough number of companies that the risks that come with any one of those companies going for a huge valuation are worth it... to them.

ESPN is owned by Disney, which is a corporation, which in large part is an organization designed to make as much money as possible. But I said large part. If Disney stood for literally nothing other than making as much money as possible, they wouldn't be Disney. They wouldn't make Disney products (that make money), or invent Disney things (that make money), because they would just be a bank, or maybe a hedge fund. VCs really do exist just to make money -- the soul of a hedge fund in the body of, I dunno, some kind of Silicon Valley Tooth Fairy -- but in many ways, they've taken over the entire culture of entrepreneurship and remade it in an image that serves their business model, or sometimes just serves what they think their business model is.

I've often pointed out that this is a choice, not a requirement. You can try to make money -- even a lot of money -- without trying to make as much money as possible. We do it all the time, primarily because profit maximization makes everything suck. Selling your extra basketball tickets to your friend for as much money as you can possibly get from him sucks and if you do that, I'm sorry, but you're a bad friend. People get pissed off at Wendy's for kicking around the idea of surge pricing because it would suck to decide to go to Wendy's and then realize you've picked an expensive time to go to Wendy's.

Money is fine. But it's a necessary evil. If you forget that, and declare it your north star, your purpose for being, officially or unofficially -- you will eventually ruin whatever you're working on. Count on it. It will always be really easy to defend profit maximization because it looks best in the short-term, and the short-term usually wins. But you eventually pay. And we will eventually pay for sucking the life out of everything because today's cohort of shareholders (a totally different group of people from yesterday and a totally different group from tomorrow) told us to.

Sellouts

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 17:07:47 -0400

Andy Baio has a really, really great post on the long, slow failure of a social media site called Ello. That word -- post -- doesn't really seem to do it justice, to be honest, but it's bloggy in all the best ways so let's just go with it. I won't rehash its contents here (just read it, already!), but one of the amazing things about it is simply its subject and scope. Ello was one of many, many decently capitalized startups that sprung up in the mid-2010s as an idealistic counter to one or more large, successful tech companies/platforms. As those big players became successful, plenty of people started to feel they had lost site of their original purpose, or in some other way lost whatever magic they originally had.

I get it. I remember how this felt, and I remember the second or third wave of a lot of companies that popped up with explicitly idealistic alternative approaches to the rapidly entrenching big players in things like social networking, search, and productivity tools.

Even at the time, though, it seemed odd that so many of these companies were getting started with funding from venture capitalists. As Baio explains quite eloquently in the piece, there are sources of funding that are okay with building a public benefit corporation, or simply making decisions that aren't necessarily based on some transactional end state for the business, but venture capital is absolutely not one of them. It's not a failing of venture capital, that's just... not what it's for.

But people did it anyways, often convinced (as in Ello's case) that their large ownership stakes in these companies gave them control, except it wasn't actual control. You can be the captain of a sinking ship, but if someone offers you a way to save the ship if you do what they say, you're effectively the captain in name only. Some people (like Baio) saw this at the time, wrote about it the logical issues, and even hurt some feelings along the way. But those people were absolutely right, not just because of the particular instances (like Ello), but fundamentally. You are not going to build alternatives to aggressive growth and profit seeking with venture capital -- that capital is going to require you to go big, spend big, and then raise even more capital to keep operating like that, which will require more concessions both in operating structure and most likely operating strategy. As soon as you get on the treadmill, that's where this is headed, and almost no principle outside of revenue maximization can survive it.

There are two really good reasons to supercharge a business (or support an unprofitable one) with venture capital. One, you can be happy building something that in the end, makes sense as an acquisition by someone else. Basically, you can use your idea to try to become rich (or at least richer), and then do something cool with the money. I don't begrudge anybody this path -- I know people who did it and it seems fun in a lot of ways -- but you're obviously unlikely to make any sort of lasting change to how things work by operating this way. You're building to be absorbed, and when you are absorbed, by definition whatever you built will either be put to work to accomplish the goals of whoever bought you, or it will be deprecated and disappear. I can't think of any exceptions to this off the top of my head; some wonderful web service that got purchased by a large company and then, despite being a troublesome thorn in the side of their status quo, was simply left alone because people liked it, or it was popular, or whatever. It'll change, or it'll die. That's why big companies with lots of money buy things -- just look at how Tumblr's been passed around, first as a prize, eventually as an albatross.

Two, you can build a business that is designed to make money. You figure out that magical alignment between what you want to accomplish, and why people pay you as much money as possible, and you're off to the races. This is the platonic ideal of capitalism, so if you get it working for you, congratulations -- it's just a lot harder than it sounds. The fastest way to make as much money as possible doing anything is usually pretty gross and, at best, in an ethical gray area. Maybe Facebook does bad stuff because Mark Zuckerberg is a sociopath and he enjoys doing those things or doesn't think they are bad, but I actually don't think that's the case at all. I think Zuckerberg, like many rich people, is in complete and utter denial about what his company actually does, and what its actual effect on the world is. He certainly wouldn't be the first.

Selling Out 101

Many of the people who built a lot of these 2010s, reactionary, "principled" startups are my age, so I can assume they have some understanding of the cultural context of "selling out". If you're not familiar with it, basically the idea is that you start off making something idealistic and purposeful in relative obscurity -- but once it's successful, opportunities to dump some or all of your idealism in exchange for money start to pop up. The idea of exchanging your principles for money is "selling out".

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEKbFMvkLIc)

Pretty good explanation of the times, plus a dope bass part.

In the mid-late 1990s, we accused people of selling out all the time, but there were limitations of the era that made the whole thing hard to assess. Green Day is a punk band that famously "sold out" according to lots of people when they moved from an independent label to one operated by a large, for-profit corporation in the early 1990s. There are much better, clearer examples of actually selling out than Green Day, but the discussion of whether they sold out or not is one of the best examples of the debate, and how much people cared about it. Once on a major label with national distribution and promotional capabilities (and with an awesome, generation-defining album in hand), Green Day got extremely popular, and yes, made a lot of money. But... did Green Day really change what they were doing in exchange for money? Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, you can make a pretty reasonable argument that they didn't. You can accuse them of, I dunno, maybe tacitly endorsing an exploitative industry, or leaving behind the independent infrastructure that helped them get off the ground (although Green Day was far more financially supportive of that infrastructure over the years than they had any obligation to be), but you can't really say "Green Day made a band to do _____, and they traded that away to become rich celebrities". Really, they just figured out how to do exactly what it seems they always wanted to do while becoming rich celebrities, so... kudos to them, I guess. Green Day has made some of my absolute favorite albums of all time and a whole bunch of stuff I've barely listened to or simply l don't care for, but I don't think any of that has much to do with how much money they've gotten from Warner Music Group.

At any rate, the nuances of what is and isn't selling out in each little cultural niche isn't that interesting of a subject these days. Honestly, it wasn't all that interesting in 1996. But I do think it's kind of crazy that the idea of selling out seems to have disappeared from the discourse altogether. Whether you agreed with someone's specific decision or not, there was certainly some value in considering the ethics of taking large amounts of money from someone, because obviously whoever is giving you the money wants something in return for it, and maybe that something is bad.

But... we don't really talk about it anymore!

Selling Out is a Default Setting Now

It might seem weird to anyone under 35 or so, but LOTS things that were very important to people used to happen completely outside of commercial channels. Before the internet -- or more accurately, before the internet became where everyone was all of the time -- you could promote an event, hold it, and let people experience recorded versions of it later without ever using a "platform" or any sort of distribution device whatsoever. In fact, not only could you do that, you actually had to do it. You couldn't just add your music to the music store. You couldn't livestream your show over... television, I guess? All of those things had limited shelf space, or bandwidth, or whatever, and those limited resources were both valuable and owned by large commercial entities.

Even crazier, when the internet first took off, for a while it actually freed us from the few commercial constraints that existed, because it eliminated certain bandwidth constraints AND there were no dominant platforms (mostly just protocols, if that). You just sort of poked around looking for stuff, and most of it languished in obscurity just like the pile of demo tapes in your room. But it certainly was exciting that technology made it possible for people to get them in theory, and occasionally, in reality! Actual people in Japan bought Glenn's Army CDs!

Fight Songs by Glenn's Army

For better or for worse, commercial platforms eventually started to spring up. Many of them didn't start up as especially commercial (YouTube made zero business sense at first), but were eventually acquired or matured sufficiently that they felt obligated to start making money. Either way, these platforms didn't have supply limits, and didn't try to bring them back. Instead, they took advantage of unlimited supply by letting anyone put their "record" on the "shelf", so to speak, and simply took a cut of the sale (be that a purchase, or an ad, or whatever).

I'm actually pretty neutral on whether that business model is a good thing or not (I don't really know), but one kind of insane impact it had was the immediate ability to passively commercialize what you're doing, from literally the minute you come up with something. Successful commercialization isn't easy -- just like discovery on the 2004 internet wasn't easy -- but it's possible, and it's possible from day one. And on top of that, the commercial, centralized platforms have taken over the whole discovery process. They've taken out record stores. They've taken out magazines. They've even taken out the popularity of the open web, message boards, and stuff like that. If you want to be seen at all, you need to be on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify, and those are all platforms that can almost immediately pay you money (even very small amounts) if you get enough eyeballs.

Where's the Green Day moment, then? When does someone make the decision to trade their principles for the chance to become wealthy? If you're an optimist, maybe it feels like the answer is "never, because you don't have to do that anymore". Anyone can turn even small amounts of popularity into real money, and there are basically no gatekeepers to that. The whole thing scales as you go, so Green Day never would have faced the problems they faced back in 1992 or whatever that drove them to consider and eventually sign with a major label.

But the other answer is... "immediately, without even thinking about it". Baking commercialization, a theoretically infinite audience, and tons of quantitative data into the process from the absolute, very beginning means selling out is no longer something you do at a critical juncture in the development of whatever you're working on. Other than the absence of big-dollar promotional muscle (no small thing, but not as important as it was when radio and CD sales dominated) you're already operating the way you would operate as a commercial juggernaut the minute you start sharing your work with the world. It's just a matter of degrees -- a boiling frog analogy for every band, artist, and creative from the jump.

And yes, you still have agency. You can ignore many commercial opportunities (although not all of them -- people are going to see ads if YouTube wants them to see ads), not worry about data, and just sort of punk rock your way along as long as you'd like. But you're still living and dying on somebody's profit-minded platform, in a way that you didn't have to when people made each other cassette tapes and found out about shows by looking at fliers on telephone poles. But more importantly, the next generation doesn't automatically retain the knowledge of the last one. The experience of starting a band, of playing your first show, of making your first record, it's something you learn by doing. Today, the way to do those things is largely on big, commercial internet platforms with incentives that aren't compatible with not thinking about monetization.

Kids adapt. The centralized internet gave them options I never had; options that would have been very tempting to leverage given the limitations of our era. But they were also limitations that caused us to have really honest conversations with ourselves about why we were doing what we were doing, and whether that meant anything to us. I played in my high school era band for six years, through most of college, because I loved doing it and I loved what we represented. We stopped largely because we didn't really want to half-ass our band -- we never had before, why start -- but because at the same time, we wanted to do things in life that weren't going to be possible going all out on niche, non-famous punk band. In fact, even in our small, largely irrelevant state we still grew big enough to face the idea of "selling out" as we simultaneously started attracting younger fans and starting to worry about how we were going to make enough money to live. Our success did not scale gradually, and in fact, when I even considered the possibility that we might be able to make it do that (in 2003), the idea was still new and kind of radical. But regardless, we didn't hang it up because we were a low performing commercial entity -- we hung it up because we thought about life in our band as a commercial entity and decided that wasn't something we wanted to do. I don't know that kids today truly have the luxury to think about things the same way.

All this brings me back to Ello, and the idea of solving problems caused by money with more money. The internet itself is a lot more punk rock and non-commercial than you'd probably expect. It's powered by protocols and ideas that a bunch of really smart people felt passionate about, and was worked on by contributed to by lots of people who not only didn't get rich, but don't feel like failures for not getting rich because that's not why they put in the work. Those are the bones. What we have now is the world on top of it, that we live in -- a world almost entirely built by people looking to use their ideas to become as rich as possible, either because that's what they want, or that's what the people who are paying for it want (unlike the random universities, government agencies, DARPA, etc. who funded a lot of the aforementioned infrastructure work). Capitalism is fine, and appropriate in a lot of circumstances, but it's alcohol. You have to cut it with something else; straight capitalism will make you throw up.

Ello thought they were cutting capitalism with principle, but in reality, that wasn't happening at all. That only works when the people leaning on principle are willing to work for free -- as many people in bands are, and many people working on certain technology projects have been and will be in the future. If you take the money, it's over. I'd argue that for many kids, it's over before they even get any money, because today society forces you into the money machine right away, and co-ops your sense of what's possible in your earliest years. You don't have to take my word for it, either. I'm not exactly burning down the establishment with my little punk rock software company right now, but this is why I never even considered raising money. Sure, I probably would have failed, but success would have felt like a delayed death sentence for what I actually wanted to build anyways.

The thing is, a lot of conversations about selling out were substantively dumb. I know, I was there. But I'm still glad we had them, I don't think we have them anymore, and I think the world is a worse place without them.

Quick Thoughts from the Green Goblin of Generative AI

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 16:09:31 -0400

Okay, I'm going to let you in on a secret. One of the reasons I'm so frosty about the gap between generative AI's narrative, and what it actually can do when you build an application with it and put someone in front of it is that for the last couple of months, I've been building an application with it.

(OHHHHH YEAH, I'm gonna be that guy for a minute.)

Does that make me a giant hypocrite? Maybe! But I don't think so, because again, the main reason I have a bucket of scalding hot takes on the subject is not because I have a negative perception of Elon Musk or whatever. It's because I've spent a good number of nights and weekends being personally let down by the capabilities of this stuff, not from the perspective of someone making silly pictures with DALL-E, but from that of someone trying to power a solution with the alleged precursor to the singularity.

... not that I haven't made silly pictures. I have. Have you seen my album?

To be clear, I don't think making a (kind of crappy, at the moment) app gives me some kind of veto power over any generative AI conversations. But... if I'm being completely honest, I don't think most people who talk about generative AI have even done this much. Because if they had, I think we'd be having a lot more interesting, reality-based questions about where this space is going, and/or what we should be empowering developers and end-users to do with it.

So here are my observations.

1) Development is very rewarding, very early

My idea was much less aspirational than the world's best what-if scenario builder. I was doing some mindless corporate freelance work, and realized that I was literally transforming text, manually. Not writing, not creating -- transforming. Except, I had some requirements, and it didn't make any sense to keep typing them into a prompt. I needed to manage a hierarchy of information (what I am talking about), and a parallel structure of "physical" requirements (the length/form/structure of various instances of that information), and I needed to be able to quickly mix and match the two. For instance, give me two paragraphs and a bulleted list about this product's security features.

It took me about 5 minutes of thinking and about an hour playing with Bubble.io to realize there was very, very little keeping me from actually making something like this if I could just handle some of the automatic, programmatic prompt generation. I texted my Dad, and within a couple days he was writing Python scripts I could summon (they live in England -- the scripts, not my Dad) from Bubble, and we were generating content -- not good content, but content, dammit -- programmatically.

This was alarmingly easy, and to pat myself on the back, this wasn't even one of those pure "wrapper" apps where a bunch of canned prompts are connected to buttons. We were mixing and matching a lot of stuff here, and I built management tools for all of it. Good job, Nate.

(My love of basic information software UI is... weird, I'll concede.)

Now look, I've been making fun of various forms of AI content forever. But even I got a runner's/developer's high off this thing working. It's exciting. You feel like you're incredibly close to solving the problem you set out to solve, because you're 80% of the way there in like, two weekends. I think this is a non-trivial factor in why people are so obsessed with this stuff -- there is always demand for the kind of App Store 2009 gold-rush feeling among entrepreneurial folks, and this is probably the first tech trend to make it feel sooooo tantalizingly close.

2) There are way too many black boxes

My greatest concern with LLMs and generative AI in general is that the black box nature of it is being treated as a feature ("just type!") when it's actually a fundamental limitation no one has any intention of solving because it's impossible. Tapping into OpenAI's API has not made me feel any different. Now, you could push back and say "well, you didn't build your own model!", but I think that's just kicking the can a little further down the stack. What does training the model mean? Whether it's prompt --> output, or training data --> model, the real question is whether we're just throwing this stuff in a blender and then giving an awkward thumbs up when plausible results come out. Maybe someday I'll build my own model and that'll change my mind, but I'm skeptical.

3) The black boxes might be on purpose, a.k.a., "There's no Step 3!"

Great ad, first of all. Jeff Goldblum should do more ads. Anyways, like I said before, I have this nagging feeling that this technology, with its current fundamentals, is going to struggle to dazzle people without the ambiguities of a chat interface. Yes, it gives the model the input. But there are lots of ways to tell a computer something -- we used to tell it to delete things by typing, and most of us don't do that anymore because it's insane. What natural language really does is obfuscate. What are you getting? Why are you getting it? Pretending a computer is a not a computer can feel magical, but one advantage it gives the computer is that for some reason, it causes people to stop holding it to the standards we would ordinarily hold a computer to. And these are not arbitrary standards -- computers that don't meet those standards are useless, because they are simply incredibly fast chaos machines that can't be relied on to do anything. They have no judgment. So go ahead, use controlled randomness to generate interesting results. But never make that randomness unauditable or inaccessible. Except... they did! And that's where today's magic comes from, but I think it's unsustainable as a fundamental of a generally-impactful development platform.

4) Context doesn't scale... at all

I'm an objectively poor software architect. I get what should happen, but I'm pretty bad at making it happen, and I'm not disciplined enough to ensure it happens (just like an LLM!). But I've been in technology for twenty years, and I know how a lot of stuff basically works, or more accurately, how it doesn't work. But even I was surprised at how limited the options are for helping your "AI-powered" application maintain context. One option is just to keep feeding it the entire history of the "conversation" each time you ask it something, which is completely insane, and quickly becomes wildly expensive. I've been messing around with OpenAI's ability to parse documents as a way around this, because my application doesn't need the context of the back and forth between me and the bot -- I am just trying to use structured information to generate better output. But it's hit or miss, and the pricing on all of this is totally up in the air, so who knows if my approach is even economically viable. I guess I will, soon.

This one bothers me the most because content is much less interesting to me than context. Context is everything! It's why Siri is still so dumb. So when I, like a million other tech dorks, first stayed up all night chatting with ChatGPT for a couple days, the thing that really stuck with me was the context. I told it entire worlds of nonsense, making up fictional biographies of my friends and neighbors, and it maintained that context through a bunch of other requests and conversations, for weeks! That's what really got me excited about this -- I thought we had figured out how to maintain context in some incredible, invisible way. But... I don't think we have. I think we're just shoving entire transcripts into this thing over and over and over again, until we can't, and we stop, and context is lost. Bummer.

I mean, hey. I'm having fun. If nothing else -- and this is to Point #1 -- there is something magical about building applications, but making an application DO something is beyond the skills of a lot of wannabe developers like me. LLMs take a bunch of work-like activity, throw it behind an API, and let you trigger it programmatically with your crazy UI ideas, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a huge kick out of it.

Now, do I feel capable of replacing people's jobs with this technology? No, not at all. And sure, you could say "well you won't be doing it, Nate, a team of real developers, potentially with a foosball table, will be doing it", and you'd be right. But the people telling me about everyone being replaced by robots aren't those people. They are people who don't even do what I've done -- they are just (maybe) poking at ChatGPT and extrapolating not with a low-code platform, but with their own overactive imaginations.

Not me, pal! I come from the tech school of hard knocks. I'm under the hood, building artisanal AI applications by hand and developing a fine, nuanced palette for all things prompt-related. So I'm wise to your games. I'm not some startup rube about to be played by a bunch of AI-sharks looking to sell shovels in a pointless, hype-driven gold rush!

Ooh, that reminds me, I have to go pay my OpenAI bill.

The Last Mile

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 11:46:52 -0400

I make a lot of generative AI jokes, because they’re obvious, and because they’re hilarious. But, in all seriousness, there is a huge problem with the value proposition of almost every generative AI application that everyone is just whistling past for a variety of reasons.

The Promise is the Problem

Generative AI as a technology is what it is, and I’m not really here to assess it or say it should or shouldn’t exist. Basically, we’re now capable of building programs that, if given enough training data, take either input, a prompt, or both, and turn that into something that either looks or sort of looks like something a human would have made, given the same instructions.

That’s basically it. This isn’t that different from the AI we’ve gotten used to, which is basically automated decision making (i.e., should we give this guy a mortgage, should we call Nate back about his job application, etc). The only difference is that the decision we’re automating is “given all of these other things, what word should come next”, and then we’re doing that a bunch of times until we have enough words. The art stuff is a bit more interesting and harder for me to understand, and the music stuff is so bad that I don’t really feel like it’s worth talking about yet.

But what is all this actually for? You don’t need an answer for that to justify building it (at least with 2021-era interest rates), but you do need an answer for that if you want someone to pay for it. And Microsoft wants you to pay for it — so does Google, and so does every VC in the valley. In fact, they want you to pay for it over and over again, in every aspect of your business.

So then what is the promise this technology makes? Fundamentally, it promises to do work for you that normally requires people. This is a classic technology promise, and we’ve seen it work and revolutionize business many, many, many times — and it will happen again. So on the surface, okay, seems plausible (just like LLM output!). But in this case, the reason we’re so excited is that we’re promising to do work that ordinarily really requires people. Like, this is it — we really never thought we’d be able to get rid of good copywriters, and analysts, and artists, and all these people with… sigh… talent, and so the idea that maybe we could is amazing.

Except… we obviously can’t. It takes very, very little time working with AI tools to realize that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are going to get absolute trash from these systems (although fortunately, many early adopters actually know so little about what they're generating that they're one of the few people who can't tell how bad the output is). So as these products have gotten further from investor-world, and early adopter LinkedIn hustlers, and closer to people signing contracts to pay for them, the promise has had to shift. Now, the technology doesn’t replace these people — it augments them.

PROMPT: "an anthropomorphic banana looking at himself in the mirror as he ties a tie"

Have one artist? This is like having 100! Have five copywriters? Maybe you only need two! The software will do the “grunt work”, and allow your precious humans to either babysit the whole operation, or focus on human things.

Who We’re Not Asking

Of all the people I don’t trust, the one I trust the least might just be the person describing to my boss how to make me better at my job, which neither this person nor my boss actually do, or are held accountable for.

“See, for Nate, the problem is that he spends a lot of time generating ideas. This stupid robot will generate thousands of ideas — it’s a great starting point for him.”

Actually... no, it’s not! It’s super annoying, and not helpful at all! I guess it could be, if the way I solved problems was to create as many plausible sounding answers as quickly as possible, and then go through them and edit them to make them good. But that isn’t how I work, and never has been. In fact, almost no one works this way. The “blank page” problem is a real thing, and I have definitely heard of people using generative AI to break through it. I am not one of these people, but I have heard of them. That’s great, and good for them for successfully leveraging the 2023 zeitgeist for their benefit. But even that use case — which, again, I don’t actually use — can be solved with the crappiest version of ChatGPT, or some knockoff. It doesn’t require an $85k enterprise license for bullshitmachine.AI, because the output doesn’t have any real value besides being output.

If you look hard enough, you’ll see “the output here is just a starting point” ALL OVER the generative AI world. It’s a core part of the pitch, at least to actual users. Here’s OpenAI being honest for a second, in-between talking about building automated AI tutors and auto-generating lesson plans.

A starting point! If I have to read an entire document word for word, manually checking the veracity of each claim it confidently makes, that document is not a great starting point. If I asked my seven year old daughter — who is amazing, and incredibly smart — to write this blog post, she would probably do it. It would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a great starting point for me. Hell, if I asked my Dad — an electrical engineer who is objectively smarter than me and does not, to my knowledge, have absolutely any interest in generative AI whatsoever — to write this blog post, it would still not be a great starting point. I would almost certainly re-structure and re-write the entire thing from scratch, and the sooner I accepted it and got to work, the sooner I would be done.

The problem with this “productivity” value proposition is that the characteristics of actually useful “starting points” are mostly things that LLMs are fundamentally ill-suited for. How about brainstorming? The LLM will create thousands of ideas in seconds! Except, if you’ve actually brainstormed before, or done work where brainstorming is useful, you know that the entire point of brainstorming is to attempt to generate entirely new, uniquely appropriate ideas. You don’t generate thousands of plausible, derivative ideas. Or if you do, that’s just noise the process generates that you throw away. It doesn’t add up to value, because rote pattern-matching is not a substitute for either good taste or inspiration we (very, very grudgingly) pay professionals to provide us.

The New Yorker just absolutely nails it.

The Last Mile

There’s a supply chain concept (I think this is in telecom too, but I’m out of my depth here) known as “the last mile”, which refers to the final step in getting something somewhere, and is often the most challenging part of doing anything logistical at scale. It’s easy enough to route a million packages to 8 different regional sorting centers, or scale that up to a hundred million packages. It’s getting each individual package to each individual house on each individual, weird little street that becomes an existential problem, and usually an existential expense. Whenever someone has some amazing idea to solve an inefficiency problem, they usually struggle with “the last mile” part of it, because the last mile is usually really inefficient, but utterly unavoidable. Unless, that is, you can make it someone else's problem.

With knowledge and creative work, the same thing is true. “The last mile” of a marketing campaign, or a user interface idea, or a go-to-market strategy is where all the real, expensive work is. Giving me a go-to-market template you found online really will save me time and effort if you only care about generating something that looks like what people expect a go to market plan to look like. If you care about the plan being useful, and appropriate to your business, if anything you’re probably slowing me down by making me think about and answer arbitrary, potentially irrelevant factors that just happen to be in the generic template.

Everything generative AI tools leave out — factual accuracy, fingers, etc. — fails to make that “last mile” any easier, and in many cases, makes it harder, and that’s a deal-breaker for the productivity argument. You're not able to completely replace people, because the output is bad. But babysitting the output either doesn't sufficiently improve it, or makes generating it just as inefficient, or even more inefficient, than generating it by hand. Sure, executives will yell at workers to use these tools and somehow become more efficient. "Most of the work is already done!", they'll yell. And sometimes, in sufficiently derivative contexts, this will be true and the starting points or grunt work removed will be valuable. I’ve heard good things about tools that help with syntax in programming, for example. You can build a legitimately functional For loop by pattern matching other people's work, and that's great. But that’s not how a lot of information work gets done; LLM-powered tools have arrived with great fanfare to solve slightly-flawed-or-derivative-bulk-content-generation problems that many of your expensive, annoying employees don’t actually have. You're better off buying them a better coffee machine.

So Where is This Going?

You can watch people flail around wildly, searching for these problems, on ProductHunt every day. What about thousands of email subject lines? Same problem. Product ideas? Same problem. Feedback to employees? Same. Okay, fine — but there has to be an application where being able to generate a huge number of fundamentally derivative, but plausible sounding ideas is inherently valuable, right?

There is! It’s called spam, and it's a humongous, lucrative industry! Spam is perfect for generative AI; it’s where this technology was always destined to go, and I’m sure it’s already being used extensively for it today. Spam audiences are the ideal audience for generative AI content, because the entire point of spam is to present the trappings of thought, not actual thought, and the only thing more important than that is that you spend as little time and money as possible generating those trappings. LLMs are absolutely magical for it, and unlike with more subtle use cases, or fantasies about these things turning into sentient general intelligences, this is one job they’re going to continue to get better and better at as they not only get better at generated plausibility, but more customizable in ways that are compatible with scale (like programmatically generating more or less aggressive "custom" sales pitches based on how people react).

Because that's what Amazon shoppers need -- more fake things!

Spam has been around forever, so this in itself doesn’t grind my gears as much as you might think. It’s stupid and wasteful, but a lot of things are stupid and wasteful (the metaverse real estate con, the hilariously smug crypto boom and extremely quiet bust, etc.) and we figure out how to muddle on. What really does bother me, though, is that so many people are excited to apply the principles of spam -- again, something we all know is stupid and wasteful -- to things that have traditionally had at least a slightly higher bar.

Sales outreach. Customer support. Thought leadership. These things have always had more than a whiff of spam to them, but it seemed like we all understood that going too far in that direction was undesirable. Not anymore! Building an entire website with meaningless, industry-appropriate pablum used to get you dirty looks at work; now that same output, if created instantly with technology, isn’t just acceptable — it’s some kind of productivity breakthrough! Make 10,000 of them and just auto A/B test the entire pile of shit forever!

But of course, if you actually have this discussion with a vendor, and take this stance (as most experienced people in these customer-facing fields will do), you’ll quickly hear the last mile argument. No, don’t treat this like spam. You still matter. You should read all of this crap, and make it good, because God knows the machine has no idea what it’s barfing up. It’s a starting point. It’s “90% of the work done for you!”, kind of like 90% of hitting a home run is putting on your uniform, finding a bat, and stepping into the batter’s box, right? Just finish the job, kid!

The last mile always exists. The difference between breakthrough products, and quickly mumbled answers to questions that no one is asking, is that breakthrough products acknowledge that last mile, and either solve it, or do everything in their power to set you up for success when you solve it. Outside of spam, filler, or fake-it-until-you-make-it use cases, I haven’t seen an example of that with a business focused generative AI product, and I think it’s because the fundamentals of the technology are simply not up to it. No amount of venture funding or shoving it into existing products is going to cover that up in the long term. That means the only paths forward are (a) a sheepish retreat as this tech finds its proper home in non-transformative use cases where it makes sense (autocomplete, spam, custom “stock” imagery, elevator music, anything where a chatbot/command line interface is practical), or (b) the slow, venture-backed adoption of spam techniques in more and more last-mile-dependent work, which is going to make being a customer even more confusing and enraging.

I think we’re headed for (a), but not before some irritating amount of (b) takes place.

Work Paste

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 17:48:59 -0400

As I’ve gotten older, one thing I’ve started to realize is that there are many different kinds of burnout. I know this, because I’ve gone through several, and watched my friends, family, and colleagues go through an even wider variety of them.

For starters, there is the most physical kind of burnout. I’m talking about the kind where some combination of your commute, lack of time for activity, bad ergonomics, or even the physical nature of your job just starts to grind away at your well-being.

Then there’s the all-consuming work culture burnout — the kind where you have dreams about your inbox, or responding to comments in documents, or from personal experience, working inside the WordPress admin screen.

(I once had a full-screen, edge to edge dream about the WP admin where I spent some indeterminable amount of time updating user roles and content taxonomies. This is a true story.)

(Seriously, it was like this, except it felt like watching it in an IMAX theatre. I needed a vacation.)

I also think you can burn out on certain things that tend to come with certain jobs. I’ve never had a sales job, but I’ve worked extensively with sales teams, and it doesn’t take some crazy amount of empathy to think of ways that work could burn you out in very specific ways. I’ve made a staggering amount of product videos in my life, and I actually did burnout on capturing screen footage at one point in, I dunno, maybe 2015. I’m not talking about throwing Loom on and just rolling with what happens — I mean getting great looking B-roll of unfinished products that covers exactly what you want, works perfectly, and fits exactly the aspect ratio you need. Eventually, I got over it.

These days, I’ve realized that I’ve burned out on a completely different thing at work, which I’ve found pretty inescapable and I’m legitimately concerned I can’t recover from.

I call it “work paste”.

What is work paste?

To me, work paste is the collective, usually digital output of a bunch of people smushing their time, knowledge, and opinions into something that looks and feels like our gut tells us work should look and feel. It could be a document, a deck, or a really long email. It could even (heaven forbid) include a meeting component. What makes it work paste is that it includes multiple perspectives and goals that are wildly out of alignment — sometimes they are contradictory, but just as often they are just not logically connected — that are then blended together and obfuscated into a single thing that does not resolve these differences, but packages them all up so it’s impossible to draw a single, obvious conclusion from the paste itself. In fact, many times, work paste will include multiple, directly contradictory conclusions within itself, and you’ll be told to ignore certain sections of the paste depending on who is showing it to you.

Here are some examples of things that are not inherently work paste, but often end up becoming work paste to everyone’s detriment.

Press releases
Website copy (especially on home pages)
Brand/style guides
Product strategy documents
Company values / missions / vision statements
Annual plans, goals and OKRs
Sales decks
Investor pitches

As I look at this list and think about what these things have in common, the first thing that comes to mind is “these things are all bullshit”, but that is unfair. None of these things HAVE to be bullshit, and I have personally seen, used, and even worked on non-bullshit versions of all of these things that were incredible valuable and useful. Even OKRs! But… I mean… most of them were bullshit in application, yes.

And that’s what is so interesting about the concept of work paste. It comes from a specific set of things that, together, all seem to cause the dreaded “this project is bullshit” feeling. But that means that if we can figure out the things that lead to work paste, we can figure out the things that lead to work feeling stupid and disengaging.

Why do we make it?

Just like no executive says “let’s have the most expensive meeting possible, and make sure we don’t make any concrete decisions in it”, no authority figure at work actually asks their team of literate, often talented professionals to generate work paste. Instead, this output happens because of things that are or aren’t part of the request. Here are some of my favorites.

Generic Allocation of Effort

While no one likes to be micromanaged, there’s something to be said about management asking for something concrete. Whenever you’re told to “put some time into….”, or “start a document”, it should set off some work paste red flags. Management involves resource allocation, but it’s not just resource allocation — you have to decide what problem you want people to solve, and actually tell them. That way, they can do it as directly and efficiently as possible, and be done with it. If you just say “your top priority this week is figuring out our partnership strategy”, you’re asking someone to generate the biggest pile of plausible-looking work output they can by the end of the week, and trust me, you’re not going to want to read it.

Random Contributions

Here are some more phrases that may trigger you: “have ____ take a look at this”, “make sure you work with _____ on this”, “send it to ______ and get their thoughts”. Grinding your teeth yet? I know I am! Again, the vagueness of this direction is the problem. It doesn’t specify what you’re actually supposed to get out of the people being dragged into this process. It doesn’t make clear whether this input is just interesting color, or something more akin to an approval process. In many cases, the smartest person you ask will be smart enough to stay away from it, while the least informed and most desperate to affect things will riddle your work with hot takes, distractions, and even the dreaded word-smithing. When these interactions are useful, they’re only useful by the grace of everyone involved, and no one succumbing to the Peter Principle. In other words… most of the time, it’s not happening.

Obligatory Language

“We need a section on _____”. Do we, though? Because just having a section on a topic doesn’t actually do anything. If you want someone to answer a question, or propose a solution to something, just say it. “Having a section” on something without a requirement for what that section is supposed to accomplish is a clear invitation for work paste. Another favorite red flag observation is “we just need people to know we are thinking about X”. If we didn’t write about X, and X is a big justification for the proposal, mentioning it makes sense on the merits (not just because people want to see it). But if we didn’t write about X because it’s not really relevant to our proposal/solution/idea, there’s no need to jabber on about it. At worst, just include a “X is irrelevant to this because ______” and move on.

No One Cares About This Topic

This is a big one. If you have an American company, and your employees went through the same high school and university system I did, you can bank on the fact that they know how to feign expertise — and even passion! — about things they could not possibly care less about. With certain kinds of work (and in some cases entire careers) while people are highly motivated to look important and involved in a lot of things, the actual things they make aren’t important at all. I would absolutely, 100% prefer to get less/no credit for some company project than muck it up and make it worse but get a piece of the action. But I am a lunatic, and most people are much more pragmatic.

How do we not make it?

Work paste sucks, but unfortunately it’s going to be what most of us do all day because it’s a natural byproduct of some of the most fundamental aspects of 21st century professionalism — the internet, corporate capitalism, and the natural tendencies of people tasked with working together on something. It’s not going to go away on its own. It’s the foundation of some of the dumbest, most fraudulent parts of the modern meritocracy.

So… you gotta get to the roots. Real deep. But hey, I used to run a department, and I was able to hold off this kind of thing pretty well with a couple of basic policies.

Actually Read Things

Nothing reveals terrible, vapid ideas quite like actually reading them. I’m serious! Don’t skim. Sit there and read it. Even better, read it in front of the authors, and ask questions. Just remember, don’t contribute to the work paste problem by feeling the need to insert random opinions or ask questions just so you feel involved. Instead, read it like a person who doesn’t want to be involved in this project, and just needs value from it. If you do this enough times, and you’re in charge, your terrible reactions to work paste will start to generate different incentives for your team, and eventually different output.

Don’t Value Work Product for the Sake of Work Product

Management has a really self-destructive obsession with making sure people are doing a lot of things. I get it — this is entirely self-serving and comes from actual, individual managers justifying their own existence by adding up the work output of their subordinates. That’s great if your team is bailing hay, or welding doors to the side of Ford Fiestas, but it’s not so great if you’re making brand strategies or “alignment documents” or whatever.

A lot of information work is stupid, redundant, or both. It just is! Everywhere I’ve ever worked, we’ve faced the challenge of throwing documents and words and so, so, so many Google Docs comments at issues we wish we had more control over, or the confidence to make a clear decision on. But all we did was burn time and energy talking past each other.

Let Russ Cook, or Just Check Down

For those of you who aren’t (American) football fans, “Let Russ Cook” is a now very dated reference that referred to once-very-good, now-pretty-bad quarterback Russell Wilson. As a young, exciting player, fans begged for the team’s coaches to stop micromanaging him, simply give him the ball, and let him do crazy stuff, because more often than not it worked out.

If you have a Russell Wilson-type strategist, just let her/him cook, man. Get out of the way. You don’t need 15 people figuring out a product strategy. If you don’t have anybody like that who’s qualified to “cook” on the topic at hand, do the other football thing and “check down”. When you check down, you look at all the high reward downfield options, decide “nope, no good”, and make a simple, low-risk/reward through to the guy standing next to you.

In other words, don’t try to write the unifying theory of our reseller program if no single person you’re willing to empower has a clear vision for one. Ask for something much simpler, like “two things we can do to improve the reseller program in Q4”. I get why people want the big thing, but too often when teams just don’t have the discipline/willpower/idea juice to make it work, they spin their wheels on these incoherent, written-by-committee projects and end up with a tube of work paste.

Life is short, and we can’t all be working on colonizing Mars or building the iPhone. The least we can do is try to actually move the needle on whatever it is we’re stuck doing.

My Spreadsheet Cannot Fail, It Can Only BE Failed

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 13:16:32 -0400

One of Resolution's biggest marketing failures has been Reddit. When I was first preparing for the initial Kickstarter, and then general availability last year, I dove in and tried to do exactly what you're supposed to do. Listen, be patient, don't make your stupid product the answer to every question, provide value, all of it. We literally built the shared model functionality of Resolution so that we could help people with specific answers without making them sign up for anything.

Well, I suck at Reddit. I got banned from r/Startups, first for violating the promotion rule and then perma-banned for arguing about the rule. Reddit... it's just like baseball! r/SaaS was full of grifters, r/Spreadsheets was full of people who write VB Scripts, etc., etc., and so forth. On top of it, then Reddit went through the whole crazy API/moderator revolt thing and just generally started feeling a lot more like the Twitter/X dumpster fire, and I just got tired of basically annoying everyone.

Still, I did have some mildly interesting conversations, and I did learn a fair amount about some different potential user mindsets. Surprisingly, this happened outside of my areas of expertise in places like r/Accounting and r/Consulting, in conversations like this one.

The poor original poster hangs in there and engages with a bunch of pushback, including my favorite kind, that it's his/her fault.

Nobody is wrong here, unfortunately. But as I've discussed many times, spreadsheets fundamentally give you enough rope to hang yourself. That's how they work! Sure, you can password protect things and prevent changes. But then... it's not really a spreadsheet anymore, is it?

There's a sort of underlying sadness in the thread, where it seems like the Excel experts know people aren't really getting value from the hard work they do, or the thoughtful modeling decisions they make, because the people don't get it, and frankly don't want to learn how to get it. Not on those terms, anyways.

And that's what gets me. All these smart people know this will never work. They've spent their careers dealing with that fact, and the consequences of it being the case. But still... no, those people should do better. The near-realization of the problem is almost an exact 1:1 of the famous Principle Skinner meme.

This veers outside of the core mission & purpose of Resolution, but... it really is crazy how immutable and permanent the Microsoft Office-style framing of work is in professional settings. Culturally, math is Excel -- the person who understands and builds spreadsheets better than someone else is seen as the person who understands math better. Someone who is good using PowerPoint is someone who understands good presentations.

This is nuts! But I get it; we develop competencies in tools in order to solve problems, and as we get good at it, and we can solve more and more complex problems with our preferred tool, it seems crazier and crazier that other people are so bad doing it themselves. But that doesn't mean those people are stupid, or even that they are wrong for seeing it as not worth the effort to master something that is potentially incredibly broad and complicated.

That's not a spreadsheet problem. And it's not even a spreadsheet builder/creator problem -- it's that we are trying to solve a surprisingly common scenario with the wrong tool for that specific job. Obviously, I have my answer, but we're never going to get there if we don't push the envelope more on how this stuff works, and who it's for.

Say Hello to the Microsoft Excel Solver

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 17:14:45 -0400

No, "Iterative Calculations" is not the name of my new band

Product Marketing 101 (a class I am imagining, but definitely did not actually take) says "don't sell the feature, sell the value". Here at Resolution, we've taken this to heart, drowning you with examples, use cases, and solutions to an almost comically large collection of real-life problems.

However, people still often ask me what Resolution does. This is not a question that's easy to answer with "value" unless you are really annoying and sales-y, and kind of dodge the specifics and re-direct towards some slimy discovery question like "wHaT aRe YoUr oRgAnIzAtIoNaL gOaLs?" So I won't answer it that way. I'll actually answer it!

Resolution is in most ways, a pretty limited version of a spreadsheet that does one completely insane thing spreadsheets cannot do -- it allows you to treat any "cell" (their language, not mine) as a specific, user-set value and a formula-calculated value at the same time, all the time.

[youtu.be/fRvNfj-M7...](https://youtu.be/fRvNfj-M74k)

This isn't the only thing that's different about Resolution (it doesn't use actual formulas at all, for instance, it automatically uses Units for things, etc.), but it's definitely the thing that, once you get it, makes you realize that there are entirely types of work and problem solving you can do with it that you will literally never be able to do with Excel or Sheets or the like despite those applications having been around for decades and having seemingly infinite capabilities.

When I first started trying to do these things in my spreadsheets, to a person, basically every intermediate-type Excel person told me the thing I wanted to do was impossible, and that I just needed to bite the bullet and make a second spreadsheet.

(Side note: In fact, every intermediate Excel user always advised me to use a pivot table, and would excitedly offer to show me how to make one. It didn't matter if a pivot table would solve my problem or not, or if my problem even had anything to do with what a pivot table does. Find someone who loves you as much as intermediate Excel users love pivot tables.)

Before really diving into building Resolution, I looked into it things a bit further. As it turns out, the answer is a little more complicated. It's still basically "no, go make a second spreadsheet", but in some ways, not for lack of trying. Believe it or not, spreadsheets really have tried to solve this problem.

... sort of.

Iterative Calculations and the Bizarre Power of Brute Force

One thing I've often mentioned about spreadsheets is that they haven't really changed, fundamentally, in my lifetime, even though they've become relevant to more and more people in more and more roles. Things like Solver and Goal Seek in Excel (and their dopplegangers in the Google Sheets extension libraries that work in almost the exact same way) are great examples of this. These add-ons are fascinating to me because, rather than restructure how a spreadsheet thinks about data and relationships to allow it to answer certain kinds of questions, they basically just use a spreadsheet the way a person does. They literally test out different values -- using the existing spreadsheet -- and compare the results until they land on what they think is the best answer, which they then autopopulate for you. The only real thing they do is keep the results of a WHOLE bunch of scenarios, and then compare them for you.

This is... fine? You can answer a lot of questions with brute force like this, especially if you have a program to do it for you. But it's not really a "feature" of Excel or Sheets, as much as an especially complex little macro that can use Excel or Sheets for you in a specific (read: insane) way. Solver is a more complex version of the same thing; you can allow auto-Excel here to test multiple variables in its hundreds, thousands, or millions of calculations, and it'll give you the best solution it can find, using a method you prefer. You'll even notice some Resolution-y elements in here, like being able to solve with certain values having a minimum or maximum to them.

From a pure problem solving perspective, I think this is actually pretty cool. It's probably very helpful in some very specific power user scenarios, and it definitely fits into Excel-culture of "wait, no, technically we can do what we want if we just do something that seems insane but is not actually impossible".

But there are a couple of enormous reasons why I'd never, in a million years, use this instead of Resolution in my everyday workflows.

1) It's Slow

Spreadsheets aren't built for this kind of brute force, and it shows. Even a basic "how do I get A5 to equal 10 by changing B5" goal seek function can get you a status bar and a spinning ball cursor. I don't want to know how long it takes to handle multiple variables with cascading consequences. Part of the problem is that Goal Seek and Solver are both looking for specific, "correct" answers for you, and generating that through brute force just requires a ton of individual cell calculations. It's fine if you are getting the ultimate answer to the question "what is the meaning of life" (p.s., it's 42) with a single, sluggish Goal Seek calculation. But this by no means puts formula-derived cells on equal footing with manually entered value cells. You'll know when you are using this process, because it's really slow and...

2) It's Annoying

"Technically, you actually can..." is always the beginning of a terrible, useless answer, and for 99% of my scenarios, that's exactly what Solver and Goal Seek are. If you want to poke at a bunch of values and see an entire system flex and change when you do it, this is not what you want. If you want outputs and inputs to work the same way so you can define an input or work backwards from a desired output, this is absolutely not what you want. This is a cool workaround to "is it possible to...", not a solution to the problems that come from it not being how spreadsheets are designed to work. You have to make a very deliberate choice to derive a value this way; your spreadsheet is not going to just do it because it makes sense in the context you're working in.

3) It's Basically a Hack

Hacks are cool. Hacks often come from clever people. Hacks make the world go 'round! But hacks are also exhausting, and cause chaos and unpredictability, and that's exactly how Goal Seek and Solver work. These things aren't even on by default! In Sheets, you have to find them in the Extensions store (Goal Seek is from Google, Solver is from some company) and turn them on, and then they run as little sidebar apps. The Excel scenario is even weirder; Solver is built into Excel but it's not on by default either, and you have to go through this byzantine set of preferences to even make it available. Why? I have no idea, but maybe it's because the UI that appears looks like this:

Look, we have many UI/UX things to improve in Resolution, no doubt. But this isn't even an attempt to make this make sense. This is a Visual Basic script built for people who enjoy building Visual Basic scripts. And keep in mind, this all sits on top of Excel. It's just basically using Excel for you, albeit in a pretty clever (and very persistent) manner. But that means your spreadsheet itself has no idea what you actually want here -- it never does -- and as a result some things are going to work in very weird ways. Undo, for instance, got all kinds of messed up in Google Sheets when I used Goal Seek. I haven't played enough with the Excel implementation so maybe it's smoother, but generally companies don't build amazing intuitive data exploration features, leave them off by default, and not tell you about them unless they are a little rough around the edges.

4) It's Opaque

This is both the most trivial and forgivable sin of iterative calculations, and somehow the one that bothers me the most and seems the most at odds with the ethos of Resolution. But the biggest challenge I always had with spreadsheets wasn't necessarily getting specific answers to things. That was annoying, but just like Goal Seek and Solver show, it was also literally possible as long as you changed a value twenty billion times, or made a second spreadsheet, etc. and so forth. Iterative calculations give you value by somewhat clumsily automating that annoying work, and doing it at massive, beyond-human scale. So yeah, answers can be derived if you have the stomach for it.

The problem I really had with spreadsheets is that they were terrible at conveying any actual grasp of the numbers and situation at hand. I could give you my Marketing Leads spreadsheet, and you'd learn some stuff, but you'd also waste a lot of time trying to figure out where lots of numbers come from, whether certain things are calculated correctly, and whether some factors mattered a lot or a little. Or, more likely, you'd give up and either trust me or not trust me based on whether you thought I was intelligent, or my suit fit properly (it never did). For real understanding of the universe my spreadsheet was representing, you'd need to try things and work backwards and see all of the pushing and pulling I mentioned earlier.

You simply do not get that experience -- at all -- with any of these features, or with iterative calculation tech in general.

So... what?

After really digging into these iterative calculation features for a couple days, I have a few conclusions.

The mechanic that Resolution doesn't just do, but is actually built around -- enough people want to do it that BIG SPREADSHEET has made an attempt
They are doing it for a very different reason; it's to spit out a correct answer, not to explore relationships between things
It's a pretty lame attempt, honestly, and feels like a macro that might break at any moment (and in Google's case, apparently does, according to the reviews)
There is just zero appetite from BIG SPREADSHEET to fundamentally expand how spreadsheets work or what they can handle... they aren't coming for this corner anytime soon

All of that makes sense. Until I can get people to realize how awesome it is to learn through spreadsheet-like numerical relationships without the brittleness and technicality of actual spreadsheets, and do that in large numbers, why would they waste their time trying to solve this?

Onward we march, then, towards a glorious new day of easily manipulatable mathematical logic models.

Very Quickly Sketching Out User Acquisition Costs

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 16:30:20 -0400

I've spent a lot of time trying to get Resolution to represent the most complicated scenarios it possibly can. Compared to the average user, I'm (unsurprisingly) pretty good at doing this, even if some of the results are kind of ridiculous.

However, in doing so, I've learned that some of the biggest "aha!" moments in the application aren't with complex models. They are with really, really simple ones, like the one I built today.

Considering User Types

Here's the situation. I'm helping someone figure out yet another go-to-market plan (hopefully better than Resolution's), and one of the things we're budgeting for (unlike Resolution) is some money to acquire users. At first, I just threw all these different people in a big "user" bucket, and assigned a single set of costs and benefits to that big bucket.

However, this turns out to be more than a bit too simple. We have powerful, important, advocate-like users with much higher acquisition costs and network effects than normal users, or especially casual users (like students). I really need to consider what the user breakdown by type is going to be -- not just to anticipate my costs, but to understand my downstream network effects. Unfortunately, I'm working in a spreadsheet, so there are a lot of annoying things about trying to take this stuff into consideration.

Brittle Formulas

Again, I'm in a spreadsheet. For every additional factor I want to consider, I either need to manually code it into my formulas (and have to update it umpteen times if it changes), or find a place I can stash it, and then reference that value. Either way, if I suddenly change the way I'm doing this (by, say, referencing one of several potential values in each place instead of using the same one all the time), I have a lot of refactoring to do, which usually leads to me making mistakes.

Unclear Inputs

The driver of my user acquisition numbers is my user acquisition budget. But of course, we're not totally set on what that should be yet. In fact, as is often the case, the answer is really "as low as possible", but we don't know what that is yet. So I can't just say "the budget is $20k", nor can I say "the budget is whatever it takes to get 100 power users and 400 casuals". I have to give and take on both sides of that to come up with something that makes sense.

Rates Up For Grabs

This is one of those classic Resolution-y scenarios where no answer is ridiculous until you see it, at which point it's obviously ridiculous and you want to make sure you never see it again. What's a reasonable acquisition cost for a power user? A hundred dollars? "That's nothing!" A thousand dollars? "THAT'S INSANE!!!" Okay, okay. I need to be able to take these different costs on and off the table, and probably put some floors and ceilings on them.

What a Flex

Basically, I have what seems like a really simple math problem, except I want a whole bunch of different things to be able to flex -- and of course, I want to be able to go "backwards", where I can use money to determine user outputs, OR I can request certain amounts of certain types of users at certain costs and see that affect the required "input".

Aaaaaand.... here it is.

To be honest, this was even simpler when I started. I simply had my pile of money, my three user groups, and my three costs. All I really wanted to do was figure out what reasonable acquisition costs would be for the goals we have, but once I had that established I immediately wanted to plug in some of the downstream effects, so I just... added them.

Where the model really shines, though, is when the questions come (and they always do):

Can you make this work with 15k? How does that affect the total user base?
What if we spent a lot more money on influencers and a lot less on the rank and file users?
What if referrals are actually stronger from senior staff than from influencers?
What's the cheapest way to get me to 500 users?
Follow-up: "Okay, not that way, what else can you do?"

I built this model in 5 minutes. It's not complicated. But I poked at it and tried different scenarios for the next 20, and I've come back to it several times since. Scenarios! Flexibility! It's all there, baby!

Managing Hours & Possibilities

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 17:14:11 -0400

As mentioned earlier this summer, our CTO Brian Cunningham has decided to reassign all non-essential personnel towards "short-term revenue generation", which means I have to go back to work to fund this incredible enterprise.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8GcmNm9n_M)

Since I need flexibility to also run this high-tech side-hustle and occasionally hug my children, I'm going the contracting/consulting route.

Building a Proposal

I've done consulting before, but I'm not much of a business development person, and I have a hard time turning what I can do for people into blocks of hours and amounts of money. For one project, I was asked if I could deliver a whole host of different things, when in reality I have (at best) a couple hours each week available to dedicate.

What should I work on? How much work should I put into each thing? How long would the chosen pile of things take if I worked on this for 6 hours a week, or 8?

Hilariously, I started building a spreadsheet to figure this out, but I quickly ran into the quintessential Resolution-brain problem -- I wanted to be able to change both sides of my model, so I could see what how many hours (and thus, weeks) I'd need with different project expectations, OR, crucially, what would happen to my project outputs if I had more or less hours to work with. No spreadsheet could support both of those things in a single model, because that's not how spreadsheets work.

The Resolution Alternative

Once I realized that I was really just allocating hours and turning them into different things (task-allocated hours, or maybe project outputs on one end, and weeks on the other), using Resolution made way more sense. I used the Units of Hours & Weeks for most of the model, and a few project outputs like Assets & Orgs, so I could play with different rates. Those rates measure things like "how many hours to make a one-pager", or "how long does it take to fully assess one competitor". When I couldn't specify project outputs, I just... didn't do it. Instead, I let the hours speak for themselves. Setting up a CRM will take a while, but it's not based on number of contacts or whatever.

I found this whole exercise to be incredibly helpful. In classic Resolution fashion, I felt much better confidently stating that this work would take months, because I had the receipts, and when you look at the individual pieces, they make sense.

Here's the model. Seriously, check it out! You could do this with just about any form of time management.

Back to work. Resolution will be humming along like this for the next few months, so keep on building and drop me/us a line if you have any questions or issues. But we won't be putting out new features for a bit while we save up our developmental ammo. Trust me, no one is more eager to take this thing to the next level -- not just because I invented it, but because I use it for stuff like this!

Humility

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 16:24:05 -0400

Unelected! Unpopular! Lifetime appointments! Self-enforced ethics rules! Very little documentation defining its role! The Supreme Court really does have it all, when you stop and think about it.

And "government at its finest"? I think you're on pretty safe ground with "the Supreme Court is important", or my personal stance of "it was a decent catch-all until we started using it too much". But finest?

It's just a tough quote. I definitely would have gone with "the volunteer fire department" or something for "what do you think is government at its finest". If they had specifically asked me about the Supreme Court... hmm... wait, I've got it.

Perfect. No notes.

(~~Editor's~~ Note: They ruined Twitter, so now when something makes me crazy I have to post here like it's 2007 again, or else text my friends, and I'm giving them a break this time.)

The Michael Scott Paper Company Golf Association

Tue, 06 Jun 2023 10:52:23 -0400

Major news in a sport I don't care that much about, but have been unable to ignore because the lawsuits are too interesting.

This is all fine and probably makes sense, but there are some pretty funny elements to it when you look at how all of this will eventually get sorted out.

Still to be determined is how players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, who defected to Saudi-funded LIV Golf for nine-figure bonuses, can rejoin the PGA Tour after this year.

- ESPN

Um... yeah??? So basically these guys bolted (no judgment) for huge piles of money, and the price they paid for those huge piles was that they weren't able to be in the PGA Tour anymore. Well, that's all behind us now, right? Except... they still have the huge piles of money! And the other guys don't!

Nine figures, man. Nine figures.

Anyways, I know who I want smoothing all of this over, and so do you.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-GFmH0EK9Y)

5 Resolution Things You Should Do Right Now

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:02:50 -0400

(Post title inspired by 2013-style listicle clickbait. You're welcome.)

Resolution is still a very new piece of software, but it’s still the case that I’ve been working on it and thinking about it for a while. There’s a lot of stuff I want to add (and some things I want to change completely!), and if I’m being honest, I spend most of my time thinking about that.

One of the problems with that, though, is that I often take for granted what exists in Resolution right now, until someone excitedly explains it to me and I sort of blankly say “yeah, I know”. (Again, I’m working on this.)

Anyways, here are five of those really cool, simple things that you should go try out right now. No forward-looking or "coming soon" features required.

1) Ask for some money

When I ran marketing departments, I was often hesitant to ask for money to spend — not because I didn’t want to spend money (“wheeee!!!”), or even because I didn’t have any ways to spend it that I thought were good ideas. It was because showing a justification for giving me that money was usually a lot of work, and really hard to get right.

I would spin up a spreadsheet that made the argument, and my boss would ask me a question the spreadsheet wasn’t built to answer. Or my boss would push back on one of the numbers in my spreadsheet, and I’d find it was built into a bunch of formulas and I needed to hunt them all down. Pretty soon my spreadsheet would be closed and we’d be having a qualitative discussion about the issue, or worse, a quantitative discussion with lots of disconnected numbers and assumptions being thrown around.

You don't have to get this detailed, but you also don't have to NOT get this detailed.

Resolution, on the other hand, is a great way to ask for money. You can very quickly take that pile of money, and turn it into things your boss actually wants (usually more money, but could be other things), and all the required assumptions and rates will just… show up! It’s super easy to handle pushback and update a Resolution in real-time, or even add additional factors you forgot to include.

2) Plan your week

Fundamentally, management (of yourself or others) often comes down to making sure time gets spent on the right things. Maybe that’s bunch of different projects, or activities, or rest, or whatever. But in the end, you can’t add hours to the day, and you can only reduce how long certain things take by so much.
And of course, hours for the sake of hours isn’t really that useful, at least for things that aren’t “rest” or “having a great time”. You’d like to learn something, or create some sort of work product that leads to a positive outcome (like money, or a happy person).

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJios_eU7hU)

Trigger warning: this video is about cold-calling people and not being appreciated at work.

The ability to easily turn a finite amount of time into other things, at different rates, makes Resolution a great way to think about time management a little differently. Simply by knowing what you want, and how long you have to get it, you can start to think about everything from where your priorities should be, to what realistic outputs are, to how efficiently you need to be working. If you’ve never done an exercise like this before, be prepared — it can be incredibly enlightening.

3) Set some better goals

Many of us work as part of a larger process or funnel, turning money into customers, or raw materials into products, at different rates. But even though we know our process is slightly different from everyone else’s, when it comes to goals, we’re often quick to assume what we should be increasing and decreasing based on what we hear from people doing similar types of work.

If the answer to "which ones are your focus this quarter" is "all of them", you're doing this wrong.

But that’s wrong! Certain parts of your process can be incredibly high or low leverage, and assigning yourself an “industry standard” goal without taking a few minutes to dig a little deeper and figure out if it actually matters is a great way to waste a lot of time and demoralize everyone.

So... maybe don’t do that. Take 20 minutes to build out a simple Resolution model of your process and see where the choke points really are. Best case scenario, you’ll metrics and goals that actually matter. Worst case, you’ll discover what you don’t know, and why that’s a problem.

4) Build an organization

Whether it’s money, people, or potential customers, Resolution makes it really easy to divvy up something important among an organization, and figure out where it leads. You can add a new product line with a whole new set of costs and revenues, or a new region with a similar, but slightly different sales funnel. Personally, I like to anticipate capacity planning problems and figure out how many support technicians, account managers, or help desk people will be necessary to support a growing operation.

It's a budget! It's a strategy! It's... a Resolution model you made in 20 minutes?

One of the reasons Resolution works so well for these kinds of processes is that they’re often pretty unique to whoever is trying to map them. Support problems, for instance, are not one-size-fits all — one company may have a single resource handling multiple customers, and another could have thousands of tickets being spread out among multiple teams. If you want to set up a model for either of those situations that’s easy for other people to read, critique, and iterate on, skip the formulas and spin it up in Resolution.

5) Brace for the worst

Personally, I think business people constantly overstate how much more “uncertain” everything is than normal. People have been complaining about uncertainty my entire life! Still, there’s value in being ready for a sudden collapse in a metric or other factor of the business. What if we lost our Top 5 customers? What if the price of getting a new customer went up 500%? What if the best way to retain customers suddenly became illegal?

These aren’t things you want to spend all day building hyper-accurate models of, because most of them time they won’t even happen, so what’s the point? But it’s important to have a general understanding of what-ifs like this, if for no other reason than having a compelling reason to tell people to relax a little.

Resolution is the perfect way to split the difference. You don’t need a profit-and-loss, accounting-level statistical model here (nor do you want to spend the time, effort, and talent to make one) — you need a quick, easy to read understanding of what is and isn’t survivable. And Resolution models allow you to change any factor at any time, so when someone’s crazy nightmare scenario comes up in a meeting, you can throw it into the model quickly and either assuage their fears, or realize they might actually have a point.

But wait, there's more!

Of course there is. For starters, take a look at the Examples page (for walkthroughs and video tutorials) or the Model Index (which just has everything organized by type). If that doesn't give you an idea, I want to know what you do for a living. It's probably something badass, like underwater welding.

Sneak Peak: Resolution Refactor

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 16:21:21 -0400

We like to stay ahead of the curve here at Resolution. So when I heard people were writing actual web applications with large language model chatbots, I spent $20 on the GPT4 version of OpenAI's ChatGPT and got right to work.

Here's a little window into today's working session:

Is this easier than working with skilled, experienced professionals? In a way... absolutely! This thing does exactly what I tell it, works incredibly fast, and is happy to allow me to change my mind whenever I want, as many times as I want. I feel absolutely no guilt at all doing things like pivoting completely and dumping an entire code base that would cause normal, human software developers to push me into traffic or at least passive-aggressively respond to my meeting invites with "MAYBE". (BTW, I invented that move, so... respect.)

However, there are downsides. For instance... well, here's where we stand as of today, product wise.

Pretty bad! I think the math works, but it's hard to tell because this entire thing is totally illegible, despite the cheery confirmation of my robot engineering department that the problem had been addressed. (UPDATE: The math definitely does not work, at all.) It's hard to say that I can't make this any better, because I probably can! I'll keep yelling at this thing every couple of hours and it will keep making changes without even a scintilla of human empathy or understanding and send them to me in chunks of truncated Python that I copy and paste in a text editor with a hopeful, utterly clueless look on my face.

The future is here! Somehow, though, I don't think the AI Edition of Resolution is going to surpass the slow-cooked, human-architected production version anytime soon. Sorry, Brian.

Bad Ethics, Bad Products

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:23:05 -0400

AI bots make stuff up. This is not new; in fact, it's so commonplace that people aren't even phased by it. Rather than question the value of the bullshit robot, we've started to doubt the existence of non-bullshit.

Unfortunately, this problem isn't going away. And while there's a weird consumer religion out there that machine learning products somehow fix themselves ("sure, it's bad now, but every mistake is just the model getting better!"), that's not going to happen when bots learn from the internet and the internet is increasingly just content from robots that learned how to write content by reading the same internet.

The snake-head is already eating the snake on the opposite side, man. We're here.

Sometimes the product IS the ethics

Generative AI skeptics have been pretty clear that there's an alarming correlation between ethics teams being dissolved and tons of new generative products coming to market. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that obviously the ethical quandaries of bullshit robots and idea-smushing-together algorithms are significant, and that fully staffed ethics teams were probably putting a pretty high burden on getting stuff out the door.

Well, they're largely gone now, so here come the products. They are very ambitious, and the main ethical effort made on most of them is to say "don't use this for anything" somewhere in the terms of service. That's pretty gross from a personal/moral/ethical standpoint, but in this particular case, it's more than that. The ethical objections to this were partially about poisoning people's minds with plausible fiction generated at scale with little effort. But some of them were also about destroying the content soul of the internet that these very products depend on to function.

We've blown right past that! Chatbot Tech is now a tourist beach resort that dumps its sewage directly into the ocean, and we're barely out of the gate with this stuff.

This could have been good fine

If this was a serious product, to me, you'd reverse the stack here. Output tools are not that interesting, because the output isn't particularly good. At best, it's fine and extremely cheap. But the input -- that's the good stuff. That's how you'd deal with things like misinformation, "hallucinations", and things like that. I don't want tools to generate output that's been trained on a bunch of garbage. If something is going to feign understanding, at least feign the understanding I want and don't start mansplaining to me about things I know you don't know.

But my guess has always been that LLMs need that first "L" to be so large that restricting the dataset to trusted info was always going to be a problem. That you could theoretically do it, and that you can probably do it today with some tools, but that either (a) with a smaller, more restrictive data set you can't actually generate anything as human-ish as what the general purpose chatbots are barfing up and delighting everyone with, or (b) to work at all it would still need to reference other training, and there's no viable way to say "look at this data to learn English, and this data to learn facts", because there are no facts, we're just spitting out tokens here.

Seriously, I'm guessing on this. I'm not a linguist OR an ML engineer (clearly), but I do know how people bring products to market when they want to make money, and one clear sign that something is impossible to do well is when the guy winning the race concedes a necessary portion of his/her market to a "network of partners" or developers and says "you guys figure this out, we're just here to support you". Best case scenario, you get the iOS App Store (which is still hell for a lot of developers, but we did get a lot of great apps along with limitless terrible ones). Worst case, you get Salesforce, where the last mile is a death march you pay a consultant $5,000 an hour to slog through with you and literally no one is happy, ever.

Ethically, owning the model should suck, because the model is what makes everything terrible. Unless, that is, you can convince everyone that (a) the model is a child so it both can't be controlled AND you should feel bad about yelling at it, or (b) it's actually the apps ON the model that need to take responsibility, even if that is impossible, or more likely, just not important to said app-makers.

I think this is where OpenAI and the likes are headed. They can't control this, and that's fine right now because they don't need to. The magical, self-healing lie non-experts like me tell ourselves about ML will buy them plenty of time, and by the time we realize this will always be bad OpenAI will have shifted to "we enable the developers" and "tools are tools, they can be used for good or evil and we think everyone should use them for good" with absolutely no blame-able hand on the steering wheel.

Plus, all the current execs and employees will leave and sit around being rich and blaming 2028's management team for losing the "mission" of the company.

Onboarding, Payments, and a Shiny Model Index

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:05:09 -0400

Couple of big announcements here at Resolution HQ. Before handing it off to my new favorite algorithmically generated executives, I'll sum it up for search purposes --

There's a brand new onboarding program. Just open the Scratchpad and follow the prompts for a Resolution walkthrough based on a model you can actually relate to.
Payments are now working. If you need to save more than two models, and/or you want to see Resolution get better, we've got a solution for you. Here's more on our thoughts on pricing if you're interested.
The Model Index has a bunch of good stuff in it, and you can search the entire thing without even opening an account. Just to be absolutely clear, the Model Index is hand-curated by me. Just because you make or share a model, it does not mean it goes in here. I have no idea what you all are creating and only post things that (a) I make, or (b) a Resolution users shares with and says "add this to the index, it's cool!"

That's it. Now, here's AI-generated Resolution CTO Brian Cunningham with another important announcement.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S3gjPn6pJ4)

Well said, excu-bots!

Tell me more about this "revenge" concept

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 22:35:50 -0400

In the Wall Street Journal today:

Obviously, I immediately thought of my favorite mayor.

And with that, I yield the floor.

Good Goals Gone Bad

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 16:20:47 -0400

Life with Goals

Like most professionals, I have been dealing with goals for most of my career. Early on, I was mostly impacted by annual goals. Later, when I got into management, everything started to revolve around quarterly goals.

But those details don’t really matter — the important thing is that almost all of the goals I’ve encountered have been logically dubious, unhelpful, and hurt employee motivation far more than they’ve helped it.

To be blunt, I’m now going to tell you why that was the case, and how to fix it.

Why have goals?

The most obvious reason goals are important is that they set expectations for work, and ideally, set those expectations appropriately so that people do productive things. If goals are set correctly for an individual (or a team of them), that person should know what they need to do to have a positive impact on the organization and get whatever benefits come with that (at a minimum, continued employment, but hopefully more than that).

Aside from getting a raise or just not getting fired, goals can/should also link the day to day work of an individual with that of a larger team, and that team with the larger organization. This is so obviously useful — necessary, really — that everyone pretends to do it, but as we’ll discuss later, it almost never REALLY happens for a variety of reasons.

(Here's a live look at me in a goal review meeting sometime during the Obama administration.)

Hitting a thoughtful, realistic stretch goal is incredibly satisfying if it’s connected to both personal success/reward and a larger sense that it’s moving the organization forward in a meaningful, positive way. It gives your work every important kind of purpose.

Why are bad goals so bad?

Nothing says “I don’t care about you or your work” like setting up goals for a person or team (or allowing them to be set by a manager) that don’t convincingly bubble up to the overall company plan.

For instance, if you want to hit $100 million in revenue this year, and part of the plan involves hiring a second lawyer for the company, how are these things connected? If they’re not connected, why are you doing it? Why not hire three more lawyers? Or ten? Or none? And if, deep down, you know they’re connected, but you don’t feel like explaining it because it’s complicated… you’re being a terrible leader! Explaining things is your job! Bad goals are usually lazy goals, or scared goals.

Cool story, bro. Unfortunately, in real life, this entire exercise is pretty irrelevant.

In general, people aren’t going to be happy if they think they’re working for lazy, scared management. But bad goals do more than just fail to point people in the right direction. They often provide a way for people to go in the wrong direction and be rewarded for it!

This just sounds like normal business stuff, why should I worry about it?

The “quiet quitting” thing was a fun little media narrative, but the reality is that paralyzing cynicism at work didn’t start there, and certainly hasn’t abated with a few rounds of buzzy tech layoffs. If anything, it’s worse than ever. Hiring good people is still hard, and having them cynically go through the motions because they don’t believe in their goals is still extremely counter-productive. You can’t avoid it by hiring “better” employees; don’t even think about saying “poor culture fit” right now. The problem is that you are taking good employees — maybe your best ones — and making them less productive or anti-productive by being vague, incoherent, and unaccountable.

If you want people to be “engaged” at work — especially if you are asking them to work hard at things they may not be personally passionate about or even interested in, like dealing with angry customers or cold calling people — you’re going to need to do an excellent job at making their work matter to them. Fortunately, that’s what goals are for. Unfortunately, most leaders and leadership teams make bad goals and bad goals make the problem even worse. You’re probably doing it right now!

Why Your Goals Are Bad

Here are the most common causes of bad goals I’ve seen, based on a combination of my own experiences and those from colleagues.

Problem #1: Goals Are Dishonest

I’ve been in startups for a long time now, and most of the companies I’ve worked for have had — and have made a pretty big deal about, internally — a “mission”. That mission has never (in my experience) been “to make money”, or “to grow revenue at a rate similar to other venture backed companies that were acquired at high investment multiples”. Instead, it was always something very qualitative that seemed more aligned with the interests of the people who started the company, and in most cases many of the people later hired to work there.

For instance, if I worked at a company that made a weather app, their mission might be “to make the world better and more equitably prepared for the impacts of extreme weather”. This would be on the wall, stated in kickoffs, etc., etc. and so forth.

The funny thing is that nowhere that I worked was the ongoing success of this mission actually tracked. Instead, we used the company’s financial and growth goals as an unofficial, unstated proxy for this mission, and we tracked the absolute shit out of those. So when my fictional weather company hit a million dollars in recurring revenue, all the managers would clap and say “we are that much closer to our mission of making a more equitable, prepared world!”

[youtu.be/Gj0o8m5lB...](https://youtu.be/Gj0o8m5lBbk?t=165)

But people aren’t stupid. Even if financial success is a decent proxy in the early days of a simple company, it (very) quickly becomes less so as that company grows and becomes more complex.

Companies like these may have investors who “love” the mission of the company, but what they actually, professionally love is the belief that this mission will cause the company to do things that increase the value of their investment in it, and those things tend to be strictly financial and not necessarily related to the mission at all. Not talking about this doesn’t make it any less true, or any less of a drag on “employee engagement”.

Cynically, my belief continues to be that missions largely exist to pacify employees who may not feel like getting up and putting their hearts and souls into minimizing logo churn, for instance, or building out some annoying single sign on requirement for a giant enterprise account.

But missions are not goals. And we usually pay/promote/hire/fire people based on goals, not missions. When a mission exists (and exist loudly, as it often does), but is clearly deprioritized in favor of increasingly disconnected business performance goals, that mission stops being motivating and starts becoming a cultural AND operational albatross.

Solution #1: Build Better Proxies

If you’re not willing to measure the success of a mission, and celebrate or panic at the results the same way you do when you look at business performance, you should probably dump your mission. That sounds brutal, but I’m telling you, it’s going to do more harm than good before you know it.

Most companies take financial performance seriously, and for good reason! If they perform poorly for long enough, they probably will cease to exist. So financial rigor makes sense, but it also sets that bar for what it means to actually care about something. As mentioned, your employees are not idiots. They can tell the difference between things that are taken seriously, and things that are not, and it has nothing to do with you or a bunch of vice presidents saying “we take this seriously”.

If dumping your mission seems depressing (and it should, so don't worry), take heart; it’s not crazy to measure your mission. In fact, it’s a good idea! Is there a loose, objective way to measure my fictional weather app’s contribution to a more equitably prepared world? Probably? Here are some random ideas from a non-expert:

number of people injured in major weather events
amount of property damage (assuming this could be mitigated with sufficient warning)
number of weather related car accidents
something that counts these things across different economic backgrounds and looks for increasing equity there

Maybe these are all stupid, or impractical. What do I know? But then… that just means this is a stupid, impractical mission, and you should either get rid of it or make one you’re serious about. Too many companies treat the vague impenetrableness of their mission as a feature, not a bug. But if you wouldn’t accept that in your financial goals, don’t accept it from your alleged stated purpose for being, because your employees won’t.

Of course, the most logically sound missions effectively tie the two together through a really smart business model where business performance is a highly accurate, believable proxy for mission execution. It’s a high bar, but if you can pull THAT off, you’ll take an enormous bite out of employee cynicism.

Problem #2: Bad Goals Protect Bad Leadership

I don’t meant to be a downer here, but spoiler alert — there’s a lot of executive and middle management that acts in bad faith. These are variable comp leaders (hello!) who would rather be given four incoherent goals they can successfully argue they’ve achieved, versus four clear, logical goals that may have a more direct connection to company success but are more difficult to argue have been achieved when things go badly.

In other words, it’s very hard to create coherent goals when everyone’s personal success relies on some amount of incoherence.

Plus, on top of this fundamental preference for complexity, creating connected goals across multiple functions often requires the leaders of those functions to take ownership of certain assumptions, and frankly, most leaders would rather not do this. For example, go back to my “we want to grow to $100m and also we are hiring a second lawyer” example. The head of the very small Legal team should probably take ownership of the assumption that a second lawyer will help this goal be achieved. Maybe there’s an assumption that fewer deals will be lost to legal obligations, or that contracts will get signed more quickly. Maybe there’s a negative risk — some distraction cost — that another lawyer will mitigate simply by being around.

Those assumptions need to made, and they need to be owned. Now, they don’t need to be owned so that someone can be flogged and terminated if they’re wrong — but how can you get better at making estimates moving forward if nobody actually owns the ones you’re making today?

I mean, if you want to do this, just be honest about it. It's fine.

Finally, if there is simply NO quantitative justification for doing something — not even a loose one — somebody needs to say that and defend the fact that despite SO many things being “decided” by data, this thing is somehow fundamentally different. I’m not saying that argument can’t be made, but you have to actually do it if you want to maintain any credibility. Spending a million dollars on PR can’t just “be good for us”, and it can’t just “be time for us to do it”. Clearly we are assuming this has some transactional value (since our company goals are transactional), let’s either take a stab at it, argue for why this thing gets to be vague and unmeasured (which again, is fine), or realize the folly of our ways and do something else.

Solution #2: Own Assumptions and Support the Owners

The fact that there’s a guess or an assumption at the end of a logical rainbow should not be an excuse to simply avoid the rainbow. If/when Marketing hands off “qualified” leads to Sales, there is obviously some assumption of how well those leads are going to perform. Whoever is running Marketing owns that assumption to some degree, as does whoever owns Sales. If the leads are weak, have that argument, and fix that problem. If Sales sucks at closing, same process. But don’t look at each other at the end of the quarter and declare victory from both sides because both of you outperformed some industry average if you look at it the right way.

Similarly, don’t make product goals like “improve onboarding”, list a bunch of deploys, and say the goal was achieved. Hell, don’t even set “improve onboarding” as a goal unless you’re willing to make some assumptions about how improved onboarding can affect the business. And definitely don’t make those without running those assumptions past other relevant departments. If it’s your call, great, but if everyone thinks your assumptions are insane you better be willing to explain why you think you’re right and then get made fun of at the end of the year if you’re wrong.

On the other hand, if you’re thoughtful about it, you also shouldn’t be FIRED at the end of the year for being wrong — that’s exactly why no one wants to own any of these assumptions. Transparency is not the same thing as honesty or good faith, and the latter two are a lot more important than the first thing.

Accountability for my assumptions shouldn’t necessarily be the destruction of my career — it should be that I actually change something I think or do as a result of being demonstrably wrong. Instead, I’ve often seen the opposite on both counts, where no one is willing to take any kind of reputational risk for the good of the larger organization, and as soon as someone does and it doesn’t go their way they’re layered or given the boot in the name of “accountability”.

"Yes, I said 20% of qualified leads would take meetings, but it just a guess! It was a GUESS!!!"

The great leaders I’ve worked with have used being wrong in controlled, well documented ways as the strongest evidence to do something differently the next time. Unfortunately, too many of them were already gone by the time their knowledge and humility could have been turned into something useful for the company.

Problem #3: One-Way Goals Are Nothing But a Power Struggle

The corporate version of “history is written by the victors” is “goals are set based on the assumptions of whatever department the CEO (or investor, or whomever) is currently enamored with”. In other words, you work backwards from some number, that number is dictated by someone, and thus everyone wants to be that person so they can indirectly control everyone’s goals.

Maybe Finance is in charge. If so, they’ll declare how much money the company needs to make, and everyone will work backwards from that. (This one is at least logical, because in theory they also decide how much money everyone gets to spend.) Maybe Sales is in charge — they’ll set up goals they think they can hit, and whatever they need to hit it (new heads, leads, etc.) will be everyone else’s problem. Marketing leaders often fantasize about being in charge — they rarely are — and creating goals with a clear-eyed assessment of both their perceived value of what’s being sold (which is usually wrong), and resources they have to make people aware of it. Every number is negotiable, except one, and you want to be the person who gets to decide what that magical number measures, and how big it is.

(Here I am during that one quarter when decided to let Marketing define our business KPIs.)

Unfortunately, in this scenario almost everyone is unhappy, frustrated, or checked out. Why? Because no one person or team knows enough about everyone else to set that number on their own. So one function is happy, and the rest are either saddled with numbers they know deep down aren’t achievable (Sales, Marketing, Account Management), or they simply retreat from the numbers and focus on qualitative goals, or completely disconnected metrics that don’t rely on anyone else (Product).

This kind of thinking -- as unproductive as it is -- works perfectly in a spreadsheet. Something is a number, and everything else is a reaction to that number. The goal is some number, and everything else exists to generate that number.

Here, let me show you what I mean.

Solution #3: Two-Way (or Eight-Way) Goals

If people own their individual numbers instead of having them indirectly dictated to them by people who don’t understand them, you’re much, much, MUCH more likely to set achievable, motivating goals — even if they are still very hard to reach.

So how do you do this? Well, for starters, you don’t make “second class goals”. By that, I mean you don’t have a certain set of numbers that you are willing to take input on, and change, and another set of numbers that are automatically calculated based on others. As soon as you have this two-tiered system in your goals, you’re making certain people’s goals subordinate to others.

This means that while you can use a spreadsheet once you have your goals set, it’s the wrong place to actually figure out what they are. In Resolution, you can set up a model of the business that includes all of the same factors, but makes ALL of them first-class goals. That means all of them can be set, all of them can be changed, and all of them can be temporarily locked once you settle on what something really does need to be.

Here’s what that looks like (you can also click here to try out this model yourself).

Bad goals are worse than no goals

Nobody, in any company I’ve ever worked for, has put enough thought or effort into setting goals well. Maybe it’s because the difficulty of the situation is depressing, or maybe the idea of wrangling consensus out of a room full of egos and insecurities is just too much for all of us to bear.

Well… too bad. Bad, dishonest, hand-wavy goals are making your best employees nuts, and more transactionally, it’s making them leave. No matter how pleasant the unreality of the situation, people are remarkable resilient and determined if you don’t yank them around and send them on the performance equivalence of wild-goose chases.

Be honest. Embrace logic. And don’t complain about silos and lack of collaboration when you refuse to build a single, understandable map of the business that everyone can find themselves on.

Meet Resolution's New Artificial CTO

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 18:09:00 -0400

Now that we're live, Resolution is making some important staffing decisions.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m761uj_vZ8)

Welcome aboard, Brian. Hope we hear more from you soon.

Resolution 1.0 Is Live

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 18:37:54 -0400

Big news! The new and improved, public version of Resolution is live and ready to use. It's still missing some stuff (more on that in a sec) but the major improvements are up and running. Those include:

Account creation
Model publishing to a public URL
An onboarding engine / help center / contact widget
A scratchpad where you can build an (unsaved) model without logging in
way better ESC/Enter handling (this was making me crazy)
better error messages
tons of weird, edge case bug fixes
prefixes for units (so you can append "inches" or whatever to the end of "length")
Just general handsomeness and reliability

What's Missing / Immediately Next

Hilariously, our biggest remaining tech holdup isn't tech at all -- it's me getting a bunch of stupid tax and corporate information established with Uncle Sam so I can set up Stripe properly. Actually switching over to real payments shouldn't take long after that, so ideally it'll only be a couple of days. BUT, for now, you can make an account and save/share up to two models as is, and build as much crazy stuff in disposable-Scratchpad-mode as you'd like.

Use this little doo-dad in Resolution to send your thoughts and questions.

I'm not going to actually blitz people with this thing until payments are running (you know, because money), but I'm more than happy to have you kick the tires if you've found this on your own, or already knew about it. Make sure to check out the Examples page not only for video walkthroughs, but included links to models you can really use and copy into your account.

So be sure to check out what's new, share what you build, and let me know what you think!

On Pricing & Sharing

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 13:39:11 -0400

Given that we’re approaching the initial launch of Resolution, there’s a lot to be excited about. Every feature, every capability, the simple fact that it exists, etc. etc., and so forth.

But the thing I’m the giddiest about might surprise you. Pricing!

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76DgXQHw1Ek)

(If you aren't familiar with Resolution, this video will show you the idea in EXACTLY 60 seconds.)

Who can use Resolution?

There are a bunch of ways you can use Resolution, several of which do not involve paying for it.

If you publish a model, anyone can view your model and even try different scenarios simply by clicking on the public URL. You do not need an account to do this.
If you just want to try to build something in Resolution, you can do that without creating an account. If you decide you want to save it or share it, you’ll need to create an account or login to your account.
If you want to save a model — yours or a copy of somebody else’s they’ve published — OR share a model, you can do that with up to two models with a free account.
If you want to save more than two models (and help support the next generation of awesome improvements, wink wink), you can upgrade to a paid account for $65/year — basically $5 a month plus a couple bucks to cover my Stripe fees.

That's it.

I've always wanted to say "Artist's Rendition" and now I can. But it really does look a lot like this.

Why is this cool?

In my career, I’ve learned that there’s a big difference between wanting a bottom-up, community-driven growth strategy, and actually offering something that makes sense to be discovered that way. I’ve worked at a bunch of B2B SaaS companies over the years, and there was often a desire, or even a straight-up edict to “broaden the customer base” and lower the cost of acquiring customers by unleashing some kind of bottom-up strategy.

The problem was… we usually didn’t have the product for it. Instead, we had complex, non-obvious enterprise software designed to be sold over weeks of discovery and demos, to people who would then be onboarded by customer success professionals. At best, our “bottom up” product strategy was to offer a crudely-restricted version of our software at a cheaper price, and then hope that everyone would love it. When that didn’t work, we’d argue about marketing tactics.

By the time I had the core of Resolution working and was thinking about how to actually bring it to market, I knew that since it’s an early version of a totally new, general-purpose tool, I wanted to make available to as many different people as possible. That meant keeping the price down and going for volume.

That’s all well and good — “broaden the base!” — but I also knew it was a fool’s errand to expect random strangers to become crazy advocates for the 1.0 version of software they learned about directly from the guy who made it. Hoping you go viral is not a strategy, and “founder led sales” of a $65 product is a good way to run out of money. I’d be better off selling knives.

So in a moment that was both terrifying and very exciting, I made the internal decision to commit the rest of my pre-revenue development resources (aka, $$$) not to making Resolution more powerful, flexible, or beautiful, but instead to making discovery and sharing of the application as natural and useful to customers as possible.

Non-accounts

There’s something about being able to actually use a certain kind of product, even in some kind of sandbox, that makes it seem real and helps people get it. This is especially true with Resolution; pretty much everyone who falls in love with it doesn’t have the “a-ha” moment until they’re clicking around and doing stuff.

For that reason, I really wanted to center the actual product experience. This is scary, and risky, because building good, usable products is much harder than everyone pretends, and building good, usable, bootstrapped 1.0 products is more or less impossible. I think this is why so many companies avoid it, and would rather show you a demo or talk about its value. I get it!

Still, I wanted that pressure — knowing people would be able to succeed or fail using Resolution right off the bat — to keep my product goals focused, and I knew that the more friction I put between the world and my product, the more of a bottleneck I’d be in actually getting it to people.

Long story short, this is why Resolution allows you to simply build stuff without even making an account. Internally, we call it “Scratchpad” mode, and it just basically means that you can pop in and sketch out your idea in a fully-functional version of the application. If you realize your idea is actually pretty good, you can then say “okay, creating an account is worth it”, and go through that (very short) process.

Not exactly where we landed, but a sign that we've been thinking about this for a while.

In allowing this (and investing the time and money to support a smooth transition from Scratchpad to account creation, and then to saving a model), I’ve basically prioritized putting the product in front of people over gathering potential customer information. Maybe this is a good business idea, maybe it’s not, but either way it definitely aligns with what I want to prioritize.

Free vs. paid accounts

My original plan was simply to restrict saving a model to paid users. Eventually, after both formal and informal UX research, I got cold feet on this and felt like it was too much to ask. I simply saw too many users who needed to (and were willing to) build two models, and often go back and forth between the two, before everything clicked. I didn’t want to force those people into a purchase decision before the value was really clear.

By making free accounts truly first-class citizens, and only limiting them by how many models they can save, there’s an obvious risk that I’m giving too much of the product away. But when I thought about my goals for getting this thing off the ground, I realized that I valued the potential of community building and user-generated models more than I did maximizing the odds of any given purchase.

I want people to build models and make better decisions with Resolution probably more than anything else. Partially that’s just me being annoying and insisting that the value of the product should drive everything. But I really do think it’s compatible with growing the paid user base — if people build one useful model and find two others, spending $65 is a no brainer. A world with more models out in the wild is a world I’m more likely to succeed in.

Sharing

Building out the technology and infrastructure to make sharing models work (and work reliably) took a ton of effort, and is probably one of the bigger bets I’ve made at this point in Resolution’s history. We could have cleaned up a million different front-end experiences instead of doing this, but ultimately I chose opening up a fundamentally different social experience for this thing over expanding its power or flexibility. Frankly, my logic was simply that without sufficient discovery, it wouldn’t matter how cool this (already cool) thing got. If I can get off the ground and build a happy user base, we’re 100% coming back to expand the capabilities of the core product.

"You get a model! You get a model! And you... you get a model, too!"

The other major question — should free accounts be able to share? This was a much tougher call, but in the end I once again deferred to making early stage community building as easy as possible. If you make something cool in Resolution, you should be able to get it out to the world.

Am I underpricing this?

For a small number of customers, absolutely. I think the vast majority of successful businesses that started out in a scenario like mine would probably spend a lot more time than I intend to zooming in on the kinds of people who see the MOST potential value in Resolution RIGHT NOW (independent consultants are a good example), and building a go-to-market and pricing strategy designed specifically for them. The price… would not be $65.

It’s possible I’ll still do this in parallel — I have a lot of vague ideas about how a slightly different version of Resolution could be way more valuable to consultants, for example — but I don’t ever foresee it overtaking the core, general-purpose growth strategy I’ve outlined here.

Will free accounts always have equal access to every feature paid accounts do? Probably not, because I have some very big, very ambitious ideas that might not even matter to casual users. Will I keep charging $65 a year for this? I’d certainly like to, but that’s obviously dependent on me moving enough units to build a sustainable business, which means Resolution has to resonate with a pretty large base of people. I don’t necessarily need it to click with the average person on the street, but we’re not talking about 500 customers a year, either.

Why isn’t this kind of strategy more common?

I don’t mean to make what I’m doing sound novel or more special than it is. I obviously didn’t invent self-service professional software. But, I don’t think this strategy would be possible if not for a couple of things.

Resolution is bootstrapped/self-funded. This is a huge deal because whether I’m right or not, I have absolute control over a strategic decision like this. I don’t have to stick my toe in the water, or execute multiple strategies at once to keep multiple investors happy or interested.

I set my own growth goals. This is obviously connected to #1, but more specifically, I can grow at whatever rate is financially sustainable to me. I know from a lot of experience that the reason so many companies abandon bottom-up strategies and try to move up-market is because it’s just really hard to 2x or 3x your revenue every year building an aggressively priced, general purpose product. Even if you start out priced for everyone and built for organic discovery, eventually your VC-backed growth goals start to necessitate a strategy shift, which is the main reason I want to be able to set my own goals forever.

Product usability is hard, and expensive. The “un-logged in —> logged-in —> paid” flow is really logical for users (that’s why I wanted it to work that way), but BOY is it complicated to implement. We needed a version of Resolution for looking at shared models that didn’t include certain controls. We needed to be able to hold on to a model state during the process of going from not-logged-in to logged in, or through account creation. We needed an answer (AN answer, not necessarily the best answer) for every edge case that fell somewhere in between those paths. And, because we were going for self-service, every time we left something unclear or weird, we knew we were probably hurting the business. Software is hard! Usable software is even harder. I’m passionate about the subject — if not particular qualified to solve it — so that helped, but man, I get it if you don’t want to deal with any of this.

Lastly, for all the aforementioned reasons, it’s really hard to “test” the value of especially smooth, frictionless experiences through the traditional MVP process, because it’s basically impossible to build a smooth, frictionless experience and still have it BE an MVP. So this isn’t one; it’s definitely a 1.0, and it definitely does not come with the validation and certainty I might feel if I had built a proper one. Unfortunately, not every concept in human computer interaction has a form that is both “minimum” and “viable”, so you can either just stay away from those kinds of things or prepare for more risk.

I Guess We'll Find Out

Did I get any of this right? Who knows??? The truth is we won't find out until we open this thing up and get people using -- and hopefully paying for -- it. So stay tuned, and prepare for launch.

Actually, Top Gun: Maverick is Bad

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:54:49 -0400

I am not a shitposter, I swear. I don't even really have time to construct inflammatory takes, let alone take abuse for them and somehow turn that into engagement or personal brand or whatever it is people do with internet rage.

So when I saw the Top Gun sequel, I kept things to myself. I listened to podcasts I respect, and heard nothing but total praise. I floated some criticism past friends and co-workers, and got the exact same reaction.

"This is one of the best sequels of all time."

"It's better than the original."

"This is one of the best movies of the last decade."

I just can't. I know what I saw, and it... wasn't that good.

Why Top Gun Is Good

My argument -- nay, feelings -- about the Top Gun movies is/are not complicated. This is not some bank shot where I explain to you the history of aviation-based cinema and then at the last second make you realize something subtle but devastating about these movies. It's much simpler than that.

Does this man exist? Who knows? But if he did, this is exactly how he would act.

The original Top Gun movie created a bunch of awesome, exaggerated characters
The setting/premise of the movie means you don't have to unpack a lot of the details about those characters; Maverick and Goose are 20-something badass Navy pilots, Goose does young Dad things, Maverick does young non-Dad things, Iceman is a dick
Maverick being awesome at flying is not weird. It might be UNLIKELY that he can do the specific things he can do, but who cares -- someone is the best at flying F-14s, and it is not unreasonable to think that person is a 20-something non-Dad badass who would try to hook up with his attractive military consultant quasi-boss. The specifics of what you can do in an F-14 are not important to me; everything looks kind of real (and even awesome pilots like Maverick and Iceman make mistakes in the movie, validating how difficult all of this is), so a general movie non-expert like me is fine.
These awesome exaggerated characters go through "relatable" things. It's not that I can relate to going to fighter pilot school -- I cannot. But I can relate to being good at something I'm good at, going up against other people who are also good, struggling, losing my mojo, and needing to think differently about my awesomeness to regain my confidence and save the day. That's actually... super relatable.
The important people grow and change, because people often grow and change under exciting, challenging, dramatic circumstances. Maverick loses his confidence and regains it through a series of trials. Iceman learns to respect what is different about Maverick after they overcome a life-and-death challenge together. Goose dies.

I'm not putting in "Tony Scott creates a magical, sun-kissed nautical playground" in here because obviously he does that. Top Gun is a great looking movie. It also has ridiculous shirtless volleyball scenes and other odd things in it, and all of that is fine. Sometimes it has perfect music, and sometimes it has slightly odd, borderline stupid music. Whatever. You could say doing more or less of those different things would make Top Gun better or worse, but I don't really think any of those things make Top Gun fundamentally "good" or "bad". Top Gun is an okay story -- not great, but crucially, it is an okay story -- attached to great characters, and getting those two essential things right enough makes it a fundamentally good movie to me. Are they great because they are incredibly deep? No, not really, but they are deep enough and vibrant enough that most of the time you are either rooting for them, mad at them, empathizing with them, or feeling bad for them.

Why Top Gun: Maverick Is Bad

When I say this movie is bad, it's important to realize I mean more "it is a bad thing" than "it is a bad movie". I say this because absolutely no one agrees with my "Top Gun: Maverick is bad" take at the highest levels, and I'm starting to think this is (partially) why. This movie does a bunch of things extremely well; it looks incredible, the flight footage is awesome, the sound basically rules, etc., etc., and so forth. Plus, even though it is stupid, movies can be fun and stupid and perfectly fine. Independence Day is a stupid movie that is totally fine. In fact, Independence Day is actually in the upper tier of stupid, totally fine movies for some of the same reasons Top Gun is, even though Top Gun is (while still ridiculous) less shlocky and eye-rolling and "better" for a variety of reasons. But I definitely did not want want Will Smith's character to die, I definitely didn't want Vivica A. Fox's character to die, and I am legitimately happy for the drunk cropdusting veteran guy when he tells his children he loves them. It's still a stupid movie, but I'm not like "this movie is bad for movies and the people who watch it". In fact, I basically think the opposite.

So don't come at me with "bro you are overthinking this". How dare you. How dare you lower the bar for Top Gun like that, a movie that is directly responsible for me saying "talk to me, Goose" to my children when I am trying to get them to open up about their days at school. And I'm not even a Top Gun person! I am just a random general culture-consumer who realizes that Top Gun did a really good job of making me care about/relate to pretend, exaggerated fighter pilots!

Now, for those of you -- and there are many, including film and TV critics/professionals who I really respect and who make me embarrassed to even write this -- who legitimately think Top Gun: Maverick is a great execution of a Top Gun sequel (let alone a good movie on its own), here are my problems.

Maverick is not a blank slate. This is the character we met in Top Gun, thirty five years later. He is not "aging out" of fighter pilot age. He has absolutely blasted past the window when you are even allowed to fly these planes at all, and he is clearly still -- at present -- the best pilot who has ever lived.
This is... absolutely incredible, and yet it's not really considered that big of a deal. What has Maverick been doing? It says that he is extremely decorated, which seems unsurprising (and is very easy to accept), but lots of people don't really seem that impressed with him?
This is even more absurd because Maverick is clearly still vastly better than every single person around him at all times. Wouldn't it be well known by all these hotshot fighter pilots training for this mission that not only is Maverick the best ever, but that he is STILL the best, and is showing zero signs of even slowing down?
It would make sense if maybe the young pilots were BETTER at some stuff, but Maverick came in and said hey, you guys don't know how to dogfight, all you do is shoot missiles from 100 miles away, etc., etc., and his old guy tricks became relevant and helped him compensate for being SIXTY YEARS OLD.
But that's not what happens! He's already better than everyone at everything! Imagine if Michael Jordan walked into Charlotte Hornets practice, today, except instead of being old and kind of chubby, he was in peak physical condition and actually BETTER than he was in, say, 1993. And then, on top of that, imagine if when an absolute space-alien like that walked into the gym, LaMelo Ball was like "you're old news, grandpa". And then all the other players laughed and high-fived, and the big drama in the room was that, I dunno, Horace Grant's kid was on the team or something and had a problem with MJ. Who cares! 60 year old Michael Jordan just came in after putting up 85 points against the Bucks last night! The only thing that matters is this absolutely incredible space alien who is standing here.

He's like Iceman, except he is absolutely no competition for Maverick whatsoever.

Do you see the problem here? It's not a "the writing is weak" complaint -- although the writing IS weak! It's a "what are we doing here?" complaint. The fundamental canvas of this movie isn't just implausible from a what is happening standpoint (i.e., Tom Cruise keeping a plane flying at record speeds and then surviving a crash of said plane through.... sheer force of will, I guess?), it's that even accepting all the implausibility, the reactions of one implausible thing to another just don't make any sense. The entire plot is just the Navy not understanding that they have peak Michael Jordan sitting there, on the bench, and they are like "MICHAEL, CAN YOU TEACH GORDON HAYWARD SOME MOVES". There isn't even a Lethal Weapon style "I'm getting too old for this shit" vibe. He's very specifically not getting too old for this shit -- it's all he wants to do, it's an apparently desperately needed skill, and he's unquestionably the best at it. There's no actual conflict!

The only time the next generation is relevant at all is when Maverick simply runs out of hands from doing too many awesome, incredible things at the same time. Thanks for the assist, Hangman, I really needed your help after singlehandedly saving Rooster with my plane, somehow not dying, stealing an ancient, abandoned F-14 and almost killing all the bad guys with it.

In the original Top Gun, Maverick thought he was good enough, and the plot proved him wrong. He had demons to overcome, and ultimately the story of him overcoming them is a story of a guy who should be the best figuring out what it took to actually be the best. You can make fun of the details, but the journey holds up.

There is no journey at all in Top Gun: Maverick. Maverick is inexplicably, uniquely incredible the entire time -- no one else, friend or foe, comes close. Not even THE EARTH, which he crashes into at phenomenally high speeds not once, but twice in this movie, both while (of course) being totally badass (saving a fellow pilot from a missile, and breaking some speed barrier). It's just a matter of how big of a problem he can unilaterally solve (quite big, it turns out!), until he requires someone to basically hold his beer for a second until he can catch up with whatever the impossible challenge is.

That's not a journey! Top Gun: Maverick says "let me tell you a story" and then proceeds to do a series of cartwheels while beatboxing. It's 100% humility-free boomer pornography. It's here to tell you not only that the old dogs still have value, but that it's the (accomplished, adult) kids themselves who are completely unnecessary -- they are simply impediments to the best thing doing what it does best, which is whatever it wants to be doing at the moment. 60 year olds were the best when they were 25, they're the best now, and they'll always be the best! You kids will never understand! VRRRRRROOOOM off on my motorcycle!

Top Gun: Maverick is bad.

Resolution 1.0 - Coming in February!

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 13:21:02 -0400

(Note: Things are starting to get real, which means that after this post, I am going to shift the content here from meandering techno-navel gazing to much more of a release-notes-kinda vibe. Navel-gazing will continue unabated in the newsletter, so sign up if you're into that.)

What’s Been Happening?

It feels like a million years ago, but in reality, the Resolution Kickstarter project just ended in early October, after 30 days. Even though we didn't end up with an influx of money from the campaign, we found some volunteers to do UX testing on and spent a few weeks trying to figure out what was needed to make Resolution 1.0 commercially successful.

The results weren't shocking, but they were pretty interesting. There were lots of little things to tweak, and a few big things we weren't ready to tackle. But above all, we learned that people felt most comfortable learning about Resolution when they had the ability to work with (and tweak) an existing model.

While we always knew this would be a useful way to use Resolution, having user confirmation of just how important this was made it clear we would need to bake working with shared models into the fundamental experience of the application. (More on that in the Sharing Models section, below.)

Long story short, we had enough time and money for one more major -- albeit limited -- development phase. After a bit of planning, we started that work on December 12th, and we'll be finished in another month or so. By the end of that time, we should be extremely close (or, if we're lucky, actually ready) to open up Resolution to the general public.

General Availability, a.k.a, “CAN I HAVE IT?”

One of the things I had to decide after the Kickstarter was whether to do an official beta release, especially since many of the project backers had reached out about participating in one. Even though none of you ended up having to pay me any money, I definitely appreciated the support, and thought about opening up to beta users for that reason alone.

Ultimately, the UX research is what pushed me away from doing a formal beta. While Resolution at that point was very functional, it was pretty difficult to use and to be honest, we knew exactly why. We didn't really need a lot of additional user feedback, we just needed to build and improve some stuff that didn't work yet. Given that Resolution has just one official employee (me!), it didn't seem like the best use of "company time" to manage a beta program with a product that probably wasn't really ready for it yet, when I could be focused on improving said product instead.

So that's why it's been quiet since October. The good news is, we ARE on track to have a much improved version of Resolution available in February 2023, which you actually WILL be able to figure out thanks to new-user onboarding, a bunch of UX/UI work, and a fundamental change to how you get started with the application.

It’s enough to get you hyped all over again!

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9KziOa1_8Q)

Oh yeah, and then there's that “price” thing...

Pricing

One of the biggest differences, for better or worse, between Resolution and a lot of cool internet things is that Resolution does not have institutional investment, and is not seeking it. Will that change? Maybe! But… probably not. Right now, I would rather take investment than give up on Resolution this early, but that's about it.

Being self-funded is awesome in a lot of ways. But… it’s also not sustainable without customers or some kind of unexpected cash windfall. That's why a big part of this initial, official release of Resolution is making the application something worth paying for (as well as something that you literally, logistically CAN pay for, but that part works now — thanks Stripe!).

While there are lots of ways to make extremely valuable software, most of them take time and money that I don't have, so instead, my goal is to make Resolution something that is definitely worth paying a relatively small amount of money, and then to only charge that.

So here's the first truly big announcement: anyone is going to be able to waltz into Resolution and build a model not just for free, but without even making a Resolution account. You just come to the site, and start building.

If you decide you want to save your model for later, you can make a free account from right there in your model. There are no limitations on that account other than the fact that you can only save two models. If you want to save more (and you probably will), you should upgrade to a paid account, which will allow you to make and save as many as you want.

For launch, paid accounts will be pretty cheap — somewhere between $60 and $120 a year.

Shareable Models

This brings us to the reason why I think a lot of people will enjoy saving a lot of models, which is... they are going to be shareable with anyone, including the general internet public, if you'd like.

That's right! For the initial release of Resolution, we are including the ability to create a public link for any of your models, which anyone can look at and even plug their own numbers into. Changes people make will not affect your model. Instead, if someone either wants to save their version of a shared model, or alter the structure of it (beyond just plugging numbers in), they'll need to create an account and use up one of their two free model slots to save a copy.

If you already have a free account, and an open model slot, you can do the same thing with any shareable model URL you receive -- it'll just add a copy of the model to your account. And if you have a paid account, you can add models to your account left and right from all corners of the Resolution community.

I am really, really excited about being able to make the benefits of Resolution (and the knowledge it often unlocks) so available to so many people, without relying on a big pile of venture capital that will inevitably run out. And I'm just as excited about how valuable this kind of thing will be for consultants, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and other people who can build amazing things and make them visible and interactive for their clients/co-workers/friends, etc.

It's just really cool! And while there will surely be bumps in the road, this is the kind of thing that can be the foundation of a sustainable, long-term business that can slowly but surely add the amazing, next-generation stuff I’ve always dreamed of doing with Resolution.

Website & What’s Next?

Hopefully everyone on this initial email is excited to, at the very least, kick the tires on this first general release of Resolution. Some of you might even find that you want paid accounts! But either way, if you want to learn more or refer Resolution to a friend, check out the now generally stable and minimally copy-edited https://www.resolution.biz (where you currently are). You'll find:

Example Models
Walkthrough Videos
Feature and Concept explanations
Long, rambling blog posts
... and more!

Even better, as soon as shareable models are up and running, all the examples I post there will go straight to a working URL where you can play with each one, or make a copy to put in your own account.

And... that's that. Happy holidays, and here's to a great 2023!

Elon's Twitter Will Fail

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 22:12:19 -0400

This is one of those topics that doesn't seem like it needs me to add to it, as most of the smart, correct things have already been said. Still, I've read some odd things from smart people who are missing some of the elephants in the room that make it pretty clear Elon Musk will never succeed with Twitter unless he basically puts it into the equivalent of a blind trust, which he is probably emotionally incapable of doing.

Here are some of the key reasons.

Technology is hard

People at technology companies are often well-paid, and relatively well-treated by the standards of most people who have normal, kind of crappy jobs. I've had regular jobs and tech jobs, and I much prefer the way I've been dealt with at tech jobs even though I certainly haven't enjoyed every day at work. It's still a lot better.

Here's the thing -- technology is hard. Not every person at a big technology company is important, or even necessary to have around, but a surprising number of them actually are. Sometimes it's because you're dealing with a weird social problem like what Twitter called "Trust and Safety", sometimes it's because selling things like services or advertising, or uptime, or other concepts is complex and weird, and sometimes it's just because software engineering at scale is hard, grinding work that a lot of us literally cannot learn to do. Learning to code is not learning to do CrossFit. Some of us are just not smart in the kind of way you need to be to do it.

Managers don't like this. Venture capitalists don't like it (actually, they hate it). Hell, sometimes I don't like it because I want to build things I don't know how to build and it costs a fortune and a lot of patience to get them built. But that's the way it is.

There is this bizarre idea that companies like Twitter have these "coddled" employees, but what they really have are the employees necessary to make something like Twitter work like Twitter. The same is true at places like Amazon, Apple, Google, etc. -- there is absolutely bloat and people who aren't necessary, but in general a lot of the work requires really talented people with extremely in-demand professional experience. If you want those people to do what you say, you have to defer to them a lot, or you can try building it yourself. Good luck.

Being an asshole isn't going to work

This is America, so if you want to reconfigure the term "woke" to mean, I dunno, just being unable to handle adversity or whatever, that's your business. But people don't have to accept your definition, and when they look at this South African billionaire making fun of Twitter's good faith efforts to support its black employees during the legitimately traumatic upheaval of Ferguson, they are going to see -- at best -- a guy being a idiot and a bully for no discernible reason. Again, that's the generous interpretation.

The people who don't like that -- the people who ultimately won't work for that person -- will come from many backgrounds and places. What they will have in common more than their race or gender will be a tendency to have the skills, education, and experience that you need to run something like Twitter, unless you don't really need it to work very well, handle security issues, etc., etc.

Musk, Sacks, and all these guys can sort of wish that away and pretend they are all brilliant computer scientists, but it's not going to work with people who have the necessary skills.

Attention is not revenue

I keep hearing that Musk trolling everyone and dabbling in white nationalism-style tropes and circles is "marketing" because he's "controlling the narrative". I get it -- he's lighting a huge pile of garbage on fire and screaming at the top of his lungs and people are looking. In theory, if people are looking at something, you can slap ads on it and make money.

But that's only in theory. You don't get money when people look, especially when they don't pay for anything (and as Twitter Blue 2.0 has shown us already, there's no compelling reason to pay for this and Musk can't think of one either). You get money when advertisers give you money. Yes, they need to people to look, but looking is one of those "necessary but not sufficient" conditions. As I once said to a colleague when my marketing department was asked to generate more "buzz", I could get us on CNN whenever we wanted if we just starting throwing televisions and musical instruments off the roof. That attention would be BAD, but it would be attention.

It's absolutely false that all PR is good PR. Lots of PR is horrendous -- this is why there are PR firms. Twitter looks like a badly run, weirdo tech zombie that is being run by douchebags and is veering into a "basically racist" vibe that advertisers aren't going to touch with a ten foot pole.

He's not winning, and I don't think he knows how to stop.

I Failed to Raise Fifty Thousand Dollars in Crowdfunding and So Can You

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 16:40:51 -0400

If you're unaware, I recently launched a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to raise $50,000 for my still-nascent (but very cool) software thing/application/company, Resolution.

It did not succeed. And yet... perhaps the REAL fifty thousand dollars were the friends we made along the way?

(Editor's Note -- No, I just checked, we did not get $50,000 in any form, including friends and/or relationships.)

Ok, fine. There will be no money. But I learned a bunch of interesting things about life, love, and crowdfunding software companies that I wanted to share, so here goes.

First, a little background.

A Little Background

Basically, I offered glorified access to -- if I'm being honest -- a pretty sophisticated beta version of Resolution. Pure access was $20, and then I added on a bunch of models I'd give to people if they pledged $50, $100, or $250.

I don't really feel the need to dissect the effectiveness of my tiering, because the elephant in the room is that I got 73 people to back this project, which is not nearly enough no matter how you slice it. There were a few friends and family in there, for sure, but there were also a bunch of random people I've never met, plus some old co-workers I haven't talked to in forever, and some 2nd and 3rd degree connections. The average donation/backing/pledge was $135.

I spent zero dollars on advertising or sponsorships. In the end, I got a grand total of $9,912 dollars pledged, or just about 20% of my admittedly not-that-well-thought-out goal.

Things I Learned (your mileage may vary)

1) Kickstarter is Not For Web Productivity Software

Kickstarter is a strange community. I don't mean that in a negative way, but before I did this project, I hadn't really thought about it much in nearly a decade, when it at least felt like it wasn't an insane place to build support for a high quality software application. When I went back to check out other software projects before setting this one up, it was... pretty slim pickings. Most stuff was weird, super niche, and frankly, looked extremely half-baked. Resolution, hilariously enough, quickly became the number one project in the fairly buried "Software" sub-category, but based on my final results you can probably tell that's not quite the feather in your cap I would have liked it to be.

I did basic due diligence on "how to be successful on Kickstarter", but there really weren't any obvious magic tricks sitting in old blog posts. In general, the most helpful things were having a clear target audience and/or a decent, pre-existing following you could hit up. I had neither of these things, and that's probably why not that many eyeballs got on my project.

The other kind of funny thing was some of the direct feedback I got. While I appreciated everything I heard from folks (it's nice just to be noticed), a lot of the software feedback felt like it was from some bizarre, alternate universe. Some people wanted to know whether Resolution ran on Windows, and others expressed grave concerns about running anything on "the cloud". There were a number of pretty specific feature requests from people (some who backed, and some who did not) that felt much more like they were buying from a store than backing an early stage project.

For the most part, I get all of this, and my surprise is mostly a matter of degree. Kickstarter has been around for a long time now, and it's much more of a direct sales channel today than it was ten years ago when it served as a bit of a dream incubator for entrepreneurs. Are other crowdfunding channels also like this? I don't know. Will this change if software stops being such a sexy institutional investment that doesn't really "need" crowdfunding the way a set of cast iron anime action figures does? I don't know that either. The browser has been eating software for decades now, and I think people are really used to either discovering potential workplace solutions from fairly well capitalized startups, or simply muddling through with whatever enormous industry standard tool they are used to (whether it's from Adobe, Microsoft, Google, etc.).

This is not to say "my idea is perfect, it's the children who are wrong". If a Resolution beta had enough value, that value was obvious enough, and people knew about it, I'm sure I would have gotten more backers. I just mean that the people who thought I was a little nuts for trying to crowdfund this out of the gate... well, I didn't exactly prove any of them wrong, now did I?

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1)&v=hYAuR5bkIlQ&feature=emb_title

Basically, you could definitely do a better job than I did executing a Kickstarter campaign for a software company. But even if you did, I still think most people would react to you with confusion and a bit of a shrug, because a non-niche software project on Kickstarter is not something people expect to see, or are especially jazzed to pledge and promote.

2) I Need to Purge my Enterprise B2B Habits

I have been in the enterprise B2B SaaS space for way too long. That's part of my personal motivation for designing Resolution (both the product and the business) the way I have -- to get *away* from selling vague solutions via slides about ROI, writing white papers, and selling expensive top-down deployments that may or may not get used by real people.

However, as tired as I am of that playbook, it's all I've really been doing at work for the last decade. I'm good at it! I make vague solutions sound amazing to extremely hands-off executives! Conversely, I am not yet very good at really hammering home actual product value. This sounds completely insane, because I am a professional software product marketer who loves products, but if I'm being honest, I really think I did a pretty poor job of hawking the particulars of my own thing.

I blame my enterprise B2B experience because Resolution does have something in common with many of the platforms I've been tasked with telling stories about -- it's not ready for general release. Now, in the case of Resolution, that's because I've only been working on this extremely ambitious concept for less than a year, it's not even a public beta yet, and I have very limited resources. Those are pretty defensible reasons for having a product that doesn't work the way you want yet.

But I'm an enterprise B2B product marketing professional. For me, when the product isn't ready (or good), you just... stop talking about the product! Sell the vision. Tell the story. Focus on benefits, not features. These are all things people like me (and my bosses) tell ourselves are inherently good things to do, when it's really more complicated than that. There's an ideal balance between the "Why" and the "How", and the fact is, a lot of software is pretty crappy and the "Why" looks a lot better in slides than the "How" does in real world usage, so we steer into the good and away from the bad.

And that's where I need to change. Resolution isn't done -- heck, it's not even ready for the general public -- but one thing it's definitely not is a crappy piece of software. It's a passion project that happens to offer a lot of potential value to customers, not soulless middleware looking to get acquired by Salesforce as quickly as possible. So why dodge the actual product I'm so proud of, even in a very early state?

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QouXY928pY)

To be fair, some of this is just a resource limitation. While I was making the Resolution Kickstarter video, we added a bunch of stuff to the application, including a complete style overhaul. Stuff kept changing (for the better!) but I stuck with initial assets because they're super time consuming to do well. Even my current walkthrough, while still mostly accurate, looks way worse than the actual production app does today.

Regardless, it's important to play to your strengths, and I didn't really do that largely because the strengths of Resolution are so different than the strengths of products and companies I've marketed before. My wife was using it the other day, and blurted out "this is just so much more fun than a spreadsheet", which is definitely something I agree with, but have never said at any point because I was too busy telling everyone how USEFUL Resolution can be. In my career, that has always been "what you do", and I suspect I need to ditch that approach ASAP.

3) People Are NOT Scared to Pay For Things

Another product of my enterprise B2B fatigue is that I am really excited about making something that is both extremely affordable, and broadly useful to a large number of people. That's my aim. One of the reasons I am hesitant to find investors is that I'm sure most of the smart ones would tell me -- even at this point in Resolution's development -- to find a niche where people like to use it, and double down on whatever those people need so that they are willing to pay more and more for it. In other words, stop trying to be broadly useful to everyone (or at least a lot of people) at the risk of generating value for no one.

I get this logic. I've lived this logic! It is... not really wrong, to be honest. But it's also an inherently anti-creative approach to things and I'm 40 now (this is why I have all these crotchety old guy opinions, sorry not sorry) and if I want to iterate something to death I can probably do that and get paid to do it at a real company with a marketing department and decent snacks. I know the drill. Basically, you start off with some kernel of a new idea, and as soon as other people are willing to pay you a non-trivial amount for it, you stop and say "okay, we'll just do what you want, ideas?" If Henry Ford worked at a software startup in 2022, it would absolutely have "Q4: BUILD FASTER HORSE" on the roadmap.

I'm kidding, of course. But... also, I'm not. Directionally, this really is how a lot of product development works, and in my experience it has often lead to (a) strong revenue growth, and (b) stifled, unimaginative products I don't care about and don't want to use.

Anyways, this is a long-winded way of explaining that I applied this logic to the Kickstarter, and in hindsight it was a bad idea for many of the already mentioned reasons. I don't actually HAVE a broadly useful product yet, so hoping that tons of people would give me a small amount of money made very little sense, especially when you combined that with the fact that I didn't have a very good way to get this in front of a large, general audience.

Did having a $20 minimum tier and a $250 tier make sense for me? Probably not. I am very glad the $20 people had a tier to go to, but if you were really trying to optimize this thing to succeed financially, I think those were the wrong extremes. This became even more apparent when a shocking -- to me -- amount of people I do not know personally signed up for higher tiers, including the $250 level where I offered to help them build a model.

Unsurprisingly, many of the highest pledging amounts came from people whose daily struggles align very clearly with what Resolution can already do -- help you spin up relatively high level representations of a simple, but important scenario, question, or funnel. Those people are... small business consultants! I got a bunch of them, and they all totally get it because they face one of the biggest pain points of spreadsheets, which is communicating what's in some random, new spreadsheet to a skeptical customer. A lot of professionals can dodge this ("This is cool, but I'm actually pretty good with spreadsheets"), but people with clients often cannot.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHDYkHrKo)&pbjreload=102

So those folks are clearly in, and already willing to pay. I'm VERY excited to work with them during the beta.

4) I Get Why We Keep Inventing the Same Product Over & Over Again

So far, the whole Resolution experience has been very educational, but one of the most interesting things to me personally is that I'm starting to come up with a sort of Unified Theory of Why Work Software is Boring Now. Obviously work software has been boring forever -- basically since we started using software at work -- but there was a period of time where it seemed like we were really starting to push the boundaries that seems to have slowed down pretty remarkably.

There are undoubtedly a lot of factors behind this kind of thing (if it's even true, and not just my own perception), but one thing I've definitely noticed over the last decade is that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When wildly radical approaches to work were popping up everyday, people started to get used to the idea of wildly radical approaches to work being out there somewhere. They'd look, they'd listen, and best of all, they'd complain when something (file sharing, project management, calendars, etc.) stayed stagnant for too long.

Now? Not so much. One of the interesting Kickstarter reactions I got was a general sense of bewilderment that you could simply do things in a fundamentally different way than they are currently done, which seems weird to me given that we're talking about technology and new products here. Another was just how locked into existing, unsatisfying workflows people are. When I first started kicking around ideas for Resolution, the most obvious thing to build was something that lived on top of a spreadsheet. But if you know anything about how even the current version of Resolution works, you already know the same thing I discovered -- you can't overcome the fundamental limitations of spreadsheets by adding UI on top of them. While expected that ditching the cell/formula dynamic would be a lot of work, I didn't anticipate how hesitant even people who admit they hate formulas and spreadsheets in general would be to accept that there might be a different way to work.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-p1CF2gdw)&feature=emb_title

I've said this ad nauseam, but as with many tools, I just don't think Resolution will ever replace spreadsheets, just like Notion will never replace word processing applications (is that still a term?). However, I do think a lot of software startups these days are going toe to toe with something else (or multiple things), and so there's a natural inclination to want to know who's going to "win" an existing space, versus whether someone can carve out a useful new one.

What's Next?

Fortunately for me, I have a lot of options. I was attempting to raise $50k as a form of growth capital, not subsistence funds to keep this project alive. While it sucks to not have that growth capital, there is still plenty of work to do and I intend to do it. I also met lots of cool people (project backers and otherwise) who are very likely to be beta users and eventually customers before too long. While the calendar is a little in flux as I figure out what we can do with a little less cash, there will be a general, public release of Resolution in 2023 and it's going to be awesome.

So for all of you who clicked little like buttons and dug out old Kickstarter login credentials, seriously, thank you! I am honored for your support. Go buy yourself something nice with the pledge money that will not actually be withdrawn from your account. Stay in touch, and I'll keep you posted as we go.

The Unstoppable Bullshit Robot

Sat, 08 Oct 2022 12:55:43 -0400

Just like you can spend months rolling out critical back-end improvements to a software application to no reaction whatsoever, only to set off a riot when you change the color of a button, "AI" is having a moment (again) right now because the folks at OpenAI did an awesome job plugging their work into something we can all relate to -- an overconfident, well-spoken, semi-competent reply guy.

I don't need to say it but I will -- as an experience for random internet users, this is an extraordinarily cool, well-implemented experience. I used to use some ancient Mac version of ELIZA as a kid, and I got a huge kick out of it even with its immediately obvious flaws, so comparatively this is like talking to something from the year 3000. That doesn't even take into account the whole "write me a song/poem/bible verse" aspect of this, which will be entertaining us all for some time.

Obviously ChatGPT, as it's known, isn't perfect. In fact, since it's hard to describe exactly what ChatGPT is, or what it's intending to be, I'm not sure it's possible for it to have a definition of "perfect" to begin with. But it does a couple of things that, in theory, you probably wouldn't want something like this to do if you could help it.

It's often wrong about objective facts
It almost always sounds right

The second thing is more of a good thing by itself ("it's so well spoken!"), but it's also something that makes the first thing much, much more of a problem. Of course, there are people like this, too, and there have been throughout the history of people. But in my experience, they're actually pretty uncommon. The majority of folks I've met who don't know what they're talking about give it away by also sounding like they don't know what they're talking about. This is in important, easily taken for granted component of human-generated bullshit that allows us to sort through it without even trying that hard.

But if machine-generated bullshit can sound right more frequently than the man-made variety, the fact that anyone in the world can crank it out by hitting a button is an absolutely enormous problem. People's "this guy doesn't know what he's talking about" detectors are pretty good, but they're trained to detect the kind of specious nonsense that -- written or not -- comes from people, or at least much more socially awkward robots. We hear/read/see certain cues, and we use those things to filter out a lot of life's junk. This new stuff either doesn't have those factors ("look deep into the eyes of this computer"), or emulates it better than the vast majority of crooks, liars, and major-party presidential candidates ever have.

There's already plenty of discussion about the social impacts of this kind of thing, and for good reason. Unless we specifically tell them to, robots probably aren't going to rise up and kill us in the immediate future. But it's very possible they'll be used by us to generate enough automated nonsense to destroy the necessary levels of trust and social cohesion that society needs to function. Seems bad.

Still, I'm not here to focus on the fraud and gaslighting part of this. Instead, consider this much more basic issue: in a world that isn't just dependent on AI-driven insight, but is actually polluted by AI-generated noise posing as either data or analysis, how are you simply supposed to do your job?

Cognitive Automation Cranked to 11

François Chollet wrote a great, high level explanation of what today's real-world artificial intelligence is, and is not. I strongly encourage you give it a read. But for the extreme layperson, basically when regular people (hello!) talk about AI, we talk about a wide variety of tasks and concepts, many of which we've collectively made no progress on at all. But we also talk about things that can be done with what Chollet refers to as Cognitive Automation, and we really have made pretty amazing, practical strides in that over the years.

In Chollet's words, cognitive automation means "encoding human abstractions in a piece of software, then using that software to automate tasks normally performed by humans". What we've seen in the internet age, and more recently with the work of groups like OpenAI, is a huge leap forward in our ability to encode tons and tons of fairly complex abstractions -- far more than the experiments and "AI" demos I grew up with ever had to work with.

Abstractions ain't the whole bag, of course. The next level up would enable software to help us make better decisions in the complex real world (not in a closed off system, and not by simply presenting or sorting data for us in a certain way, as many tools do today). Beyond that, you're talking about independent minds and consciousness and a bunch of stuff that we are absolutely nowhere near making a reality -- "science fiction", in Chollet's words.

But the thing about mastering abstractions is that if you master enough of them, you sure do start to look and sound like a real mind, at least to regular dummies like us. And if you really master abstractions, you can sound smarter than a real mind, because we often evaluate the quality of an idea, or the accuracy of an objective fact, based on a bunch of abstractions like the human language used to explain it.

And while computers might still be dumb, they sure are fast. So we taught them how to figure out a secret social handshake, and then they used their inherent computer-ness to go ahead and learn how to handle another bazillion of them or so. The end result is pretty compelling, even if it's not actually any smarter.

Bullshit Detection 101

So what do we do? Ben Thompson wrote a fascinating piece on the flaws and implications of ChatGPT and in doing so, introduced to me the awesome concept of "Zero Proof Homework". The idea, in a nutshell, is that the next generation shouldn't try to block out garbage content from AI, but instead be challenged and evaluated on their ability to catch the errors and/or lies that come with it. After all, even in this early version, ChatGPT can spit out incredibly authoritative sounding answers and arguments, complete with references, that are completely and totally wrong. That's because it doesn't actually understand the information itself -- it only understands language.

This is weird and counterintuitive to a lot of people. Many of us think of numbers as things that computers can work with easily, and language as something qualitative and human. But numbers and language are both simply abstractions of something much more important and complex -- the meaning, logic, and context of the world around us. People aren't always good with those things either, but they can learn, whereas something like ChatGPT (despite its apparent mastery of our abstractions) literally cannot. However, it is so good at using that vast library of well-encoded human language abstractions to generate believable content that it will often appear like it understands the world better than you do.

Remember the Friends episode where Joey tried to make people think he owned a Porsche by wearing a bunch of Porsche merchandise? Did he actually need to own a Porsche? In some ways, he didn't. In some ways, he did. But if you interacted with him from a certain perspective, with a certain set of expectations and information, he effectively did own a Porsche. Maybe even moreso than someone who actually, technically, legally owned one and got to drive it around.

Your Pre-Existing Bullshit

I could now spin you a dystopian tale about your information-economy job, where you're inundated with so much data and analysis, from so many sources that look right, and sometimes are right, but often are not, that you can barely make a decision. A world where people stare at output generated by different algorithms and weakly poke at it, hoping that it will fall apart with basic scrutiny if it says something bad, and if not, ready to push a different button and generate a different result, maybe from a different algorithm.

Except... this is already what work is like! It's been like this for years! We use business systems every day that have mastered an even less complex set of abstractions ("pipeline revenue", "units sold", "project velocity") and posed as voices of wisdom and authority, like two kids in a trench coat trying to get into an R-rated movie.

So what we do we do at work? Well, for the big stuff -- quarterly reports, managing cash, etc -- we tend to do things by hand, or with systems that are reliable, because they're actually pretty simple. They either just tell us observably true things, or project things with math that at least one person at the company understands, and is capable of challenging and auditing. That's how we keep the lights on.

But for WAY more things than you'd like to admit, we're total suckers for context-free conclusions that prey on how easy it is to impress us with a mastery of our most trusted abstractions. Over here, this system will calculate how valuable the marketing team is! This other one will tell you how happy everyone is! This one will tell you what your customers want! Turns out they want lower prices! Who knew? THE DATA KNEW, APPARENTLY. We either buy into -- or reject -- these systems and their methodologies for the same reasons we buy or accept a ChatGPT answer. Maybe the system is objectively correct/incorrect, and we have the knowledge to confirm that. Maybe it feels correct, or is at least partially correct in a way that makes us okay trusting the parts that are a mystery to us.

What Thompson is proposing when he talks about teaching kids to challenge AI generated content makes a lot of sense for kids facing a future of plausible sounding misinformation. But it also sounds like a great idea for people making business decisions right now.

I did a poll on LinkedIn last year where I asked people about their level of confidence in mapping out how their company makes money.

{editor’s note from the future: Wordpress ate this screenshot at some point, but basically it’s a graph where everyone says they have an extremely accurate sense of how their business makes money)

In the words of many a noted business expert, "C'MON, MAN!" Either your definition of "extremely accurate" is nonsense and you need some perspective, or a whole lot of you are just straight up full of it. Many of you would believe any Salesforce report I waved in front of your face if the numbers sounded familiar-ish and it had normal looking pie charts where most of the slices were of vaguely similar sizes. And for a long time, that's been basically fine.

But it's going to get worse, and if kids really do adapt to machine-generated incompetence, whether it's due to education or simply overexposure and needing to survive, those kids are going to work with you in a couple of years and wonder why you're such a gullible rube. Because for kind of an embarrassingly long time, holding up something you found on the Internet, or some default report the CRM spit out for you, was the easiest way to look smart.

But pretty soon, it's going to be the fastest way to look like you need to retire.

Why is Easy Business Math So Hard?

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 11:28:32 -0400

Years ago, I was a new-ish employee at a startup that was both (a) 100% set on becoming a massive enterprise software company, and (b) celebrating closing a $20k annual contract with one of the biggest companies in the world.

“But wait…” I said, nervously. “How many companies out there actually need our product?”

5,000? Maybe 2,000? A lot. And either way, we just closed one of the biggest ones!

“Right, but if one of the biggest companies that will ever need our product is paying $20k a year for it, that’s a maximum of $100m in annual revenue for our business, assuming there are really 5,000 companies that need us.”

Well, it might be more than that. Plus, we’ll upsell them!

“Upsell them to what?”

More users!

“How many more users? What do additional user accounts cost? How many people at this giant company need another user account?”

The conversation broke into a variety of directions – everyone had a different, qualitative take on all of these things – and it became clear to me that we had absolutely no idea what we needed a customer like our recent win to pay in order to actually, logically declare the whole operation a success.

And nobody really felt like that was a reasonable problem to solve.

Math is easy, but context is hard

These were not dumb people, or people who were literally bad at math. In fact, they were very smart, thoughtful people who were quite good at all kinds of math, whereas I barely passed calculus (or trigonometry, let’s be real). But that didn't matter, because the problem wasn't a traditional math problem.

It was a context problem.

None of the individual math questions I had were very difficult. The problem is that there were a lot of them, they were all connected to each other in various ways, and those ways were all in flux. You could assume there were 5000 potential customers, but that might be wrong, and if there were actually only 2000, that would affect a bunch of other math problems needed to figure out how much the average customer needed to pay you to build a $100 million dollar company. Or a $50 million dollar company. Or a billion dollar company! And what if we had two products? Three products? One-off services in addition to recurring subscriptions?

In other words, it wasn’t just that a ton of different numbers might have to change. We could handle that. Instead, it was that the logic connecting those numbers – the context, basically – might have to change, and there was just no good way to keep all of that organized in our heads, or on paper.

We focus on what our tools do, and they don't really do context

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

In business, context is often experienced as a source of frustration instead of a problem to be solved because the business tools we’ve been conditioned to think with are all pretty horrible at context. Just like bad, ad-hoc PowerPoint enrages people or puts them to sleep but is still somehow the norm, bad, ad-hoc spreadsheets continue to be how we try to project unknown futures or win arguments.

But… spreadsheets are terrible for this. Instead of making lots of simple calculations easy to manage, change, and understand, they bury them inside a complex formula language and an arbitrary grid of coordinates. Because spreadsheets are fundamentally about cells and values, and not about relationships, you can put anything you want into any field at any time no matter how impossible or nonsensical it is. A spreadsheet can tell you that a value is missing, or outside some range you define, but it’s never going to be able to tell you that something doesn’t make any logical sense.

That logical sense… is context! It’s exactly what we needed when we were trying to figure out whether to celebrate or mourn a $20k contract, as well as exactly what we needed back when we were figuring out what user accounts should do, how much they should cost, and how many people we should hire to sell them.

In business, context is more important than calculations

I've been talking to people about their spreadsheets for a while now. One thing I've noticed is that people talk about them the same way they talk about their driving. Everyone thinks they are above average. But while most people seem to think they're pretty good with spreadsheets, they also had a long, angry list of problems they have with ones made by someone else.

Given my experiences, this isn’t really that surprising. Even if you’re able to represent a massive, complex scenario with your spreadsheet (totally possible!), all of that context and understanding of the situation the spreadsheet represents – it’s in your head! Or at least it’s in your head until things get too big, or you don’t look at it for a while. But the sheet itself is just a horrendous way to discuss, debate, or convey the context of things to/with anyone else. This is fine if you’re looking at the exact same P&L statement you’ve looked at every quarter for five years (i.e., what spreadsheets are for, and where they’re fantastic) and not fine at all if you’re trying to figure out a random, specific business decision you’ve never had to make before.

In fact, when we actually need to figure out context, more often than not I’ve found myself having a conversation over something completely different – a whiteboard. A whiteboard doesn’t do any math at all, but it’s a much easier way to very quickly suss out relationships and logic. People will scribble boxes, draw arrows, violently circle and erase things, and do all sorts of things that reference math, but don’t actually do any of it.

Then we run off and try to bake that context into a spreadsheet, so we can never look at it ever again.

The cost of context-free thinking

I've worked for a lot of different startups at this point, and none of them have been able to completely avoid this kind of context-free thinking. And the costs of that have been pretty enormous, encompassing a variety of dumpster fires like:

wildly insufficient investment at key points of the business
lack of accountability for impossible promises or goals (and the resulting credibility loss)
no shared understanding of costs (in time, money, or morale)
nonsensical lead-gen expectations for ideas like social media campaigns or cold calling
unsustainable practices (rate of hiring, discounting, sales without user adoption)

... and a bunch of other terrible things that either weren't in anyone's spreadsheet, or if they were, had too many assumptions buried in too many formulas. And I don't blame the spreadsheet paradigm itself (it's not perfect, but spreadsheets are pretty amazing) as much as the culture that exists from building so much of our strategic thinking around the wrong tool for the job.

Tools matter. They affect our thinking! If we only dug holes with dynamite, we’d have a very different culture across a variety of disciplines. Construction, landscaping, telecommunications and other fields would all have a very different set of expectations, procedures, and required skills. Someone would surely be selling tiny little explosives to my Mom so she could get her garden ready for spring, and they would certainly argue that there was no need for a fundamentally different solution, because “everyone uses dynamite already”. But until we figured out the idea of a shovel – a demonstrably weaker, “less capable” solution for digging holes – we’d never really unlock so much of what we’re able to do today.

Business can be kind of stupid sometimes, and not stupid in a way you necessarily fix with high-powered answers like mass automation and machine learning. Sometimes, it’s just stupid because people – you and I – need to have a better understanding of how things work (and don’t work), and that’s something we’re going to have to figure out on our own… with the right tools, of course.

For what it’s worth, I’m having a blast working on a new generation of tools designed to help people do exactly that.

Liter of Cola

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 11:39:28 -0400

Without thinking that hard about it (and probably moderating my red hot take as a result), this is one of the best scenes from any movie ever made. (More than a few f-bombs in here, if you’ve got a kid around.)

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlKr-yg-y5I)

I’ve obviously watched this a million times, but I’ve never really felt obligated to use it in an analogy, until today.

It's just a quarter, and look how much more you get

I was just reading this Verge article on some of the concepts behind WeWork fraud kingpin Adam Neumann’s latest, wildly overcapitalized venture. The central thrust of the piece — and the critique of Neumann’s logic, really — is that while he’s talking about doing a lot to increase the tradability of a certain asset, he’s not actually doing anything to deal with the fact that the assets are often garbage.

When we started Efficiency Exchange ten years ago (holy crap), a major inspiration for the company was my wife’s work with auditors, who were tasked with assessing extraordinarily qualitative things (conditions and output quality of a factory) and turning that into data that could be consumed by people halfway around the world, some of whom had never been to a factory in their life. There was a TON of interest from VCs and other tech-world investors in making that data accessible, sortable, and identifying patterns and detecting efficiencies from it using things like (yes, groan) machine learning.

But there was very, very little interest in whether that data was, fundamentally, any good. There were people who worked on that aspect of things, but they were of a very different mindset, and essentially wanted to build better audits, align companies on standards, and do things like that. Basically, while the VC people only thought about scaling things — even if what they were scaling was fundamentally useless — the sustainability people only thought about that real-world applicability, and never about scale. That’s one of the reasons why progress on that front is so slow, whereas ten years later I can ask a web app to draw me a picture of Kermit the Frog eating a toaster and it will give me this in 90 seconds.

Basically, we can fix one piece of shit, or we can scale a big box of shit, but we’re just absolutely terrible at scaling a box of fixed shit.

Over the last decade, the scale people have absolutely, totally won, at least from the perspective of who spends, invests, and talks about what. EVERYTHING is at scale. Content, finance, assets, audiences, it’s all scaled. We make a lot of references to the micro-unit — i.e., some random YouTube influencer being interviewed — but the business of YouTube and all the surrounding services and industries are all about scale. After all, YouTube really is a scaled box of shit — it’s just SO big that it has lots of awesome stuff on it. That’s the answer. So much of everything that eventually something good will happen; the trick is just to expose you to as many things as possible in the quickest amount of time (swipe, swipe, swipe) so that eventually you get the dopamine hit. We never really did figure out curation, and it kinda feels like we’ve given up.

It’s not just consumers. The same piles exist at work — people who are focused on some specific thing without the greater context around it, and people who are focused on nothing BUT context. The former will plug away on their work until layoffs are suddenly and shockingly announced, and the latter is often living in a complete fantasy world because they shout queries at Salesforce and endlessly debate other high-level people about what the answers mean.

Does this look like spit?

Which brings me back to Farva and his liter of cola. Here we have a guy who has absolutely no idea what is behind the counter, or how anything back there works, interacting with a system that is only interested in how things actually work. Farva has to conform to the standards of the system to get anything useful, but he can’t — in fact, he actively refuses to — and since he has no understanding of the standards or the system, he gets crappy answers that frustrate him. Even reassurances from the system that it understands him (“that just means make it extra good”) just antagonize him further, because again, he has no fundamental understanding of how things work behind the counter, and he doesn’t want to acquire it. To be fair, the system doesn’t care either, going so far as to take a query it knows is nonsensical (“Do we make Liter Cola?”) and just throw it over the wall and see what comes back.

The best is when Ramathorn implores Farva to sort of “normalize” his query to the system — “just order a large, Farva”, and Farva responds with the legendary “I don’t want a large Farva, I want a goddamn liter of cola”.

Adam Neumann doesn’t want to talk about auditing, dammit! He wants to talk about the blockchain, and a world of frictionlessly trading assets. Are those assets nonsense? Maybe! Is that a problem? Of course not! We’ll push the "vet assets” button and hire a bunch of college grads in a boiler room to read them or something, I dunno.

Oh good, more thoroughly! Why didn't I think of that? No one would invest in an auditing company who claimed they could solve the problems of auditing by auditing more carefully, because that’s not even an idea, even if it’s pointed at an actual problem. Instead, here’s something that is definitely an idea, but isn’t pointed at the problem at all. Perfect! This increasingly dense layer between reality and strategy is starting to drive me absolutely bananas. Those two concepts are different things, of course, but they’re obviously related, no? It’s like we’ve said “the plural of anecdotes is not data” so many times that we’ve decided data or other high-level concepts don’t need to be traced down to an actual real-world use case at all.

I really do think — and this is not even a warm take — that the internet and cloud computing have made solving a lot of unthinkable problems with brute scale actually feasible, and that really is an awesome, mind-opening achievement for technology. I don’t want to lose sight of that as I age. But this has gotten ridiculous, and now we’ve got a generation of people who are simply scaling things not just before they’ve considered the impact of scale, but before they even really understand the thing they’re scaling. The scaled version of the thing is so different, understanding of the micro-unit is a waste of time, or so I assume because I actually have very little experience looking at a micro-unit in any detail. You people are so petty... and tiny!

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_hqPo97SQc)

Here's the thing. With any fixed amount of time and energy, you can do deeper analysis of fewer things, or more shallow analysis of more things. The cheapest thing to do in the age of communities, connectivity, and cloud computing is to do the latter, and so that’s rapidly becoming the answer, even when it's the answer to a question no one asked.

At some point, though, you’re going to find yourself building a billion dollar asset swapping system with meaningless assets, or leaping over the counter to assault a food service employee, which I think is probably some tortured equivalent of investing $350 million in the WeWork guy.

You Fix What You can Reach

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 09:47:27 -0400

Elephants

One consistent factor across the now numerous early-stage companies I've worked at for the last decade or so is the presence of proverbial "elephants in the room". Everywhere I've been, there has always been something bigger and more fundamentally important than the things we were working on, that everyone senior-enough knew was more important, but that we all knew wouldn't/couldn't ever be addressed. Sometimes it was a business model issue, and what we were selling just wasn't as valuable to people as we wanted/needed it to be. Sometimes it was a product issue where we built out too many mini-solutions to user issues and ended up with a confusing mess that no one would ever get permission to purge (because everything that comprised the mess, individually, solved a customer issue somewhere). Oftentimes the issue was a technological one, especially when our business leader wasn't sufficiently technical, and our technical leader was perfectly happy to watch the ship slowly sink as long as it continued to prove he was the smartest guy in the room.

On the other hand, I have never worked at a company without at least a couple of talented people (often many, many more) who really impressed me, and this has been especially true during my startup binge from 2008-2022. So there have always been voices -- loud, frustrated, pleading -- calling out these elephants, suggesting ways to engage with them, and ultimately giving up and either accepting the way things would have to be, or moving somewhere where the elephants were either more palatable, or less obvious.

No Refunds

Although the "talented" adjective is debatable, I'm pretty sure I'm from the bucket of people who have trouble looking past the elephants. I've left all of my jobs pretty amicably, but I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I had to leave each one. So far, every single time it's been over the collision of what the company wanted me to do, and one of these elephants. My favorite was back at Bamboo -- I wasn't even 30 yet -- where our new CEO and his consultants wanted us to create a "Bamboo Way", not unlike their favorite store Bauhaus, where we'd guarantee that customers would be happy. This sounded very ambitious, so I asked if we'd be expanding our refund policy for customers who weren't happy, since we'd usually get a decent amount of those. The CEO looked at me like I was crazy. "No, definitely not. We're not talking about refunds, here. This is more of a feeling than a specific policy."

At 28 or 29 or whatever I was at the time, I thought this was rank hypocrisy, but now that I've had more C-level bosses, I realize that it was really just garden-variety self-justification. Customers should always be happy, yes, but there are LOTS of ways to make customers happy, and we should just do the ones that don't require us to ever give them money. We should build better products, and provide better support. Easy!

But ultimately the elephant in the room was that we weren't actually built to do that, and we were cutting costs at the same time with a mandate to increase profitability, so there was no reason to think we would suddenly become more capable anytime in the future. We were setting ourselves up to not only fail, and lie to customers, but then to allow everyone to blame nebulous factors and boogeymen for that failure once it happened. When there was no real counterargument to this existential assessment other than "it's more complicated than that" without any follow-up explanation of what those complications actually were, it was pretty clear what was about to happen. Over the next couple of months, some people left, some people didn't, but for everybody in that room it was pretty clear you were either able to ignore the elephant in the room or you weren't, and if you weren't you needed to go. For the first time in my career, I was one of those people who needed to go, so I did, despite an incredible amount of affection and loyalty to the place.

Deck Chairs

At most of the other places I've worked, the elephant in the room is usually related to the nexus of product, technology, and business (which makes sense at the kind of growing technology startups I've spent my time at). I wrote about this in another post, but the venture capital treadmill makes many of these elephants almost inevitable. You start with something powered almost exclusively by vision, and then begin the process of delivering that vision with resources that have extremely specific strategic and operational milestones and timelines attached to them. They aren't articulated, but they're there -- you start burning money at a rate that necessitates more funds than you can generate from customers (which means going back to VCs or finding new ones), and those new funds rapidly become contingent on promising to operate a certain way or focus on certain things ("we are moving upmarket!"). Having only vision (versus an operating strategy) allows you to accept resources that -- eventually, inevitably -- dictate your operating strategy further down the road, vision be damned, and that's exactly what happens. Vague visions will survive (self-justification!), but they will quickly become eye-rolling corporate totems of resentment to everyone outside of new-employee orientation groups or ask-me-anything sessions with founders, because the vision is secondary to the operating requirements, and the operating requirements get more onerous every year. And no matter how far away the vision still is from reality, it's not getting any closer once the idea of product development becomes nothing more than a liability, and technology becomes nothing more than a cost.

Elephants all the way down, man.

At a certain size -- and it's not really that big -- the relevance of what you're working on to the actual stated purpose of a company (whether that is making money, or something else) can get pretty vague. You start to have goals that, if reached, seem to indicate that you are good at your job, and your function/department is a high-performing function/department, but if unpacked, may not actually have a whole lot to do with the stated purpose of the company as a whole. If you are in Marketing, you will probably get some sort of lead goal, and the way to succeed at work is to hit that lead goal, or maybe come up with a good, believable excuse for NOT hitting that lead goal. It is not to say "wait, do we actually need more leads?" Partially that's because that question is annoying, but mostly it's because the answer to that question is often complicated and opens up additional, cross-functional questions that are even more complicated, or worse, NOT that complicated but quite uncomfortable to answer honestly. Here's an example.

Q: Why do we need more leads?

A: To make more money.

Q: Can't we make more money off the leads that we have?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Most of our leads don't buy anything.

Q: Why is that?

A: They don't think the product is worth paying for.

Q: Should we make a different product?

A: No. Product development is very hard and takes a long time, so we are better off getting better at selling what we have.

Q: But you just said most people don't think the product is worth paying for. Should we charge less?

A: No. In fact, so few people want this, we should probably charge the few people who DO want it a lot more.

Q: But then... won't an even smaller percentage of leads buy anything?

A: Yes.

Q: But... you want more leads?

A: Of course, we need more leads because even fewer of them are going to buy the same thing at a higher price. It's basic math.

Q: But if this product makes sense for such a small segment of people, isn't the pool of possible leads not just finite, but actually pretty small?

A: This other software company has a blog post that says they generated eighty kazillion leads last quarter, that's a lot more than us.

Q: Does our product do something similar to this other company's product?

A: It's software. We also make software.

Q: Right, but our software calculates the number of steel beams required to build bridges of different sizes, their software is for taking online payments.

A: Exactly, B2B software. We have some of the same investors.

Q: (blinks)

A: (stares)

Q: Is it possible that we've built a business that requires people to pay a lot of money for something they don't want that badly, but that also has extremely aggressive growth targets?

A: I have a hard stop at 2:18.

The correct move here, from a career development perspective, is to start visibly working on lead generation while simultaneously looking for a job at a different company. The correct move here from a management perspective is to provide at least somewhat better answers. I have been on both sides of this conversation, especially as I got older and got into management. Just as I became a parent of two very curious, very question-oriented children, I also became a manager facing a lot of these same questions from people who sounded like better educated versions of me from ten years earlier.

And there are better answers, to be sure. When the market for your product seems constrained, you can almost always expand it -- with a lot of effort -- at least a little bit more. When the product seems critically limited, there are almost always ways to make it a little more useful with non-technology tactics like templates, guides, and services. I learned about those avenues from smart, creative managers, and I did my best to suggest them when appropriate to people I managed. It went okay. I never got fired, and most of the places I've worked have ended up basically okay.

But the elephants are there for every one of them, and I don't expect them to get addressed... probably ever.

Relationships without Formulas

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 17:55:02 -0400

People often ask me for a very simple, very short, "instagram for dogs" like explanation of what Resolution is. This is a hard question to answer -- and I've worked in product marketing for over a decade -- just as it would be hard to answer the same question about a spreadsheet or PowerPoint or SalesForce or any number of things.

But, when I have to explain it, conceptually, with that level of non-detail, I usually go with something like "it's a spreadsheet that doesn't use formulas". This is not entirely accurate, but it's not entirely inaccurate either. There are many things you can do in a spreadsheet that you can't do in Resolution; some of those you'll be able to do eventually, and some of them you'll never be able to do until control of the product is violently wrestled from my hands by private equity suits in some kind of quasi-legal corporate battle.

However, even at launch, Resolution DOES do a bunch of fundamental, common things you'd normally do in a spreadsheet, and it absolutely does them without formulas and (bonus!) without cells.

Why did we do this?

I am not a formula hater by any stretch of the imagination. Formulas are the gateway to spreadsheets that figure out amazing, useful things, and we're better off for having them in the world. Cells are a necessary component of formulas (although there are probably a lot of ways to make them work better), so I don't hate those either.

On the other hand, the formula/cell-industrial complex does have some pretty major downsides. The main one is that it's a lot easier to make things look like they are related to each other than it is to actually establish a correct relationship.

[www.youtube.com/watch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2-p1CF2gdw)

Spreadsheets are like this, frankly, because they're eagerly awaiting for you to do something a lot more complicated than multiply two things together. That's why they offer hundreds of functions and concatenation features and things like that. But what they are NOT eagerly awaiting for is you to change your mind about the purpose of your model/system/whatever. There's no feature that says "hey, I was basing this whole thing on knowing what the revenue goal was, and now I don't really know anymore, can you calculate it?"

That's because the spreadsheet just wants cells and formula commands. It doesn't have another move, and that's great if you're awesome at formulas, or someone that you really trust is and they are happy to build you models whenever you need them. That is not most of us, though, especially when we're not entirely sure what we're looking for yet and we're trying to essentially sketch out a rough, verifiable map of what the heck is going on.

A spreadsheet can be that map, as long as (again) someone you really trust made it, and you don't need to understand why the map says what it says. But you don't want to MAKE the map with it while you're driving around, or sailing around, or whatever -- I didn't really set a historical period for this exploration analogy so go ahead and pick whatever you like best.

What's the alternative?

As I mention in the Resolution Kickstarter video, the basic idea of the project was "what if instead of assigning relationships to existing data with formulas, you set up relationships first and then just plugged data into them?"

That's essentially the difference between Resolution and spreadsheets. That means that you both (a) never have to build a formula, and (b) everything in your model actually kind of has a formula behind it. That second part is a huge deal because the problem people run into with spreadsheets is not just that they have to build formulas to set relationships, but that they don't actually have to set up relationships at all. That's why many real-world spreadsheets are a weird mix of calculated values and plugged in values that are calculated at all, and none of that is validated -- or even apparent -- when most people look at the spreadsheet or try different scenarios.

And in my experience (which is much more ad-hoc business problem solving than something more structured, like quarterly accounting or inventory management), the real value of working on a spreadsheet is in determining those relationships. That's what should be litigated, and argued over, and poked at, because if that stuff is wrong or insufficiently vetted, the numbers that come out of them don't matter.

Viva La Resolution

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 10:52:44 -0400

At the end of February, I left my job at Botify after an extremely eventful two years. I enjoyed my time there, and worked with a lot of cool people (from all over the world!) in a very weird, largely COVID-dominated environment that forced me to interact with everyone almost entirely via Zoom and Slack. Botify had an excellent financial 2021 as they continue to move up market pretty quickly, and just raised another $55 million dollars to do everything bigger and faster.

Also… I got extremely bored.

This isn’t really Botify’s fault, per se. Part of the appeal of working in a startup environment — in theory, at least — is that every one is different, and the capacity is always there to chart a new course. But that’s more mythology than anything else, because I’m actually talking about a very specific flavor of startup — the venture backed, B2B kind that tends to want to hire people who do what I’ve historically done. And those are… basically all the same. That probably sounds like lunacy to many of us who spend our time working in the nooks and crannies of different businesses, mastering obscure industry workflows and customer personas, but those are just the details. The details are important when you’re actually operating — you can’t ignore them — but in terms of fundamental challenges, when you zoom out (as I have after 15 years of this), it’s really just the same thing over and over again.

Find an inefficiency (especially one that results from things being not-distributed, or not accessible, or something else internet dust could conceivably address).
Raise some money, get a growth target from investors.
Do crazy, wacky things like listen to your customers. String everything together. Make a lot of slide decks. Hit some growth targets, miss some others.
Realize you need a lot more money to do this the way you want, or more commonly, the way your investors want.
Raise more money. Get a bigger growth target.
Look for richer customers. Maybe get one or two. Realize if all your customers were like this, you’d be fine.
Move UPMARKET.
Realize moving upmarket is very expensive. Raise more money, get an even bigger growth target as a result.
Move UPMARKET-ER

This is usually about when I quit. The reason I tend to last about 2 years at places like this is that, if you do a good job, that’s about how long it takes to go from “let’s move upmarket” to “this is great, let’s move upmarket-er”. The latter is when you really start to get removed from your product, increasingly dependent on relationship selling and professional services, and if you do it right, start to make a ton of money. We all turn into our parents or die trying to, and our startups all turn into Oracle or die trying to. I’m kidding, but only a little.

None of this is even remotely unique to Botify; I’ve literally done this four times now with different details but essentially the same fundamentals, which in short are “how do we take what we already have and make it interesting to people with insane amounts of money”. Doing this at FiscalNote — soon to be a public company! — from 2015 through 2018 was one of the most rewarding challenges of my career. I can’t take a lot of credit for pulling Gooten out of the dumpster (a lot of that work happened before I got there, which made hiring me even possible), but it was definitely challenging and interesting, even if the mechanics of the business model were a little different (more on that someday). Botify was, situationally, almost a carbon copy of FiscalNote’s up-market-er scenario, and at some point you just feel like you’re watching some forgettable slasher flick on TNT late at night, yelling “NO, DON’T GO IN THE OLD BARN!!!” at your TV. You need to watch some different kinds of movies, or go to bed.

Another Movie

My Dad never pushed me into sports, which I am generally really grateful for, as I have a very healthy relationship with sports as a crazy middle aged man from New England, and that’s not as common as it should be. But he did want me to try playing organized basketball instead of baseball, because I was objectively horrible at baseball (and often miserable even though I loved it), and weirdly good at driveway basketball. I didn’t listen — I was too nervous to try something new and fail — and as a result, I never got as good at basketball as I probably should have, given how much I loved it and was willing to work at it. As I got older, I eventually stopped playing baseball anyways, kept playing basketball at the playground, and eventually battled/hustled my way onto the junior varsity bench of my high school team where I turned the ball over constantly and was generally terrible and unplayable. Then again, I also chased down a kid once and blocked a shot off the glass to the delight and delirious cheers of my varsity teammates, a silly moment I remember to this day. Basketball was good to me and I will always love it.

Is Marketing is my baseball? Something I keep doing because it’s the first discipline I found that would take me, but ultimately not what I should be doing? Or is it the version of basketball I managed to avoid (thanks, Dad) — the thing I’m ultimately wired best for, but one that I’ve spent too much time with and thus simply don’t want to do anymore? I don’t know the answer (although I have theories, clearly), but either way it’s not something I should be doing right now if I can avoid it, and the fact is that in rampantly inequitable, tight-labor-market America, I can absolutely avoid it right now.

So then... what now?

I'm in a weird position. I have some subject matter expertise in a bunch of fairly useful, lucrative things that I don’t really want to do anymore, namely high growth sales & marketing process/strategy/tactics. I’m also pretty plugged in to the basics of modern software applications at a time where those things are really important and affect a lot of people. I’m not going to pivot to being a developer — I took computer science in college, I know not just that I am bad at this, but exactly why and how — but I’ve got some real literacy there. Also, I’m kind of a lunatic and I’ve done a lot of overthinking for the last four or five years about how businesses work.

All of this is why I am making a product. It’s called Resolution, and I’ve actually been working on pieces of it (and then throwing those pieces out and starting over) for a couple years now, in the background of going to work and raising kids and making my wife laugh. I’ll have a lot more to say about Resolution soon (duh), but here are the details that exist now and are important to me.

Resolution is a general purpose tool designed to help non-math professionals use real math along with their own expertise to make better plans and decisions.
It is not magic. It does not use AI/ML or do anything predictive. It might someday, but that will never be the core point of it. Instead, it will often make you smarter. But it does not do your work for you.
I have been looking for something like Resolution for the last five or six years, to address a problem I’ve used whiteboards and spreadsheets to solve, but it is very much neither a whiteboard or a spreadsheet.
I have not raised any money to build this. It is currently bootstrapped and self-funded (thanks, years of tech industry jobs!), and is being built by me and the fine people I’ve hired at Viget.
The initial version of Resolution isn’t going to be fancy, but it is going to be cool and potentially useful to you. I have a big long, exciting (and feasible!) roadmap of additions and improvements that I think many of you will love.
I will probably have some kind of Kickstarter-like thing to fund the next round of improvements, where you’d get access to this version in the meantime. But it’s not vaporware; I’m using it right now, and we should have something legitimately cool for you to try early this summer (or maybe even earlier).

The Part Where I am Weird

The toughest part about explaining Resolution to people is that there are several stories to tell inside all of this, and despite being generally disconnected, they are all pretty important and fairly nuanced. But in order of importance, the short versions are:

There is a huge gap between “data driven decision making” culture and people’s actual holistic understanding of what they are working on, and I think a big part of it is caused (or at least not improved) by the kinds of tools we use every day. This is the product/problem story, and that’s really what is most important to me and the driving impulse behind everything.
I have become increasingly disenchanted with how software is thought about and built. Entirely AI/ML-based solutions to everyday problems are simply not viable yet, and we’ve allowed the fact that ML can legitimately do some really cool things (like find pictures of things) to convince us that it’s going to be able to do the hard parts of our jobs (or our team’s jobs) soon. This is delusional, plain and simple, and I think very little energy is going into dealing with it.
Much of this is due to the fact that B2B software is dominated by venture-backed companies that have no long-term strategy other than being bought by a huge company (where their product will die from internal politics/innovator’s dilemmas or simply be forgotten about), or improbably IPO-ing and turning into Salesforce, at which point it will be able to be a piece of shit without any market consequence.
Therefore, as important as my product vision & purpose is (and it’s very important, that’s why it is first on this list), my “corporate” vision and strategy is almost as important, because simply going by the book and doing what I’m supposed to right now (“4x ENTREPRENEUR MARKETING GUY RAISES SERIES A, BECOMES QUIPPY THOUGHT LEADER”) would probably be a wild ride if I was even able to pull it off, but would absolutely not result in (a) good software or (b) solving the problem I’m allegedly passionate about. If I build a “lifestyle” business where I’m taking home what I’d be taking home at one of my normal jobs, but this thing is awesome and cheap and improving, and people are going less crazy at work because of it, I will continue doing that forever until I die.

In short, I never wanted to be a guy who started a business without a real purpose just because he wanted to be in charge or feel important, and — I swear to God — I don’t feel like that’s what I’m doing now, which is good. That being said, do I want to be in charge? Do I feel important? Yes, and… sort of yes, I suppose.

But that is all largely irrelevant. I will either get to do this because I build something useful and successfully get people to use it/get value from it/pay for it, or I will not, and I will be back at work somewhere teaching sales guys how to sound like they have some idea what they are talking about. It’s a living, and it’s a living I’ve enjoyed at certain points, and a bunch of people will vouch for me that I’m pretty good at it, so if that happens I’ll be fine.

For now, though, I’m just happy to be focused on thinking and building, at least for now. I’ll have lots and lots to share in just a couple weeks, whether it’s in this space, or somewhere else.

Everything Costs

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 14:53:09 -0400

I have been lucky enough to work -- mostly -- in places that are primarily motivated by accomplishing something. How interesting that something actually is can vary quite a bit, but compared to organizations that work simply to maintain the status quo, or divide up the spoils of some long entrenched operation, most of my jobs have been comparatively idealistic. We will make this software, we will find these people, we will share this story, we will grow, and build, and succeed to a greater extent than we did the year before.

This is mostly a good thing, which is why I continue to try to spend my time working with these kinds of places. But it generates a specific kind of challenge, one that I've been dealing with for most of my professional life.

That challenge is... cost denial.

What is Cost Denial?

Cost denial is a term I just made up about ten seconds ago, sitting in this coffee shop. But, more importantly, it's also a form of bias that's -- sort of -- the opposite of loss aversion.

Disclaimer -- I am not an economist, or really any kind of scientist, nor especially good at math, or, if we're being honest, reading. Like many people, I have ~~read~~ scrolled through interesting listicles about logical fallacies, and it's possible I'm basically describing one of those. Either way, I want to establish a definition here so my examples and conclusions make as much sense as possible. So... sorry not sorry.

So anyways, yeah, cost denial. It's actually not really the opposite of loss aversion, because that would just be preferring gains to avoiding equivalent losses, which is probably just a description of FanDuel's business model, and not that interesting. Instead, I'm talking about cost denial, which is seeing the upside or potential gains of something and either denying or not understanding the existence of either the risks, or more likely, just the straight up costs of seeking the gains.

One of my favorite youthful exuberance stories is about a trip I took with my friend Jeff to see Wyclef Jean in concert, and yes that is a sentence I just wrote. It's not a complicated story -- we were driving on the highway to get to some faraway amphitheater, and missed our exit. This was way out in the middle of nowhere, so the next exit was several miles away, and of course we were late because we were a couple of dumb 19 or 20 year olds in a Ford Escort. I was stressed out by the situation, but Jeff wasn't. He got into the high speed lane, put his left turn signal on, turned onto the giant grassy median, and did an incredibly illegal u-turn on a major highway while I screamed "RISK ANALYSIS!!! RISK ANALYSIS, JEFF!!!!" and gripped the cupholder next to me for dear life.

Nothing bad happened to us, and we weren't late to see the local opener for Wyclef, thank God. But what was funny about the whole thing was the way both of us thought about the situation. I was screaming at Jeff to reconsider the cost-benefit analysis of doing a U-turn on a major highway to avoid being late for a Wyclef concern, but that didn't work because even when he reconsidered it, Jeff simply didn't see the same costs I did.

Life as a Series of Highly Illegal U-Turns

When this happened twenty years ago (and for some time thereafter), I wasn't able to articulate what really bothered me about Jeff's decision making in that moment, so I simply wrote off this and other debacles as "sometimes my friend decides to do idiotic things", and he probably wrote off my thinking as "Nate worries too much". Neither of these things are very good descriptions of what I now think -- after working with other people for years and years -- was actually happening.

In fact, just like at work, Jeff and I were basically talking past each other. Jeff, like a lot of startup founders/employees, was thinking about the opportunity at hand. He felt like he had a perfectly good command of what was going on -- very light traffic, a sufficiently flat median to cross -- and felt confident he could achieve the available gains without paying a price, despite having very limited time to assess the situation, consult others, etc. And... he was right!

I, on the other hand, was thinking about something different. Namely, what is the cost of generally making decisions in this way? It's not so much that I thought "this situation is extremely dangerous". I didn't think that then, and I don't really think it now. But what I do think is dangerous is a general tendency to act impulsively in response to making a mistake.

So while it probably felt like I was saying "why are you making this u-turn?", what I really meant was "why do you choose to operate this way?"

With the benefit of hindsight, I now think this is a classic example of cost denial. In this case, it required looking at every example of doing things a certain way (impulsively, in response to error) individually, and not in the aggregate. You then write off the things that don't work as outliers, and use the things that did work as justification for the lack of cost. In reality, if you zoom out, it's much easier to see the overall cost (and benefit!) of acting either "impulsively" or "decisively", depending on how you want to look at it, but this kind of cost denial prevents most of us from doing that when we've already decided we prefer acting one way or the other.

To be fair, you can probably guess that I'm a little more cautious than other people in my scenario, which means I have cost denial issues of my own. These usually manifest in me obfuscating away the cost of inaction, BUT, I'd like to think that over 15 years of professional work has given me an opportunity to correct that a bit, especially since it's a known issue and I work on it. You're reading the guy who once authorized thousands of dollars to get the Plain White Tees to play at a work event. I'm willing to shoot from the hip from time to time.

Benefit/not-Benefit Analysis

When you work at early stage companies -- especially ones with venture backing -- growth often fixes everything, at least in the immediate term. If you're growing but losing money, someone will usually give you money, or even buy your company. If you're not growing, or that growth is slowing, you're in trouble. There's a place for this mindset, but again, it does have a tendency to create a certain kind of opportunity bias. When I worked at FiscalNote, we literally had a company value called "Bias for Action" (I think we had something similar at Contactually) that meant when we weren't sure of what the downside of something was, but we felt good about the upside (or at least not bad), we'd often go ahead and do it. This is really common in venture startups, because standing still is death, and moving slowly isn't much better. You're burning cash and the clock is running. Something needs to HAPPEN.

This is all well and good until you get some traction and start growing. At some point -- usually 50-100 employees, maybe a little more, your organization becomes your biggest problem simply because now there are too many people doing too many things and pulling everything in different directions. Well-intentioned, usually inexperienced founder-leaders will come out and say something like "OUR UNIVERSAL GOAL IS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, IT'S OUR OBSESSION AND EVERYTHING IS UNIFIED AROUND THAT", but that's obviously meaningless as a true guiding device because there are a million things you could do to improve the customer experience and many of them will make that experience better in one way and worse in another.

So instead what happens is people bring ideas to other people (like me) that have some sort of upside, and say "let's do this". The first thing I ask, either literally or figuratively depending on the request, is "what is the cost of this." The ideas I am the most interested in are ones that have a very clear, often large cost, like deprecating a product line, or focusing on a smaller subset of customers. I'm interested not because I like getting rid of things (although sometimes I do), but because it's at least plausible to me that something with a large cost ($$$ or otherwise, but usually both) could conceivably have a large benefit, whereas most things that appear to have no cost either have no benefit, or more likely, have a secret, very large cost you will have to pay later at an incredibly inopportune time.

Given that most people's understanding of marketing departments is "those guys sure waste a lot of money", you'd think there would be a healthy appetite for discussing the cost of marketing activities. But there usually isn't, outside of raw channel dollars. Product and development teams tend to have a pretty clear license to say things like "if we build this thing you want, there will be an ongoing cost to support it", but for some reason that never seems to come up in marketing, or if it does, it's quickly hand-waved away because we need to act, dammit.

Cost Denial in Society

I've been talking a lot about cost denial at work because it's a pretty sterile way to feel out the concept. But I actually worry much more about cost denial in society, especially nowadays. A lot of the "move fast and break things" concepts that were born in the web software era have metastasized into general society at large, and many of the people who were so eager to bring that mentality to the world are either moving on to other things or just cruising around in space lighting money on fire. But the resulting problems are very real, and the costs we've denied even existed for so long are now here.

In fact, I read two Washington Post articles this week that I think are horrifying, existential examples of cost denial coming home to roost, either right now, or in the near future.

First, there's this exhaustive breakdown of how investment funds are taking over huge swaths of what used to be starter homes for families. Back in 2008, these (already rich) guys all thought, hey, this is great. Huge upside! And a policy world of financial deregulation had already decided to focus on the upside of a fat, healthy investment market without considering the (then probably unclear) downside of all these assets being owned by for profit funds, instead of non-profit families. Well, guess what? There are costs -- not just dollar costs (passed onto renters), but secondary social costs that come from fewer people building any family wealth or being able to afford to own a home. And those costs not only suck, but were also certainly ignored/dismissed when this entire thing was originally conceived.

Next, there's an even more chilling deep dive into child trafficking conspiracies and how they affect both the people who are inaccurately included in them (as victims or perpetrators), and the actual, real-life process of helping people trapped in real trafficking scenarios. I'm sure we're all exhausted with yelling about social media deconstructing basic elements of our society, but what you're seeing here is the impact of saying "what if random individuals could immediately create huge, informal, leaderless organizations with massive reach" and only seeing the potential upside. Now we're here, and we have no idea how to keep these things from destroying people and undermining actual functioning parts of society while the guys who did this have moved on to wearing goggles over their faces and designing legless avatars.

So, to wrap it up... remember, cost denial is NOT about arguing over the costs and benefits of something. We all do that, costs and benefits can be subjective, that's all fine. Instead, it's about denying the existence of a cost at all -- i.e., that it is abjectly good for people to be more easily connected, or that a freer market is inherently more efficient AND, assuming that is true, that a more efficient market is the primary, defining characteristic of a world we want to live in.

As a person who spends his work days trying to make helpful over-simplifications, know that these are dangerous over-simplifications, and in all likelihood were put together by people who knew better, and chose to live in a personally profitable fantasy world instead.

Merry Christmas.

Angles, Superfruits, and Supply Chains

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:41:10 -0400

This is a weird angle, for a couple reasons.

There's a fairly exhaustive amount of reporting in this piece that has me absolutely believing this headline is true -- that small children are climbing giant scary trees to harvest the açaí that I can only assume goes into the acai bowls we get on the weekend (assuming they actually have açaí in them, which I do not know). So no argument there.

The article itself is interesting, and I think valuable. I couldn't stop reading it. What goes on around the world to make little things happen in your living room is important, and I'm glad we get to read about it. But while I'm not a global supply chain expert by any means, I've dabbled a little bit thanks to working with my wife, who has dabbled a lot in places like China, Vietnam, India, and yes, Brazil. And other than the giant trees, what this piece describes applies to just about every consumer product you interact with. It's just that instead of giant trees, other products have other hazards, be they unsafe machines, long hours, or other treacherous means to acquire raw materials.

The real news in this piece that people should be aware of is that we don't have a very good system for ensuring that things we buy don't exist (or exist at a price we find acceptable) as a result of things that are morally questionable or just straight up wrong. Some of that is logistical (auditing is hard and inherently flawed in a lot of ways), but some of it is just the everyday forces of downward-price-driving capitalism we usually praise. In fact, it's pretty rich to see this article in the post after weeks of inflation panic dominating the headlines, as if these two concepts have no useful relationship.

To counter the human evils (indifference, essentially) that aren't caused by capitalism, but are often perversely incentivized, we have a regulatory state. People complain about regulations causing price increases, but that's kind of what they're for. We decided that no one should be able to sell you cheaper meat because they don't follow expensive safety protocols, so we don't let you do that. When you operate globally -- as we all do, basically -- you quickly discover that there's no great way to do things like that, and it's even harder when the wrong you're trying to take off the table doesn't materially impact the product (i.e., rancid meat), but just the people who produce it. It's hard to hide the product if you want to sell it to consumers, but it's easy to hide workers and the things they have to do ESPECIALLY if they are located in a country that is not interested in protecting them.

Given all of this, ordinarily I'd react to a piece like this by assuming that the Post is simply trying to use an interesting anecdote to highlight a larger issue. But they don't really talk about that larger issue or do a very good job pointing out that it even is a larger issue. You can read all about the child labor issues of açaí production and still walk away from this article thinking the problem of both child labor and labor safety in general is disproportionately localized to açaí, which I don't think is true at all.

Worse, they add this bizarre additional (and less important) moral component that "elites" like açaí fruit and sketchy people promote açaí as some healthy superfood without especially strong scientific evidence. This, frankly, does not seem relevant, but it DOES feel morally comforting if you don't eat açaí products. Why? Because you're now, by default, standing up against kids falling off of trees. And that's exactly how some people feel after reading this, apparently!

Way to stick it to THE ACAI CROWD, Chas. How about this guy?

FIX IT, STARBUCKS. Did you not read the article? Starbucks has no idea how to fix it! What the hell are they going to do, open an Acai farm? Vertically integrate everything? I'm only half kidding, because I actually think that might be the only way to do this, but it's an absolutely massive undertaking I don't think most people can even comprehend.

And that brings us back to my original point -- it's not just açaí. Good lord is it not just açaí, it's like, everything. And if (like me) you've dabbled in international audit world, you know for a fact that we're asking corporations to make moral decisions based on information and leverage that they absolutely do not have, and honestly, do not know how to even get.

Would they make the right decision if they had that information? Different question, and probably very different answers from very different companies/leaders and all that. But we're not there yet, because it's basically impossible to reliably tell what's even going on. "Well, the Post found out!" No, the Post found out something bad exists (which, in case this isn't clear, is a good thing and what the Post should be doing, because it's a newspaper). But you don't get to run a supply chain based on one-offs. You have to know if this kind of thing is happening A LOT, and once you try to fix it, you have to find out if this thing still happens. And then, you have to decide what to do if it keeps happening, and those options are usually very close to "shut down this process because it can and has in at least some instances been done immorally", or "do not shut down this process". And that doesn't even address the extremely salient issue of what happens to the very people and communities we are worried about if and when BIG ACAI pulls out.

(Hint: they do not all get union jobs and a regulatory state that cares about them. At least not overnight.)

Look, actual sustainability people work on this and it's obviously more complicated than my dumb blog post is making it out to be, but for the purposes of having a generally accurate sense of how something like this would/could actually be dealt with, I'm not really that far from the truth here. Basically, the idea of using your purchasing power or (even more laughably) harassing corporations on social media to "do the right thing" when you really mean "figure out a way to create the right outcome that you unequivocally do not know how to create" is a fantasy. That doesn't mean it's a BAD thing to attempt to buy ethically sourced thing -- it's good! Being willing to pay higher prices than you have to, if you can afford it, is something that is directly related to being able to solve these kinds of things.

But it won't simply be buyer choice. We didn't massively reduce child labor and other industrial hours in the United States with purchasing power -- we did it with organized labor, strikes, and regulations. Until we figure out how to do that globally, a global supply chain for basically ANY product, not just "elite" superfruits or whatever, is going to be morally suspect.

Engage

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 18:05:32 -0400

I saw this piece on Eric Clapton's sudden turn to COVID politics in the Washington Post, and thought a lot about people in my life (many who are older) who have taken sudden political turns.

“He’s the anti-Bono,” says Bill Oakes, who managed Clapton’s label throughout the 1970s. “He is the epitome of someone who is there for the music, and he’s never rubbed shoulders with world leaders and never wanted to.”

Most of these political turns -- in my experience -- don't go very well for a couple of reasons. There's an art to talking about potentially incendiary issues, and if you don't spend some portion of your life practicing it, even informally, you're unlikely to be very good at it. Even worse, if you've always been politically quiet, it can be surprising how offensive people can find your views, and that's often made even worse when you're not very good at expressing them.

What I often see is a bit of a vicious cycle. A newly engaged citizen dives into the conversation, throws a few quasi-informed haymakers, almost inevitably puts their foot in their mouth and (often legitimately) offends someone. Since they've always been quiet, this reaction is completely new and completely unexpected. It feels bad to have your views about life and society itself repudiated, and when it's never happened before, you're inherently thin-skinned. You feel attacked, and start seeing yourself as a victim. This doesn't make you better at making your points or figuring out other people -- it makes you worse. Which leads to more offense, hotter takes, and a lower standard for your own thinking (since you feel increasingly okay blaming everyone's reactions to your uncompelling arguments on how "sensitive" or "brainwashed" they are, or whatever).

People who never veer too far into politics are nodding right now. "That's exactly why I stay out of this stuff," they say.

You can stay out of politics, but politics won't stay out of you

Since I was a little kid, I have always been very interested in why society works the way it does, and why we have the rules and systems in place that we do. Growing up the way I did, that was an itch that was easiest to scratch by following U.S. electoral politics, which I did, although I never got involved in a campaign, or canvassing, or any Young Whatever groups. I liked (and still like) my own history, and I'm an American, so I find American history pretty interesting, and obviously our political and electoral history (as well as the history of our government structures) is all a part of that.

I majored in political science in college, and I thought a lot of it was interesting even though I have no desire to participate in electoral politics other than to vote and maybe share my perspective, when relevant, on various policy issues and things like that. I graduated and never really looked back, although I pay a decent amount of attention to state and federal policy (I should pay more attention to local but I keep moving). I don't read like, Politico or any of that horserace crap about who won the day or whatever.

Here's my point. A lot of people didn't do this, or stopped doing it early in their adult life. They are "not political", and probably say that with happiness and some amount of pride. And in the sense that they aren't haranguing their friends and family about the VA governor's race or how judges get installed in Texas (assuming they don't live in those places), they are probably right to feel that way.

But...

One of my first political science professors said to me -- on our first day -- something very basic but very eye-opening to me. She said "Politics is power. That's it."

Not politics leads to power, or powerful people understand politics. Politics is power. You don't need political parties, or elections, or talking heads on CNN to have politics. If you're in a room with 10 people and 9 chairs, you have a political problem. You can say "oh, I don't follow politics", but odds are you're only going to say that when you have a chair, and when you lose it, you're probably going to get "political" very fast.

I think this is the real challenge for so many people who are suddenly motivated, for the first time in their life, into speaking up about politics. They don't think they are political, but almost no one is not political in the sense that they are simply opinion-less and completely neutral on how power affects them. Instead, most ostensibly non-political people are living life, not expressing themselves, and having very political reactions over time, quietly, and often developing increasingly strong opinions about all kinds of things. And then, all of a sudden, they don't have a one of those chairs I was talking about.

The moral of the story (I think) is simple.

[getyarn.io/yarn-clip...](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f9978651-839d-4432-bb9b-c4181218afe3)

You have to engage! You don't have to engage with horserace electoral nonsense (you should vote, but that's another topic). But you do need to engage with what you think, why you think it, and where that plugs into the experiences of your fellow citizens. You may not want to do that, because you might embarrass yourself (God knows I have) and you might find out some things about yourself that you don't necessarily like. For instance, I'm glad no one wants to be racist in theory, but the sooner we can get over the existential dread of realizing we have dumb racist instincts we can definitely learn to manage with the non-lizard parts of our brain, and that this is perfectly okay, the better. Not engaging with any of this doesn't keep it from coming out eventually. It just keeps you from refining any of it before it does, and figuring out how to deal the world as it really is, which is a combination of different experiences, and -- bluntly -- not just yours.

Start with people you know and love. Your commie-hating grampa. Your endlessly protesting nephew. Go in with love and humility. Don't match the tactics of these people if you find that they want to debate you -- not because those tactics are necessarily bad, but just because you are probably bad at them. Just engage, throw in some jokes, and try to learn something. See if you can defuse something, or relate, or whatever. Don't come at things from the dumb cable news angle. Ask a broader question like "how did school handle the ugly parts of American history when you were there?" You know, an actual question the person you're talking to can add value to, and provide perspective that you literally cannot. It may start off as work, but you're a human being. You're a social creature -- you have a natural aptitude for improving at stuff like this.

The alternative is, really, just to stew quietly. You'll get radicalized in some way (we all do), and then, when you can't take it anymore, you'll decide it's time to take a stand.

And you probably won't like how that goes.

About Understanding

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 12:41:38 -0400

The Department of Why

I have been working in something called “Product Marketing” for a long time now. What that something actually is has varied from job to job, sometimes to pretty wild degrees. When I look at (or write) job descriptions for product marketing, even inside of very similar companies, it tends to focus on very tactical things like “go to market strategies” and making little documents to give to prospective customers that say how great the product is. When I was younger, this is almost exactly what I did, and I have a work history and (unofficial) portfolio to match.

These days, I’m a little older/slower/wiser, so I get fancier titles and, unfortunately sometimes, more existential questions to answer like “what is the purpose of these little documents you keep making”. As a result, I have to think a little broader than I used to, and if I’m being honest, my job has transitioned very much into “The Department of Why”. Some of those whys include:

why do we do something the way we do
why should someone buy something we have
how should they use it if they buy it
what will happen if they don’t use it that way
what is it worth to be able to use it
etc., etc., and so forth

These are all very reasonable, important things to have answers to, so I definitely feel like my job is important. In fact, coming up with answers to these kinds of things is probably the most rewarding part of my job. But it’s not easy.

Explaining vs. Arguing

As I’ve written before, my background is actually not in sales or marketing. It’s in support and technical writing. It’s just that in the kinds of spaces I’ve worked, being able to explain how or why something works the way it does is so important to the challenge of selling it that the right kind of technical writer is actually the perfect person to lead the Department of Why. In my experience, if you are explaining why something is great, you’re in a much better position than when you’re arguing that something is great. In general, don’t argue with your customers if you can avoid it.

The thing is, arguing is often easier even if it’s less effective, because you have a whole variety of different tricks you can use. You can bully people, frighten them, confuse them, trick them, or do all sorts of things that aren’t limited by either reality, or the audience’s comprehension. You’re basically trying to get the sale however you can.

Explaining something is way harder. The biggest reason — by far — is that in order to be successful, you need the other person to understand, accept, and internalize what you’re saying. Ask a teacher; ensuring comprehension is very difficult. It’s great to have truth on your side, but if the truth is overly complex — or just as badly, hand-waves away complexity that people can detect but don’t feel comfortable with — it doesn’t matter.

This is why great technical writers can make great technical “marketers” (provided you define the term narrowly enough). Spreading comprehension is their primary goal, and in many cases, a highly motivated one. My first explanatory writing wasn’t trying to get you to accept the value of a label printer; it was trying to keep you from cutting off your hand by sticking it in the wrong part of the machine.

Technical writers rely on a host of tools and tactics to leverage the fact that they have truth on their side, and compensate for the challenge of needing to ensure 100% comprehension. Diagrams, charts, specifications, even stuff like equations are often included in documentation because they’re very compelling and help people understand the concepts that support your “argument” that isn’t really an argument as much as it is simple operating reality.

Now, you might be saying — you people didn’t invent charts! Everyone uses charts! There are charts in every single sales deck, whether some documentation nerd was involved or not!

And this is true. But the goals of those non-technical-writer charts are often different, because (as mentioned) they’re simply being used to get to an outcome by any means necessary. Comprehension isn’t required; action is required. If you don’t actually understand what our software is for, but you sign a giant contract to deploy it, Sales is not going to have a post-mortem on what went wrong. They are going to have a party. But I don’t just need you to agree with me that (a) you don’t want your hand to be cut off and (b) that the printer can do it. I need you to understand how to not cut off your hand in the printer, because you’re going to have to successfully execute that task every day, forever, or I am going to get an email from Legal and probably PR.

Arguing is a Bad Way to Make Decisions

At the kinds of places where I work, Sales is understandably influential, because they bring in the money we need to operate. Unfortunately, even internally, Sales-thinking often stays in Argument mode, and not in Explaining mode. And this isn’t a salesperson problem; many of us have a tendency to argue instead of explain, either because explaining is hard, or (just as likely) because we don’t actually really KNOW what we’re talking about and just have a preference or a feeling that we’re right.

Like a lot of people, I sometimes really enjoy arguing. Hell, I’m arguing right now! But arguing leaves gaps in people’s comprehension, often by design. No sales team goes into a proposal worrying about making sure a prospect really understands what is better about the competition, unless they are going to use that understanding to somehow undermine the other guy in the long run. Instead, you actually HOPE the other person doesn’t really get that part of the situation, because that understanding would actually hurt the chances of your desired action occurring. In those situations, ignorance is bliss.

But you know when I really, really don’t want to argue? When we’re dealing with something boring, but very important. Marketing budgets, for instance, are very important. They are also very boring, compared with the things you actually want to DO with those budgets, which are usually much more interesting to work on. In fact, the marketing budget might be the most important, impactful thing in my professional day-to-day life that I want to be done with as soon as humanly possible. With the marketing budget, I don’t care about being right, or getting the exact numbers I want in exactly the places I want. I just want the marketing budget to give me what I need to do the things I want, without creating unrealistic expectations or headaches down the road.

In other words, what I really want is for everyone to understand the marketing budget, and my place in it.

Tooling for Understanding

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, we have extremely bad tooling for understanding in the modern digital workplace. What I mean by that is that we have a staggering array of ways to collect, organize, and visualize information, but they’re all completely open-ended, so authors can use them any way they want, whether it facilitates understanding or not. And just like most decision-making-meetings turn into a series of arguments, most data visualization gets used the same way — to make an argument. Sometimes data viz doesn’t even do that. In those cases, it’s just data displayed visually, with no real purpose at all.

(FUN FACT: Tableau was acquired for $15.7 billion dollars in 2019).

I don’t mean to be overly negative. Building a visualization, or a spreadsheet, has the capacity to be a very informative process. And people do create data visualizations that are amazingly informative and give people context and understanding of data and the things that data represent. That’s why data visualization is so exciting! But there’s nothing inherently educational about visual or interactive data, just like there’s nothing inherently educational about a Word document just because people can write really enlightening things in it. And from a tooling standpoint, I haven’t seen anything out in the wild that prioritizes understanding as the primary goal of the tool (versus presentation, or flexibility, or extensibility, or whatever).

You might open a spreadsheet to try to figure something out. I certainly have, and I’m not even that good with spreadsheets. But a spreadsheet isn’t designed with the primary goal of helping you understand something. It’s designed to help you do a lot of math at once, very quickly. That’s a noble and necessary goal, but it’s not the one I’m looking to solve. And that matters, because in order to prioritize understanding, a math/logic tool would have to put pretty crippling guardrails on what people normally do with something like a spreadsheet. Guardrails that very specifically don’t allow you to simply do math without (one way or another) including context, or what that math means, or whether you actually know or not.

If that all sounds crazy, well, it sort of is. We live in a world and a culture that is driven almost entirely by arguments that actively depend on a lack of understanding. Just look at cryptocurrency.

When Will Technology Prioritize Understanding?

I don’t think the present economy and technical zeitgeist is built to solve for this problem. Today’s investments continue to be in shifting as many things as possible away from people, and to machines, regardless of how realistic or impactful that actually is. As always, there’s a blind faith that business will invest in whatever solves the most valuable problems of the day, but that’s only true inside of a certain risk profile, and today that profile is extremely narrow. We are increasingly dependent on a relatively small number of massively successful and capitalized corporations to decide “what’s next”, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the answer is often doubling down on what’s already happening and cheap to provide. Right now, that’s going to be cloud computing services and heavily branded “AI” versus anything that empowers regular people at work.

There’s also business culture itself. Many large companies are hilariously profitable; day-to-day work and even strategy is powered by internal ambition and land grabs versus really getting to the root of what’s going on, or facilitating a tough decision. Arguments are fun, and a lot of decision makers have come to power making compelling ones. The beauty of living and dying by them — and selectively using data here and there — is that no matter how wrong you are, or how bad the facts on the ground are, you can still win, at least theoretically.

So if something like this happens, it will have to be bottom up. There are still many — most, even? — people working every day with some kind of operational reality in their face, even if it’s an arbitrary one like a budget or a corporate mandate. Those people do have to deal with reality, and do their best to do so with systems and tools that are pretty reality-neutral. But their lives could be easier, and their work more effective, with tooling that took advantage of their knowledge of the environment — and just as importantly their knowledge of what isn’t actually known.

I am very interested in building this.

Decency

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 17:02:26 -0400

This afternoon I saw this WSJ quote on Twitter:

In case the tweet dies (and the tweet always seems to die eventually if I embed it in something I write), it's basically an anecdote about a woman who worked for a long time in a hard, pretty thankless job for a big corporation until the pandemic broke out. She was then furloughed, and shortly after, laid off.

She's in her early sixties, and has some health issues, but she's retiring with less money from Social Security rather than go back to the work force, and one of the main reasons is that feels betrayed by her old employer -- that she was always told that work was a family, but as soon as it was financially challenging for her "family" to help her she was thrown out and discarded.

"Family" and Work

Because I've worked at often idealistic technology startups for the last fifteen years or so, I've often sat next to debates about whether work is a "family", or a "team", or whatever. It's a fine debate, and various companies with PR departments have exposed various slide decks with different thoughts about it that you can go find and read.

I do find it interesting that we've landed (in many cases) on "family" or "team" as our ends of the acceptable spectrum. Nobody is saying "here at Widgets Inc., we are proud to support our collection of revenue-generating cogs until their productivity drops below replacement value" because that seems obviously out of bounds even if it's pretty accurate in things like sales. Instead we say "team", where the team really needs to win and therefore will be patient with you if you start being bad at your job in a way that indicates you might become good again.

While the "family" idea of work was always too high of a bar for most organizations to ever seriously approach (I'm sure there are some privately run places that actually take this seriously), it was attempting to capture something that really is important, and really is missing from how we think about employment and labor in general.

That something is decency.

"What is decency in a largely capitalistic society" might seem like too vague a question to ever really answer, but a lot of our problems seem to stem from our hesitation to do so. When everything is fine, or about people in the abstract instead of you, someone you know, or someone you hear about, a lot of us accept a pretty performance-heavy definition of decency. You know, the whole "team" thing. Dave works here, Dave used to be at least nominally useful, but now Dave kind of sucks and we'd make more money -- sorry, "better achieve our mission" -- if Dave was gone and we replaced him with someone better. So Dave goes, and we all generally accept that, since this example includes no real perspective from Dave because I made him up.

But why does Dave suck? Does he suck because he's sick? Because his Dad got in a car accident? Because he's 50 and his marriage is not going great? Or is it not even really Dave at all -- did Dave spend a long time selling a product that's no longer profitable, and is struggling to sell the new stuff? Or was there a global pandemic that left Dave with very little to do after 35 years of doing a lot?

Given how important work is to things like personal identity, our social lives, survival, and other stuff, it's entirely understandable when someone is sad after they lose a job. There are many things they may miss, including (for many of us) the ability to pay for non-optional things like food and a place to live.

That being said, they don't necessarily have to feel betrayed. That only happens when people feel like they were lied to.

What makes people feel betrayed?

The woman in the example above feels betrayed because of the implied "family" nature of her job that turned out to be fraudulent. Not unlike the equally enraging "privatized gains, socialized losses" concept, this was a classic case of "you treat us like family, we treat you like an operating cost". Being treated like an operating cost sucks, but being told you're family first, and holding up your end of that implied bargain for years is a recipe for feeling betrayed -- because you were betrayed.

It doesn't help that this is all avoidable, and everyone knows it's avoidable. It's avoidable by simply aligning what you tell people with what you're willing to do to back up what you told them. The HR department shouldn't write checks the Finance department can't (or won't) cash.

For instance, there's no reason something like an employee handbook, or an offer letter, or whatever, couldn't include conditions that would result in layoffs, pay cuts, or other horrible things. Not from a legal compliance perspective ("YOU ARE AN AT WILL EMPLOYEE" lets you do whatever you want but does nothing to prevent feelings of betrayal"), but simply from an expectations alignment perspective. Marriott (or whoever) could say -- listen, once we have less than 50% capacity for more than two months, we're going to start cutting people. That's the nature of this relationship. We are telling you that now, when we WANT you to work here, but things like terrorist attacks and pandemics and such do happen, and we are unwilling and/or incapable of being your Mom and giving up everything to give you the best future we can. And frankly, private business could adjust those thresholds to anything they'd like to provide the balance of protecting their workers and protecting their profits that they are comfortable telling everyone. Everyone would be a little pissed sometimes (investors when "unproductive" workers were paid for "no reason", employees when the terms of their forcible removal were discussed and/or implemented), but nobody would feel nearly as betrayed.

Because decency is optional...

Of course, very few organizations do this. Why align expectations when you can, in most scenarios, tell everyone what they want to hear without any negative repercussions? Workers will think they are family -- and sometimes commit accordingly! -- while things are humming along, and when they aren't, those workers will be gone. Current (remaining) and future employees might be angry for a while, but eventually someone will need a job and you will have a job for them and they will come and do it literally like nothing ever happened. And eventually there will be robots.

Except... shit! No one is taking this job! And there are no robots, because they were all 3D renders made to trick VCs into pumping billions of dollars into pretend companies that don't make anything. Decency -- or rather, the lack of decency -- has never had a cost, because people need to work to eat. Right?

There's obviously a lot at play here, and no one reason why the labor market isn't snapping back like it would in a computer simulation. But at least part of it is that at least some people really were working in part due to the expectation of decency, and that expectation has not been met. Sometimes it's not met by employers, who instead of really dealing with how crappy and painful working 10 hours a day in a warehouse is, are throwing temporary, short-time bonuses and perks at people that probably come out of the marketing budget. Sometimes it's not met by customers, who are crueler and more demanding and less empathetic with basic human suffering than ever for a bunch of reasons that could definitely take up an entirely different post.

Plenty of people have no choice. The true engine of American productivity -- the fear of dying alone in a gutter -- will propel most of us back to the salt mines of e-commerce or food service or in-home Boomer care or whatever else can't be done by a large collection of cloud-computed if/then statements. But -- hilariously, in a dark way -- there may not be enough of those people to maintain the current profit margins of our most successful corporate overlords.

And that is why... we need to cut taxes.

Kidding.

... but that's probably what we'll do.

Moving Fast and Changing Nothing

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 12:05:48 -0400

In my line of work, I hear a lot about “MVP”, or “minimum viable product”. I complain about MVP all the time, because while the term is historically used to describe making products that are sufficiently safe for public usage (which is good), in my line of work it’s a concept that actually exists to reduce business risk, not make better products. In theory, you want to “avoid building products that people don’t want”, but (1) there are lots of ways to do that, and (2) there are upsides to taking large, creative risks, many of which have lead to some of the best products. That’s why the real problem with minimum product thinking isn’t that it leads to very basic initial releases of products (although that is A problem). It’s that it outsources product development decisions to crowds, so it’s inherently hostile to the major innovation and coherence that comes with a single person, or small team, driving towards a vision.

Minimum viable product — and subsequent iteration — spares you from the MacBook Pro TouchBar, but also kneecaps the iPhone. Yes, Apple iterated over years and years to improve their phones and watches, but you have to admit that they launched with VERY aggressive “1.0” versions with clear visions. When they were wrong, they eat the loss (which can take years), but that usually means rather than reduce risk, they work on getting better at executing risky things, because making transcendently good, successful things requires risk.

I find it especially bizarre how conservative a lot of software development is at venture backed companies. These are literally organizations with millions of dollars artificially pumped into them to give them the ability to operate in a bigger, more aggressive way than their present status would ordinarily allow. But these are, in my experience, often R&D environments that are incredibly risk averse when it comes to product innovation, and require confirmation of user interest on even the smallest changes before they’re comfortable investing any additional time or effort. “Move fast and break things” has proven to be a potentially disastrous way to run a growth company, but part of the problem was that Facebook ITERATED so quickly — not that the steps they took were so large and unconfirmed by user engagement. Facebook is what it is today precisely because it was always MVP based, and hyper-responsive to A/B testing and crowd/mob-sourcing. They’re also institutionally incapable of addressing their existential challenges for the same reason — no sufficiently bold solution could ever be broken up into small enough steps that would, iteration by iteration, be confirmed as good for Facebook. They may be able to take 2 steps forward and one step back, but they can’t take 10 back and 20 forward. The 10 is just too far to go without affirmation.

However, the counter-argument to this is maybe the most interesting part of all, and I know because I’ve had this argument with CEOs and product managers for years. And it’s that the degree of risk I’m asking companies to take on is simply unacceptable to some form of leadership. Product leaders don’t want to risk being responsible for wasting R&D resources or being “wrong”. Executives don’t want to risk the business failing. Investors don’t want to risk losing their money.

All of that is irrelevant. No one (including me) advocates for taking on more risk by saying “the downsides of increased risk are good things and I hope they happen to us!” Of COURSE those risks exist, and of COURSE those people would pay part of the price of that failure. Hell, I work at these companies — if they go out of business, I will be out of a job! I don’t want to fail, either!

But… there are many kinds of failure. The obvious kind is making a big, vision-driven gamble and failing to make it stick, either due to poor execution or just being flat-out wrong. The less obvious kind is failure by irrelevance — building a bland, uninspiring product driven by the requests of people who are naturally drawn to re-creating the world they already know, versus what could be. It’s a pretty comfortable way to fail, though. It often takes a while, and it’s slow, like a frog boiling in a pot, so you can blame an infinite array of discrete events (“remember our crazy VP of Sales?”) or shifts in the market for the fact that you were never going to be able to hit a home run because you sat there with the bat on your shoulder hoping for a walk.

If you follow my bold vision, and it falls on its face, I’m willing to be held accountable for that. That’s why I work at startups, and in technology. If I’m not willing — and this happens, I can do cost-benefit analysis, too — I’ll let you know beforehand. But in general, there’s a home run available in every strategy. I don’t mind that people don’t necessarily want to pursue it, but I’m getting a little tired of people talking like they do, but operating like they don’t.

The Two Kinds of Decisions

Sat, 10 Jul 2021 13:09:33 -0400

(I hate when people try to make some facet of their little niche industry into a professional maxim, but I’m going to do it anyways, because it’s a really easy way to write on the internet. So just know that I work at small-medium sized software companies and take my myopic view of the universe for what it’s worth.)

One of the most frustrating things for me at nearly every company I’ve ever worked for is inconsistency in decision making. I’m not talking about the actual decisions being made — I’m talking about the way they are made, and what’s expected/required to justify them.

I often mention my favorite quote — “if we have data let’s use data, if all we have are opinions, let’s use mine” — but this isn’t really about that, either. Or at least, it’s a more nuanced version of that. Because now, as I rapidly approach middle age (ed. You’re already there, champ), I’m completely at peace with the idea that people are going to pull rank in any kind of “tie goes to the runner” kind of decision scenario. That’s cool, I get it, “that’s what the money is for”, etc.

Instead, what I struggle with is one level up — what IS the role of data and objective evidence for any given decision, and more importantly, can we decide that before we start debating potential solutions?

More On Data (see what I did there?)

Now, I swear, I’m not here to beat my usual drum about people being wildly delusional about their ability to collect, normalize, or analyze data. In fact, let me give you an example of a theoretical discussion where what I’m talking about is a challenge.

QUESTION: Should we build Product A, or Product B?

PERSON 1: 65% of customers said they would consider buying Product A, if we built it.

PERSON 2: Our competitor does not have Product A.

PERSON 3: It would be especially difficult for our company, of all companies, to build Product A.

PERSON 4: Companies that offer a version of Product A are able to charge an average of 25% more than our current price.

PERSON 5: Product A is basically just a simpler version of Product X, which we want to build anyways.

PERSON 6: Product A is not something our normal customer would buy — we would need someone with greater/different purchasing authority.

PERSON 7: Everyone is talking about Product A like things. It’s on the cover of Wired.

PERSON 8: We will need to hire 10 experts to build Product A.

PERSON 9: Some rich guy will give us 10 million dollars if we promise to build Product A.

PERSON 10: Our current Product will be illegal by 2024, so we should definitely learn how to build something else.

Now, I very intentionally didn’t put anything worthless in these examples — all of this stuff is important, and while you can argue about the relative weight each should receive, I would never blame company/management team for (a) bringing one of these things up, or (b) considering it in the decision. But… OVERALL, this is a horrendous way to make decisions, and also how basically 95% of the important meetings in my life have gone (just make everything vaguer and extend this to an hour or two).

Obviously, part of the problem is just how complicated of a decision my theoretical situation appears to be. There are (apparently) a lot of highly consequential things to consider! So it’s not surprising that one of the hardest decision making things groups of people face is successfully breaking down complex discussions into smaller ones, without losing the overall context of the larger decision. For example, you could have some giant series of meetings about the costs & challenges of hiring the necessary experts to build Product A, only to then realize later that you have plenty of money and your current product is going to become illegal. But of course, if you try to solve all of this stuff in one mega conversation, it’s going to train-wreck and you’re going to both over-cover and under-cover various factors.

As usual (for me), I blame this entire nightmare on typical business thinking that values precision over coherence. And as I listened to my son explain to me the many small differences between his three to five (the exact number is unclear) imaginary dogs the other day, I thought about how to solve for this.

Performance Decisions & Non-Performance Decisions

“Performance” may have a real business-school term (the hell if I know), but it’s come up a lot for me lately as sort of a clarifier for “quantitative” things. To me, it represents the idea of getting a very specific, very visible return on something that you do. Now, obviously, it’d be nice if everything we did was like this, because then there’d be no risk to anything that we do (or at least no risk greater than what we put in to find out the performance of something). In fact, that’s SO compelling to people (especially rich and powerful people with a lot to lose), that the business world likes to pretend the secret to making an entirely performance-driven organization is simply to demand that everything be a performance decision all of the time. And you can do that! That is, as long as you are an enormous monopoly, a bank, or some other form of established value-extraction.

If you’re building something new, or trying to grow on the non-margins, you are kidding yourself if you think you can make exclusively performance driven decisions. You won’t have the data, and just as importantly, relying solely on reasonably short-term data as the arbiter for everything is going to restrict what you choose to do to a suffocatingly narrow breadth of things. Companies that make purely performance driven decisions are often sitting ducks to be — yes, I’m bringing this word back, just for today — DISRUPTED!!! That’s because you aren’t going to be able to A/B test the impact of sitting still while someone else changes the fundamentals of your market, customer experience, pricing structure, etc., so when it happens you’ll just be standing there scrolling through Excel trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

That’s why to either build something new, or keep your company from getting knifed to death in an alley by Apple or some other non-bank, you simply HAVE to make some non-performance decisions. These are decisions that DON’T necessarily have a measurable impact, or at least not one that you’ll want to use to validate whether you made the right decision or not.

Wait, this already exists, doesn’t it?

Ok, yes, you could write this off as “strategy vs. tactics”, or “qualitative vs. quantitative”, but I actually don’t think that’s quite right for a couple reasons.

Non-performance decisions can and probably SHOULD consult some quantitative data. For instance, you might move into a market that — via actual numbers — you decide is potentially very lucrative. Or you might see customer behavior that indicates an easy path to up or cross-sell. But in a performance decision, those things wouldn’t be enough to get you to pull the trigger. You’d need conversion rates and all this other forward looking stuff you won’t have to be able to say “THIS WILL HAPPEN IF WE DO X, SO LET’S DO X”.
Performance decisions are often tactical, but I don’t necessarily think they have to be, and I actually think I’m starting to see more and more growth-stage organizations try to set strategy via performance. Theoretically, with good enough, broad enough data (and a really wise hand guiding the whole decision making process), I think you could use performance style data to generate strategy. Think of something like Apple’s decision to get rid of the big HomePod. Yeah, sales probably weren’t great, but I bet they weren’t HORRIBLE, either. Given their history and willingness to stick things out (like the watch) I feel like there was something more specific about that sales data, usage data, or something else that made Apple think “let’s do this with small, cheaper speakers instead” besides “that’s what everyone else is doing”. Unfortunately, YOU are not Apple, and you do not have anything even remotely approaching their customer base, operational skill, or data literacy, so you can’t really do this unless you want to delude yourself.

What I’m asking for

So, let’s get back to my original terrible meeting point (my egg sandwich is gone and I’m going to try to bring this home). If all that stuff is important, how are we supposed to make this decision?

Well, again, what drives me up the wall isn’t that we make the wrong decision. You can’t control for that. But we can get rid of the apples and oranges thinking that lumps all of this stuff together and causes people to pretend they are making performance decisions when they are not, by doing some of the following:

Identify risks and rewards.

Most people won’t want to quantify the big, broad, existential ones, but back of the envelope math can help you at least decide whether something is small, medium, or large. Saying “we will need to hire people to integrate these platforms” is important, but taking a minute to roughly outline that it’ll cost about five million bucks or whatever is worth it, because now you can compare that cost to other costs, and potential benefits. Too often, everyone has a different idea in their head about what a proposal is supposed to cost & do, and then it just turns into whether people like it or not.

“Why?”

I had to adjudicate a lot of GDPR concerns at a relatively small company with a relatively junior staff that was way too eager to drop everything in the name of GDPR compliance. While I’m all for following the law, it was a useful exercise to unpack the actual, operational impact of some of their many doomsday scenarios, especially when the law was brand new and enforcement and penalties were entirely unclear. The same thing applies to other broadly “good” or “bad” things — make sure you aren’t comparing 65% improvement in X versus “Y is better for customers”. If this is a non-performance decision and we want to do Y because Y makes logical sense, just do it, and throw the 65% away. But be prepared to not get that decision validated by data in three months, because it’s not going to happen.

Don’t kid yourself

Way, way, WAY too many people (especially executives) just want to do something for reasons they can’t (or are scared to) articulate, and desperately want numbers to cover their butt for them. I get it, that’s fine, everyone does it — the problem is that you’re basically exchanging your expertise and the value of your intuition for numbers that can be generated by anybody, and if you DO have good intuition you probably aren’t as good with that data. So now because we did your idea, we have to do this other, much dumber idea, because it TOO will increase retention by 5% using the terrible math you don’t even believe. And what are you going to say then?

I think a lot of more senior leaders are concerned with becoming “because I said so” types of people. But here’s the thing — the problem with that isn’t your lack of data, it’s your CRAPPY EXPLANATION of why you want to do things a certain way. If you’re bad at explaining your intuition, relying on numbers you are probably also bad at explaining isn’t solving anything, especially since (as in the aforementioned scenario) when someone else brings those same numbers to undermine you, you’re going to tell them to go back to their desk, or pat them on the head and never actually prioritize their idea.

Empathy is Not Experience, and... That's Okay

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 17:57:46 -0400

If there’s anything decent people have come to realize over the last year, it’s that many of us lead very, very different life experiences. As soon as you start getting into the specifics, things start to get complicated (and often testy), so let’s just stick with that observation for now. The lives we lead, the things we start with, or without — they’re all really different, and there are combinations and possibilities in play that a lot of us have never even considered, been aware of, or made accommodations for. I don't think this is especially controversial, but I guess everything is now.

Equally non-controversial, I would think, is that this reality is at the root of a lot of problems and a lot of resentment. Some of it is really big, impactful, and existential to things like the functioning of our republic. Some of it just leads to people getting stressed out at work, or losing themselves in pointless fights on Twitter, or Reddit, or (God forbid) somewhere in real life.

Of course, it isn’t all bad. To the contrary, it feels like today there are way more examples than ever of people getting past resentments by understanding one of these blind spots, and better accommodating someone else. Maybe, as with the bad things, we’re just hearing about more “things” in general thanks to technology and new media, but I’d at least like to think we’re making small bits of progress every now and then.

At work, people like me hear a lot about “empathy”, and especially that we need to have it, or learn it, and use it. Lots of well intentioned, often well-educated, millennial white people (waves to camera like he's in the background of a local news report) have sort of looked around and tried to figure out what the right thing to do is in a world of situations that aren’t really about us, but are definitely affected by or perpetuated by us. It’s a weird position to be in. Not necessarily hard, but definitely weird, because it's very morally ambiguous and there's aren't a lot of good, obvious historical scenarios to emulate. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there, though probably because there are a lot of different scenarios happening, and unfortunately most of them require bespoke, complex solutions, difficult conversations/moments, mistakes, vulnerability, all that good stuff.

With all that complexity and a burning need for a Ted-talk sized solution, the quick one is “have empathy”, and to be fair, there are certainly worse principles to abide by. Being generally interested in the welfare of others and aware of the fact that you probably have blind spots is, frankly, a better starting spot for doing good than most people find themselves in today. So if we can nail that, it’s definitely a positive. But… we need to understand what we’re accomplishing, and what we’re not.

Emotional intelligence is not a panacea

The main thing to keep in mind is that empathy is not shared experience. The way I look at it, empathy is not necessarily understanding a scenario — it’s understanding that a scenario can exist. Those are not the same things, and if you’re trying to contribute to building a better world by expressing empathy, you can’t get caught up on having a shared experience you can never actually have. You have your experience, and you oftentimes have the ability to make your experience richer, and more informed, and more three dimensional. Wonderful! But other people's lives are not series of merit badges you can collect. I lived in Ohio for two years. That doesn't sound like a lot, but I didn't know anybody and I was hundreds of miles from home and I didn't have any money, so it felt like a really long time. But I don’t know what it’s like to be from the midwest, or even just from Ohio, or to feel any of the cultural affinity that’s most common from people who are. I have a better sense of what it is, and what it isn’t, than I did before I moved out there, for sure. But I don’t get to hand wave anyone away who thinks I don’t understand the midwest from other perspectives, because I don’t. Maybe, in some contexts, it doesn't matter that I don't understand that experience. But if that's the case, that's the argument I need to make, not that I somehow share experiences that I don't.

I picked a pretty lame example there because it’s harmless and doesn’t really have a lot of societal baggage — different kinds of suburban white people learning about each other’s regional differences, whoop-dee-damn-doo. But obviously this is also true for differences in experience that have much greater consequences, like race, gender, and economics. It’s a good thing that we are trying to understand each other more. But we have to know that people trying to understand YOU really can’t beyond a certain level — that’s just a limitation of the human experience — and on the other side, that knowing you have a blind spot can help you mitigate it, but is unlikely to ever truly remove it. It just gives you the ability to drive a little more carefully in certain scenarios.

There are a lot of social and political changes that I think need to happen to build what I consider a (more) virtuous society that best reflects not the literal, textbook America we started off with, but the ideal I think we were at least shooting for in our weird, stunted, hypocritical way back in the 18th century. But those changes are necessary to solve the very specific challenges we face right now, which are less fundamental problems of humanity, and more individual injuries and damages we’ve inflicted to certain groups for certain reasons. I know a lot of people don't like to hear that, but you don't have to read Howard Zinn to look at history and conclude that America has some very specific baggage that isn't even all that old. We have to fix the resulting damage, and it’s going to make a lot of people angry, and if I knew how to resolve that I’d run for office.

However, those things aside (yes, that’s a lot to ask), baking in general empathy, the ability to see it and accept it, and most importantly, an understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished with it, is a change and a social investment that can do a lot of good over the indefinite future, as we deal with more problems that surface from our past decisions, and even ones we haven’t created yet, but almost certainly will. We should do this. It’s not weakness, it’s not pandering. It’s becoming more human in the best way, and as small as the world is now, it’s increasingly something we can’t afford to do.

Nobody's Perfect

Wed, 16 Dec 2020 23:13:08 -0400

Two of the say, maybe six companies that run the world are fighting. This time, it's Facebook and Apple. Fortunately for those of you who don't really pay attention to this kind of thing and want to get up to speed quickly, it's a very simple argument.

Apple makes money off of a lot of things, including selling gazillions of phones and a variety of rapidly growing services (music, cloud space, etc.), but one thing they don't make money off of is user data. It's entirely plausible that they choose to do this because either (a) people in charge like CEO Tim Cook find it kind of gross and don't really want to do, or (b) they just don't think it's a very good business and, unlike companies that do, they have extremely lucrative alternative models a data-selling or advertising business might compromise. It's also possible that Apple is just not very good at this. Either way, it's not how they make money (and they are very good at making money), which is the safest way to predict that a company won't do something.

Facebook makes almost all of their money from advertising. They sell a bunch of random stuff like VR goggles and TV webcams and stuff like that, but the vast, vast, vast majority of their very large profits comes from selling targeted advertising. They target these ads by hoovering up as much data as possible about anyone who uses Facebook products, including data that has nothing to do with using Facebook products. For example, Facebook has always attempted to (and often succeeded) in tracking your browsing and application behavior (again, outside of Facebook properties) adding it to their information about you, and targeting to you with it. There are other things they might do with that data, but that's the main one we know they make most of their money from, and as mentioned when discussing Apple, we therefore know it's something they're probably going to keep doing, and continue to try to grow.

Inevitably, we've reached a conflict. Apple wants people to buy phones and use Apple services. There is real financial benefit for Apple from building these complex user behavior models. Maybe they can build a better experience for their products with it (or at least one you're more likely to buy), and they do that to some degree with their action recommendations and stuff like that. But they don't need to guess what you want to buy, so in general they don't really try to find out.

In fact, it's even more than that. Since there's no opportunity cost there for Apple (or, again, because this is some principle they have, but we're talking about pretty big, very profitable companies here so I'm trying to stay away from that argument), they've attempted to leverage the other direction increasingly structuring their ecosystem around user privacy, or more accurately, user control of their own data. Since this has some technical disadvantages (notably a lack of magic cloud services that guess everything you want before you want it), it makes sense that they would stress the advantages as well -- namely, that when you're using an Apple device, it's less likely that advertising companies are constantly tracking your every move and attempting to monetize it.

Pick your poison, or don't

In my opinion, Facebook is now extremely gross both for its increasingly creepy business model and the general low-quality information and interactions available on its product. I haven't used it or WhatsApp (which it owns) in nearly three years, and I'm just about done weaning myself of Instagram (which it also owns). Obviously I'm not putting a freaking camera or whatever from these guys in my house, either.

That being said, I don't think Facebook's revenue model is entirely immoral. It's just a choice; do you prefer free products & services that are subsidized in ways you may not fully understand, or do you prefer paying what is frequently quite a bit of money for products where that cost is more directly related to the value you get? Say whatever you want about Facebook -- it's does a lot of stuff for a free service, and as a company, it offers a LOT of things without every actually asking any of its users to spend any money. That works for certain people.

As mentioned, while I prefer Apple's stance here (and, more broadly their general approach to business -- there is a reason I own a lot of Apple products), they're not some benevolent charity. Completely unrelated to these issues, I think they've engaged in a mix of anti-competitive and high-leverage revenue maximization strategies that are either illegal or should be illegal. I say unrelated because unlike "free product" and "opaque user monetization", Apple's abusive App Store policies aren't necessary to support its strategic focus on privacy that I prefer. Facebook, on the other hand, is stuck -- you can't coherently argue that Facebook should remain free while not monetizing your usage in other ways.

Stan in the Place That You Are

Now, the reason I mention all of this "Apple's no angel" thing (even though it's completely unrelated) is because I'm surprised at how necessary that seems to be to make a compelling argument that Facebook's user data policy/strategy sucks. It's seems obvious to me that Apple's anti-competitive App Store policies, for instance, or their dependance on (and kid-glove treatment) of the Chinese government have literally nothing to do with a stance on user data. But somehow, evaluating billion dollar conglomerates is often treated by people as some kind of character test, like we're trying to figure out who handles arbitrary moral challenges better and then just defending that actor from any and all criticism (at least relatively) by default.

Now, if this were the way I felt issues and policies should be evaluated, I'd totally be an Apple Stan. But it's not, and that means no matter how often I agree with Apple on different policies, I'm never simply going to agree with something they do just because they do it.

(For those of you -- likely my more life-experienced readers -- who don't what a "Stan" is, here you go.)

Instead, the purchase decision for a product of service will -- as with all similar things -- come down to some kind of cost/benefit analysis that includes whatever relevant moral component is involved, and I'll go on a case by case basis. I don't need to buy half my products from Apple and half from Amazon or whatever to prove this, either. I choose to take part in the Apple App Store despite it's bad policies, because in general the store is better for me even with them in place. This is also why I'd like many or all of those policies investigated and potentially regulated away. I can literally choose Apple (or anyone else) over various technology rivals 100% of the time, and still think something Apple chooses to do is the wrong choice.

In some ways, the way we're starting to think about this smaller and smaller number of companies that effectively define and advance consumer behavior is uncomfortably similar to how we think about political parties -- the ultimate zero-sum duopoly. Now, it's worse for a lot of reasons, namely that there are even fewer options (although you really only have two options for phone platforms), and because tech companies generally overlap in weird Venn diagrams while our two political parties increasingly seem to exist primarily to oppose each other.

But... it's still bad, and just as with political parties, Stans don't challenge the things they love, which is a necessary part of not just holding them accountable, but making them better. That's why the point isn't to both-sides everything, but to look past the actors involved and assess the thing they do, propose, or stand up for. Your favorite brand or politician can be right 98% of the time (in your eyes), but you still need to be ready to call out actions and concepts that aren't right.

People refer to the instinct of the moment to bring everything down to an equal, terrible level as cynicism, and maybe that's right. But I don't think useful, constructive cynicism (my favorite kind) is about looking for terrible things from a faction so you can ignore or, God forbid, justify other terrible things from another. There are an infinite number of things to beat up for being terrible, immoral, or wrong. So many, in fact, that if we find it especially reassuring to know that our disfavored factions are wrong, we're never going to get to the part where we make anything right.

Legitimacy, Enforcement, and What Comes After

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 01:03:23 -0400

I am not the first person on the internet to tell you that since 2016, the number one thing that’s been eroded and removed from American society is the idea of “norms” — things you “can” or “cannot” do not due to a specific consequence (like going to jail, or being removed from office), but due to the generally shared understanding that doing that thing would eventually destroy the consensus that keeps the country functioning.

We’ve all learned just how much of our country operates under inertia, versus the true rule of law, where rules aren’t “expectations”, but are codified with real enforcement mechanisms that are ready and willing to activate when said rules are violated. Some things, like making everyone an “acting” head of a function so you can avoid confirmation hearings, or ignoring how much the chief executive is literally shoveling public money into his businesses, are just tasteless and embarrassing acts of bad faith. Maybe they are technically legal acts under the laws that exist, or maybe they are just so gross and weird that we never thought to put a law in place.

Other acts are even bolder — they rely on enforcement of a very real, legal limitation simply not working, or having insufficient resources. This is like robbing a bank, escaping the local police, and then arguing that what you did is fine, or else someone would have arrested you. When Congress issues a subpoena to a relatively ordinary White House official, they are supposed to show up. While you can end up in a legal battle over what questions they are required to answer based on different executive prerogatives, you have to at least show up. If you don’t, you should be found in contempt and put in prison, which is what would happen if I didn’t show up for a subpoena. Now, it’s become a courtesy to show up, because people played chicken with the enforcement of the rule, and won.

Maximalist Chicken

Most reasonable people I talk to — regardless of their politics — are uncomfortable with the second thing, because it really does feel like the system is broken. Ask a non-political person if something political is okay or not, and eventually you’ll probably end up talking about whether said action is “actually illegal”. People understand the difference between the letter of the law, and the spirit of the law, and they live in a society where everyone from local government to Verizon constantly leans on the former and ignores the latter. But, they generally believe that, when push comes to shove, laws should be enforced.

What people seem to undervalue is the impact that the removal of norms and non-legally binding political behaviors have on society, primarily because people associate “norm” with “social grace”, and either don’t believe or just aren’t aware of how much actual power is kept in check by people simply deciding it would be bad for everyone in general to exercise that power.

That doesn’t mean I think relying on norms is a good way to run a society; in many ways, it’s not. Norms are both weak and alarmingly amoral. Norms have protected racial caste systems, sexual assault, and a host of objectively awful things in place even when said things could no longer be protected by law. But the fact is, America has been (for all it’s problems) a pretty good place to live, and a pretty good social framework to build on, largely due to norms that have insulated us from fascism, communism, theocracy, and other failed systems. Those norms have survived because we’ve looked at those various -isms and thought “we actively do not want this place to turn into that”, and that was always more important than getting to be in charge for another 2 or 4 years.

But that shared agreement of some basic things we don’t want to be is exactly what we appear to have lost. And with it, we’ve lost basically the only things keeping us from turning into one of those places we used to fear becoming most.

America is not legally required to be America

The biggest misconception about America — the shiny, positive version of America we want to have, that is — is that it is, by nature of its Constitution — somehow required to be the country that we’re used to living in. My best guess is that this is due to some combination of poor awareness of our own history, the increasingly dated and hard to parse language (for regular people) of our most critical founding documents, and the fact that the country has undergone enormous changes (becoming an international superpower, for one) that have been baked into the culture, but for the most part, neither our institutions nor the actual Constitution. Americans in 1975 had very different expectations of their society than Americans in 1925, but rely on the same basic founding documents with a few (important) amendments and a lot of laws. And we don’t really make laws anymore, to be honest.

The result of this is that people mistakingly assume that the American system of government, as defined in the Constitution, if played to the absolute letter of the law, will basically look like the America they know. This is, as we’re seeing, not even remotely true. The America we know and love is built on staggering levels of public, communal investment, and long-term thinking that — while influenced and affected by varying degrees of partisan politics, of course — are not a series of continuing resolutions and scorched earth governance designed to maximize the ability to jam party loyalists into lifetime court appointments. We didn’t beat the Nazis, go to the moon, end slavery, clean up a wide variety of truly ghastly environmental problems, build the world’s most dynamic capitalism, etc., etc. by constantly pushing the burden of reasonableness onto whoever would take it, as long as it wasn’t me.

None of that is legally required. America being a decent, functional society that respects its citizens and seeks the consent of the government is not baked into the Constitution. Instead, for 250 years, we’ve made the active, often difficult decision to use the Constitution as inspiration for building a place like that.

Why Mitch McConnell Sucks

I don’t agree with the political views of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts, but I have wildly different opinions of the two. Roberts is the driving force behind some of the worst things that have happened to American politics and society, not the least of which is the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. The Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to a disgusting amount of corrupt, untraceable money that has poured into our elections for no good reason. He’s done immeasurable damage to some of the most important concepts in the country, because he’s an entitled, out of touch elitist.

However, he is infinitely less dangerous than Mitch McConnell because if nothing else, he understands the mortality of his own institution. The Supreme Court was not ordained by God; its specifics are barely even spelled out in the Constitution. We listen to it because we choose to listen to it, and it’s very possible that we’re approaching a moment where the part of the government that actually does stuff is told by the Supreme Court that it CANNOT do something, and simply replies “watch me”. If Democrats are the ones to do it, they’ll get it done by abusing the lack of specifics in the rules and simply adding more judges until they get what they want. If Republicans are the ones to do it, they seem more likely to ignore the Court without any legal argument at all, but simply because nothing will happen when they do it. Either way, the Court lives in a delicate world where it has to make adhering to the Court’s decisions easier than NOT adhering to them, and Roberts has (smartly) started to do this by breaking ties in ways that at least somewhat reflect the political mood.

You can write this off as judicial legislation/activism if you’d like, but remember that Roberts isn’t trying to generate policy outcomes; he’s just aware of the incredibly fragile position the Court is in, that the rest of us forget exists because this made-up-institution with lifetime appointments and broad jurisdiction has a badass looking building and an even more badass name. But Roberts doesn’t forget.

McConnell, on the other hand, is much more fundamentally dangerous. He's now running the country’s legislative function the way I play video games right before I go to bed. I save my game, and then just start doing the craziest shit imaginable in the hopes that it will work, because I’m bored and quitting anyways. That way, if it works, great! I’ll save again. If not, I’ll just turn off the game. That certainly feels like what’s happening today — Mitch just keeps making increasingly cynical, self-serving decisions, and seeing if the fragile balance that keeps the country together breaks or not, and they keep working.

The problem, though, is that eventually they won’t, and there also won’t be a saved game to go back to. Mitch might have impressed us all with his ability to control huge parts of a powerful country with a distinct minority of support (congratulations, I guess?), but it’s never enough for him. His coalition keeps shrinking without becoming any more accommodating or interested in compromise, so he has to keep coming up with more aggressive ways to stay in charge. It’s a smaller group that makes up for its diminished numbers every year with a stronger, more intensely focused dislike of the majority, and under American norms, that’s not really a governing coalition. So we get stuff like this, where we’ll use a poorly representative body to jam through lifetime appointments to an all powerful body with no electoral safeguards at all.

That is now the plan, as batshit crazy as that sounds. It can fail in two ways. One is the obvious, traditional way — the actual mechanism of circumventing popular will can fail (darn elections!) and his GOP majority could panic and crack at the thought of ramming through an appointee, only to lose anyways and invite a flood of electoral reforms that, while “extreme” by the standard of doing nothing, are mostly about allowing people to vote easily and adding representation for American citizens who lack it for no particular reason. These things will disproportionately benefit Democrats, but at the same time, they will all be inside the bounds of logic and the American norms we expect.

The other way McConnell’s plan can fail is much worse — worse for everyone, but worst of all for him. And it’s that he fails by succeeding. He rams home a Supreme Court justice, sure. But in doing so, he finally fully normalizes the kind of “hey, it’s legal” approach to governance he’s slowly become dependent on. And instead of a right wing that’s driven by activists and reigned in by a few moderates, and a left wing that’s driven by moderates and yelled at by activists, we get two wings that embrace a total war, norms-be-damned strategy. The filibuster goes immediately, which allows court packing — not just to right a wrong, but to advance an agenda, because it’s very much within the rights of the majority. Imagine a Democratic Party that worried as little about institutional integrity as today’s Republican Party, throwing the furniture into the fire just as quickly as today’s GOP.

The only outcome for Mitch that works is — fortunately for him, I guess — the one that certainly seems to happen every time, which is that he makes a slightly more disingenuous power grab that puts a slightly more disproportionate amount of power into the hands of his people, and everyone just grudgingly accepts it because they can’t come up with a norm-compatible way to fight back. And hey, this is what usually happens, so maybe it can work… forever? Let’s just say I’m skeptical. The Boomers are on the way out slowly, but it’s going to happen, and eventually it’s going to start happening quickly. At that point, you’re going to have an enormous class of diverse, relatively educated, motivated, and poorly represented citizens without any Boomer-era perks to lose (“what about my pension?” LOLOLOLOL), demanding that the ruling minority provide a reason why this system even exists at all.

Then what?

I'll be honest — I certainly don’t blame young-ish liberals for being eager to shed some norms and kick some ass. They’ve been hearing Lucy and the football jokes for their entire lives, and being told by their own party leaders they need to cater their preferences to entitled white guys in far-off diners. Meanwhile, their political opponents take bigger, louder, more emotionally satisfying swings and at worse come out of the battle tied. Why not get their own Mitch, and stick the burden of responsibility on the GOP?

The problem is that you can’t build anything this way — just look at what’s come out of the Trump era. Basically every achievement is either some stupid military vanity project, or not doing something. Not protecting voting rights, not funding this or that, not enforcing inconvenient laws, deregulating things (sometimes by simply ignoring violations or existing regulations). What’s a new thing that works, that is better than the old thing? Freaking Space Force? Give me a break.

Power cynicism has done nothing but give McConnell and crew the reigns to a wagon they can’t even drive. Those won’t advance any kind of non-vengeance, non-resentment powered project, and the liberals I know want to build, grow and change the way a lot of things work. And that’s exactly why Mitch keeps winning — because he knows that if the goal is just to keep anything from happening, he can’t lose. The only way to stop him is to join him in destroying the system, and if the system is destroyed, how will you do anything then? Right?

And that’s where… I don’t know. I don’t know what a packed Supreme Court looks like; I don’t know what electoral reform looks like without a filibuster, or if the demographic and voting trends of the last 20 years, freed from soft-voter-suppression tactics unlocks a wildly different, technocratic America that’s been lurking just underneath the surface.

But it’s certainly possible. And we might actually find out, because if Mitch screws up and reads the room wrong, unlike me, he can’t just turn off the Xbox and go to bed.

Customer Data & the Immovable Object

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 23:19:58 -0400

The number one obsession in digital marketing for the last decade or so has been targeting. For all the money in ad-tech and sponsored content and other 21st century marketing things, the actual experience of being advertised to and, for lack of a better word, effectively propositioned by companies online is pretty lame. Targeting promises two things:

You don't have to waste time/money/effort advertising to people who are unlikely to want your product
You can communicate to people who are likely to be interested in increasingly personalized (and thus more effective) ways.

This is basically the promise of the whole digital marketing ecosystem. Always send the right thing to the right people, and be able to do it easily and in many cases automatically.

For years, we've seen everything about the 21st century consumer economy move in this direction. Free products, exploding social networks, huge investments in companies with basically no business model, etc., etc., all the standard Valley jokes, essentially -- all based on the idea that marketing information would get more precise, more valuable, and allow for better, more precise targeting. In fact, this has been going on for so long now that it's simply assumed by both business and consumers that this data exists, that it's accurate, and that it's only going to be more accurate. To think otherwise is to be completely out of touch with "technology".

And then... there's Apple. Perhaps you've heard of them. They recently became the first two trillion dollar company, and even if you're not into meaningless psychological market metrics, they're fabulously profitable with no accounting gimmicks and own most of the profit inside the world's most critical and lucrative consumer market. When people come after Apple about anti-trust, it's not to argue that Apple has a monopoly on phones -- it's that Apple has a monopoly on the market on payment processing for selling things on Apple phones. Think about that for a second. It's incredible! Huge (although comparably small) companies gird themselves for battle against Apple not to dethrone them from their position, but simply to demand better treatment on their devices. We've completely conceded the market for "good all-in-one-digital devices that the average person will actually like" to these guys. Whether it's because Apple is amazing, or the rest of the world just doesn't have the stomach/discipline to match, that's an enormous concession to make, and implies that Apple is effectively unbeatable at this.

Now, where the collision comes is with the idea of data privacy. Apple is notoriously bullish on privacy; they've pushed (and promoted) everything from anonymous "Login with Apple" services to on-device computing for face recognition in an attempt to leverage the idea that your data should remain private and in your control. They do this because, unlike everyone else, they make money from you purchasing their products and services, and many (most?) other huge tech companies do not. So while privacy may be some sort of cultural value at Apple, and that's cool and all, more importantly it's a clear point of differentiation and value for a brand that's often associated with relatively high costs, but generally good customer experience. In other words, it's in Apple's business interest to highlight the downsides of having your personal data sold, and to deliver solutions that make that practice less prevalent. There's no opportunity cost to them for doing so (they're not good at making non-trivial amounts of money off your personal data), but there's upside in providing value that almost everyone else they could possibly compete with is fundamentally, economically incapable of providing.

As with all the other big tech companies, Apple isn't just a company -- it's a platform. But unlike something like Facebook, which is a very large, influential platform, from a dollars perspective, Apple is the platform. If Apple won't let you do it, there's simply a very low ceiling on how much money you can make doing it. That's not because consumers don't have non-Apple choices -- thanks to Android, they have many -- but because they don't actually like those other choices, and in general the ones who spend money have shown they're going to choose their iPhone and some other app over your app and some other phone.

See where I'm going, here? Increasingly precise data collection is inevitable, because... we know how to do it, I guess? I mean hey, look, GDPR was supposed to be the death of all this and we wormed our way around that, didn't we? But meanwhile, the most important digital platform on the planet essentially has no prospective rivals, famously promotes a regulated, walled-garden approach at the expense of third parties in the name of customer experience, and -- oh yeah -- has already shown that they DGAF about your double bank shot monetization strategy.

Ad-tech and user tracking is real, but it's also a lot flimsier than I think most consumers (and even many marketing people) realize. Learning what marketing executives like to see has lead to a lot of cosmetic "improvements" ("13% of your users like snowboarding! It's machine learning!") layered on top of the same flawed technology that still spends a lot of time crossing its fingers and hoping that Apple doesn't close a web loophole via mobile Safari, and that you don't happen to clear your cache. Ad-tech has the bullshitters on its side, along with a lot of people who NEED it to be real to justify whatever dumb unicorn or unicorn-ecosystem they've invested in, but the truth is that in any sort of conflict with a company in Apple's position, it'd be less David and Goliath and a lot more "ant, boot".

So maybe Amazon will eventually have something better to retarget me with than the trash can I bought yesterday. It's certainly not impossible. But if I were a marketing-tech company, I'd be a lot more scared of Tim Cook than Congress.

POSTSCRIPT: My Spidey-Sense must have been tingling..

... because here we go. It's not the first skirmish, and it won't be the last, but the theme that runs through all of these is that advertisers/data brokers really have no leverage. They're effectively scavengers, so there's not a lot they can do when the town comes and picks up all the garbage. When you compare platform leverage, Apple's is "you aren't going to be on our platform unless you can get the government involved", and Facebook's is "we're going to tell everyone you are terrible". Only one of those things is actual leverage.

We Are Out of Ideas

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:43:52 -0400

This just eats at my soul.

Grocery workers across the country say morale is crushingly low as the pandemic wears on with no end in sight. Overwhelmed employees are quitting mid-shift. Those who remain say they are overworked, taking on extra hours, enforcing mask requirements and dealing with hostile customers. Most retailers have done away with hazard pay even as workers remain vulnerable to infection, or worse. Employees who took sick leave at the beginning of the pandemic say they cannot afford to take unpaid time off now, even if they feel unwell.

It’s just such a massive failure of capitalism as the backbone of society. And that’s coming from me, a person who is extremely aware of how much positive social stuff has occurred thanks to capitalism. But this incarnation, this “capital as God” approach to things, it just leaves too many moral holes you can drive a truck through. This isn’t a temporary inefficiency that consumers are going to fix over time as their preferences affect pricing and supply chains. This is just not needing to pay an essential social function enough money to live — this is valuing people on their ability to be replaced like they are shooting guards or product marketing directors when we need this work done and they aren’t making enough doing it to live the kind of life we believe humans should get to live.

I don’t think government is THE answer to almost anything, but the fact is that it can be AN answer to almost anything. That seems really un-compelling on the surface, especially if you are doing okay and have alternatives. But consumerism doesn’t just lack good answers for this kind of amoral, transactional treatment of essential workers — it has no answers, and isn’t going to come with any, either. Making this situation into something decent and not completely abhorrent is just not in capitalism’s remit, at least not on a time scale that isn’t counted in decades that we don’t have to spare.

I am really okay being talked out of my support for Warren-style “save capitalism with aggressive regulation and distribution”, partially because even though it looks absolutely right to me, it sounds like an incredible challenge to implement in modern America. But we’re not going to suddenly figure out morally virtuous command economies without bread lines or whatever, and the current “hey, maybe YOU’LL be a billionaire someday, and then YOU can have human furniture” fantasy straight out of “The Running Man” is just wrong and gross and I’m not okay with it.

Problem Solving

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 14:41:23 -0400

The NBA started back up this week, and it’s nice to have it back in my life, even if the whole thing is extremely precarious. And of course, it is extremely precarious — the league is attempting to operate in the middle of a pandemic a few months after shutting down its season. But as I sat there watching not only a pretty amazing logistical effort involving bubbles, fake crowds, and the like, but a well-coordinated, inclusive attempt to recognize the current civil right revival that disproportionately affects their players, I couldn’t help but be impressed. Will the bubble work? No one knows. But if it does work, we’ll look back at what the NBA did and marvel at the effort. It’s that impressive.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, of course, we have baseball and football. Baseball is in the middle of collapsing literally weeks into it’s delayed start to the season, apparently blindsided by the fact that their players are humans who can both contract and spread the highly contagious virus that has plagued the world for months. They took essentially no precautions and did essentially no preparation. Since that’s going so great, football has decided to take a similar approach, leaving all possibilities open (Fans? No fans?) but not really doing anything.

How different professional sports leagues choose to react to a black swan like this is an interesting experiment because it’s quasi-controlled. The leagues all have basically the same challenges regarding TV money, attendance, insurance, and collective bargaining, admittedly with different specifics regarding the number of players, levels of contact, and things like that. It would have been fascinating to see different approaches for every league (the NBA is by no means perfect), but instead there have really only been two broad approaches that encompass everyone — either do something about the problem, or do nothing.

“That’s not my job” is kind of a weird position to take in general; it’s certainly discouraged (often to an inefficient extreme) in the VC-backed startup world I’ve been in for the last eight years or so. But it’s absolutely crazy when it impacts you so directly. If you’re driving a truck, and another truck jumps the median and starts barreling towards you, do you just plow into him? “Well, he’s in my lane. There was nothing I could do.” You haver to admit that Adam Silver and the NBA, at the very least, turned the wheel. Maybe they’ll drive into a lamp post, or maybe the truck will hit them anyways. But they assessed the impact of a head-on collision, and decided it was probably the worst thing that could happen, so now they’re doing everything they can to avoid it.

You could ask the same questions of American society in general. We didn’t turn the wheel so much as brace for impact; we threw some money (not much) at the problem, and now that a hundred and fifty thousand people are dead a good chunk of the citizenry are willing to cut the sleeves off an old t-shirt and put one of them over their nose and mouth. But for the most part, the entire response has been either:

there’s no truck
the truck shouldn’t be there
head on collisions only kill people who were about to die anyways
if we turn the wheel we’re going to be late for the movie
the oncoming truck is probably Chinese

All these responses have two things in common. One, they don’t require any effort — they are all justifications for either doing nothing or changing the subject. Two, they don’t work. The truck still hits you, a pandemic still spreads, and now you’re left to sheepishly drag yourself out of the wreckage, or scream “I WAS RIGHT, THAT TRUCK WAS CHINESE!” while you slowly burn to death in the cabin.

Smarter, more eloquent, and properly edited people have written about the millions of things wrong with our pandemic response. What scares me is that this isn’t “the perfect storm” to undermine American society. What scares me is that at this point, basically any storm would have done it, because our decision making is now so skewed towards protecting established interests and routines that it’s not that we can’t adapt to a situation that threatens them, it’s that we actively refuse to.

"Marketing"

Sat, 11 Jul 2020 16:38:33 -0400

In general, having kids has been pretty detrimental to my brain, at least in terms of raw cognitive ability. I'm tired a lot, I have way less time to think, and I have a lot of hilarious conversations that are enlightening about say, the human condition, but aren't exactly sophisticated technical or policy discussions.

I think this is why so many ambitious people (with the resources and social privileges to match) wait forever to have families. No matter how many resources you have, being a good parent just takes a lot out of you that only you can provide. It's one thing if you're rich and don't care about building an actual relationship with your kids; then you can pay other people to give you free time back. But the insidious thing about parenting is that you probably don't want that (even if you can afford it, which almost no one can). So it comes back to you to explain the difference between Iron Man and Spiderman to your son two or three hundred times a week to your son not because it's a great conversation or because it's on your mind, or even because it's enriching for him. It's just what he wants to talk about.

In between these conversations (if you can call them that), my poor, addled brain usually uses it's remaining horsepower to think about one thing -- unsurprisingly, that thing is "why he is so obsessed about X", where X is one of several very random things we keep coming back to. These include the Paw Patrol franchise, firefighters, and most recently, the Avengers.

Before I had kids, I assumed children became obsessed with random things like comic book franchises due to media saturation and advertising. Basically, the world wants little kids to badger their parents into going to theme parks and buying toys and seeing movies, so they indoctrinate kids with messages saying these things are cool at young ages. I can't be the only person who assumed this, and to be honest, I kind of always assumed this is why I liked things like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or whatever when I was growing up, even though I don't specifically remember being advertised to this way. I figured the whole thing was insidious and subconscious, because I am a cynical marketing person.

But a crazy thing happened with my kids, who as of my writing this are 3 and nearly 4 and a half -- they haven't really been exposed to much of anything. They don't go to school yet, and we've moved four times in their lifetimes (hopefully that's done) so they don't even really have friends they see regularly. They don't browse YouTube or the internet or whatever, so the algorithm isn't getting them. The only things they get exposed to are, basically, individually chosen by me and my wife. We've always worked from home a fair amount, and they've had the same daily caretaker who never puts them in front of a TV or a phone.

I'm not putting a moral component on this life of theirs -- I'm just saying the result is kind of a controlled consumer experiment. My kids really aren't saturated with anything they don't ask for, and they only ask for things we showed them, because they don't know about anything else.

What consumers inherently love

Where this gets interesting is in what my kids become obsessed with. I like all the things I introduce my kids to pretty equally, although obviously I'm a little more amped up about certain personal passions, favorite bands, and things like that. But they get exposed to almost all of my favorite bands/etc. to some degree, and only become obsessed with certain things. And with no marketing, no peer pressure, and no saturation you actually get a window into what ideas, art -- and yes, products -- are just inherently compelling.

There is no reason for my son to love Paw Patrol, except that, by his standards, it's f$#@ing awesome. And when I think about it, the concept is kind of awesome, even if the particulars don't appeal to me as much as they would if I hadn’t already spent 38 years on earth. But little kids love animals, they love vehicles, and they love saving the day, because when you think about it, those things are all fantastically entertaining. Paw Patrol combines them in a way that is both interesting and easy to process for a little kid. It doesn't need any marketing at all, outside of literally getting a kid to know it exists.

My son has never seen the actual Paw Patrol cartoon. He doesn't know one exists (thank God). He doesn't need to -- he saw a library book with a picture of all the characters and simply wanted to know more. What are their names? What do they do? Why are they doing it? What does that one do? Does he drive that awesome looking truck? Can I be one of them? He didn't need marketing material to drive these questions in his brain -- he just looked at an exciting, intriguing thing and came up with all of them.

Superheroes are another example. Like many consumers (I assume, based on their box office returns), I have a soft spot for Marvel movies. I wouldn't say those movies are in the Top 100 of my interests, but they are enjoyable distractions and I think they are good stories told well. There is also a five year old in my brain that likes cool robots and explosions and awesome fighting scenes where bad people get what's coming to them. It's hard to argue that these Marvel movies aren't good products for all of these reasons -- but given how much promotional money goes into releasing them, I think there's also an assumption that people like me partially like them because we've been convinced to like them.

I had zero intention of introducing my kids to superheroes for several more years. Number one, it wasn't really on my list of priorities compared to things like "ride a bike" and "use a toilet", because I figured they'd eventually discover entertainment like that on their own timeline. But then one day, their babysitter bought me a kind of awesome, definitely ridiculous t-shirt with 1980s style versions of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and Spider-Man on it that says "TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK" in huge block letters. It's great and very comfortable, but it's not really office wear even for me, so I mostly wear it around the house.

My kids were obsessed with it immediately. Unlike Paw Patrol, which my daughter is only semi-interested in, this one fascinated both of them immediately. With literally no additional reference material, we talked about those four comic book characters at least once a week for months. What are their names again? Are they friends? What do they do? How are they different? Where did they meet? I always answered honestly, with both whatever plot information I was aware of ("Thor is from space"), as well as logistics ("they are all made up"). This just made them more interesting. Eventually, I cracked and showed them one or two little tiny, non-violent scenes from a couple of MCU movies. Spider-Man swinging around. Iron Man trying out his new suit. Captain America jogging. Nothing epic, nothing more than once a day, and certainly nothing longer than two or three minutes.

Doesn't matter. Both of my kids are completely obsessed with these characters, to the point where my son took my USB camping light and asked my to put it on his shirt so he could pretend to be Iron Man.

But you know what? Who can blame him? Iron Man is totally badass as a concept, and the limited amount of information/validation my kids have confirms, without a doubt, that he is in fact totally badass. They don't need to be saturated with Marvel marketing to convince them of the quality of these ideas -- the only thing the marketing needs to do is make sure they know these ideas exist. That's important, but it's a different job from what a lot of people expect promotions to do; i.e., make us interested in something.

It's the product, stupid

I thought back to my childhood obsessions and realized most of this applied. I loved Jose Canseco because he was an amazing freak of a human specimen (yes, manufactured by illegal drugs, but like I knew that in 1987, or would have cared either way). I loved Legos because they're an absolutely incredible idea that lets you do awesome things. I loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the same reason my son loves MCU characters -- they're awesome, and exciting, and awe-inspiring and just basically cool as hell. Sometimes I loved something kind of stupid, like Starcom, because the other kids in my kindergarten class liked it, but those things never lasted. I still like Legos.

I run into this problem all the time as a person who does product marketing (and not consumer product marketing either, but no one seems to think that matters). No one straight up says it, but the edict is clear -- make people want this. They should want it, and if they don't, that's nothing we can't fix with the right message.

I see a lot of value in good product marketing, and to this point specifically, good product promotional marketing. You gotta get the word out, and when you aren't selling inherently jaw-dropping concepts like armor you can fly into space and shoot lasers out of, you have to articulate value propositions and make arguments. It's totally true, and if it weren't, I would deserve a major pay cut.

But I still think people wildly underestimate the importance of good or great ideas executed in jaw-droppingly good ways. That's why people truly love things, whether it's some IT platform for remote wiping laptops, or a movie. They might buy something for another reason; social pressure, some emotional weak spot, or whatever, but at the end of the day those things are fleeting. And yet still, even back in 2010 we had alleged product people looking at the iPhone -- the iPhone! -- and saying "this is a marketing creation, Nokia has been doing this for years" and just completely and totally missing what was going on around them.

Now, there's probably a whole other post about how this entire argument is what great product marketing -- not product promotion -- is actually about; building the right thing. But I have kids, so I'll probably have that one ready in about five years.

Applied Compliance

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 17:53:13 -0400

It's only my opinion, but one of the more interesting things I've written (and then promptly lost in a tangled web of SQL dumps while messing around with this site) was a piece on managing people and the different approaches towards setting goals. I thought of these two approaches as engagement and compliance, where the former attempts to create a positive reason for you to do what I want, and the latter simply orders you to do it with the threat (implied or otherwise) of bad consequences.

Because this was before the world ended, the piece mainly focused on using these concepts at work, especially as a relatively inexperienced but still pretty cynical people manager. Unsurprisingly, my spineless neoliberal conclusion was that the best approach was a mix of the two approaches, because both had limitations when taken to their logical extremes, which I explained (as is my way) by creating hilarious straw-men scenarios and clubbing them to death for thousands of words. For a blog post from an un-credentialed keyboard jockey, I thought it was pretty good. Maybe someday I'll scrape it out of those SQL dumps and piece it back together.

Now, back to today. Since the world ended, I've been introduced to two really stark, very non-straw-men examples of these extremes, and wow are they ever terrible. Let's review.

21st Century Policing, a.k.a., "Compliance Addiction"

In theory, the reason police exist is to keep people safe. Even if the actual reason is something completely different, the actual reason people THINK the police exist (and thus continue to support them existing) is still... to keep people safe. Not some people, not the police themselves, not buildings, but ultimately people.

Over the years, policing has involved a lot of different tactics to keep people safe. As a young white kid in the suburbs, there was a fair amount of "engagement" for a while (I won a basketball and a savings bond for winning an essay contest about not using drugs), and then as I got older things moved more towards the compliance end (I was pulled over four times in one summer home from college for no discernible reason; one time I was told I shouldn't be out so late), and now that I'm basically an upper class white Dad we're moving back into engagement for criminal things, and definitely compliance for things like building permits and such.

Based on this, my assumption was that policing had a whole lot of discriminatory bias, but that it was still fundamentally based on the idea of keeping people safe. If the means were immoral, the ends at least were still agreed upon (even if they weren't reached due to the flaws of the means). In other words, I believed that the police often applied tactics that were wrong, and even worse, applied those tactics differently based on how people looked or where they lived, but I still believed that they wrongly applied those tactics in an ham-fisted attempt to achieve the goal of keeping people safe.

Holy shit was I ever wrong! It turns out that when the largest, most visible police forces in the country were forced to choose between keeping people safe, and ensuring that those people complied with the orders of the police, they overwhelmingly, shockingly, violently committed themselves to the compliance part.

I cannot overstate this. Hundreds, maybe thousands of sworn police officers chose (and continue to choose) to do things like shoot random people standing on their porches with riot control weapons, or beat them senseless with batons, or fire rubber bullets into their faces, rather than accept the non-compliance of those people with the orders of the police. Shooting groups of non-violent people with tear gas (or beating up a reporter, or whatever) for violating curfew again and again and again, knowing full well everything is being documented, is not a subtle example of that choice being made.

That is CRAZY, and shows you just how unshared the goal of public safety is by citizens and, if not a majority of individual cops, the collective of police as represented by things like police unions. Can you imagine if you ran a sales team like this?

SALES MANAGER : We need to boost revenue this quarter, so everyone needs to make 50 sales calls a week.

SALES REP : Great news, I just attended a conference and closed 10x of our quarterly revenue goal.

(SALES MANAGER beats SALES REP with baton)

SALES MANAGER : GET ON THE PHONE GET ON THE PHONE NOW GET ON THE PHONE YOU ARE NOT ON THE PHONE YOU ARE IN NON-COMPLIANCE

It's patently absurd, to the point that no one would ever do it in a business environment. The sales manager would be fired immediately, not just for the inappropriateness of beating a human resource with a baton, but for the obvious lack of dedication to the shared company goal of growing revenue. But that's exactly where we are. "Safety" isn't irrelevant to the police, but it is clearly secondary to the idea of compliance with police orders. (Note that equating the two with an unbreakable link -- saying that there can be no safety without compliance -- is the same thing as putting compliance first, especially if you admit that there is such a thing as compliance without safety, which is obviously true because no cop is Superman).

Maybe that's where the analogy is just starting to break down, or at least break off into different realities. I've always thought of the police as a sales manager -- someone vested with authority (by the TRUE authority) to drive a series of goals through a mixture of compliance and engagement of their choosing (within boundaries, of course), but ultimately held accountable to those goals. Instead, law enforcement sees something totally different; that they are the highest authority, the ultimate arbiter of what the goals should even be, and everyone else is allowed to ride along until they disagree.

Facebook, a.k.a. "Algorithm Addiction" (not to be confused with "Addiction Algorithm", which is also Facebook)

With the police making the religion of compliance look so terrible, it's almost hard to imagine how damaging an equally extreme engagement strategy could really be by comparison -- until you look at Facebook.

Social media is built on engagement, largely because its goal (making money off of users looking at and clicking on ads) is more about engaging people than punishing them. That's why everything about the platform is about giving you what you want, so long as it leads to you being on the platform more -- because the longer you're there, the more you see and click on ads. The last thing Facebook wants to do is tell you something you don't want to hear, or show you something you don't want to see, so it spends all of its time trying to avoid that. In fact, the only time Facebook ever puts any kind of judgement or filter on anything is when their failure to do so starts to make people think the platform as a whole might be a bad place to be. Naturally, they address this by applying high-visibility (but extremely low-impact) things like overly deferential fact checking labels (thanks Daily Caller, for your input) on things that allow people to continue to get the most enraging content possible put before them at all times.

The Facebook problem is sort of the perfect inverse of the police problem, in that while the particulars are completely different, the core issue is the same -- we've been lead to believe that Facebook is ultimately most interested in building a "good" platform that causes "good" things (just as we assumed police inherently prioritized public safety above all else) and that if the platform started producing BAD things, Facebook would see to change it. But that's not what Facebook's goal is. The method -- engagement -- is the goal. Like the police, Mark Zuckerberg conflates the goal we think he has, and the goal he actually has, because the goal he actually has is bizarre and sociopathic. So we're told that people connecting and engaging on Facebook always leads to the greater good, and that therefore, we're all in agreement! We want good things, and connection causes them. So, connection.

Except... it's increasingly obvious, even to Facebook employees, that this level of connection and engagement on a social network causes bad things, and actually way more of them than good things. The more people push, the more defensive Facebook gets, except they don't have tear gas and batons.

... yet.

Where The Good Jobs Are, (Part 2)

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 21:07:29 -0400

One of the funny things about any kind of economic system is that, by definition, you learn a lot about it simply by existing in it. But as more and more people are realizing, there are a wide variety of ways to exist in any system, thanks to a bunch of different factors we have limited or no control over. The of the virulently pro-capitalist immigrants from Soviet bloc countries, or jaded left-wing twenty somethings drowning in college debt. Think of racial minorities, or women, watching Jared Kushner standing up at a podium with enormous power, completely oblivious to the fact that he is utterly unqualified to be commenting on a Reddit thread about pandemic logistics, let alone leading the federal response or lecturing us about its efficacy.

Increasingly, in fact, even I am starting to have this reaction to 21st century American capitalism, and I'm a healthy, middle aged white guy who makes plenty of money. And yes, I've been yammering on about captured markets and corporate sloth for a long time, but even as I've watched my station in life improve pretty dramatically over the last decade, it doesn't feel like the system works at all.

In some ways, I wish it was simpler. Americans love a simple enemy, and I am no exception. But there's nuance; we live in a society where merit is not irrelevant, but we don't live in a meritocracy where merit is the most important thing. People who work hard and make rational, risk-informed decisions are more likely to succeed than those who don't -- but they still too often are derailed by things outside of their control. Conversely, people from a certain social class who don't work hard, and don't make good decisions almost always end up totally fine, and while these people are relatively small in number, it seems like more and more of the world is built around their needs and preferences.

Anyways, I am aware this is a pretty standard, center-left, Warren-ian societal criticism, and I'm aware that people like me who feel this way are often puzzled why more people don't agree with them, so I'll stop here.

So what should I tell my kids?

My kids are in kind of a weird, middle ground position not unlike the one I grew up in, just updated for the 2020s. They have tons of advantages, and basically no disadvantages, so they actually kind of will grow up in a meritocracy, at least to the extent that there isn't anything obvious that will unfairly or irrationally hold them back. As discussed previously, shed no tears for the Sullivan children.

On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely that they end up with the kind of bulletproof financial security that comes from being the child of millionaires; we're doing great, and it doesn't seem crazy that we can retire comfortably someday (after a lot more working), but neither my children's parents or their grandparents are going to bequeath fortunes to them. Their privileges will be numerous and important -- but the won't be the kind that ensure long-term success. So yes, they can putz around and play in bands as long as they stay out of trouble, but at some point they're going to need to feed themselves and figure out how not be crushed in the gears of late-stage capitalism, just like their dad.

With that in mind, here are some things that seem like they'll be useful to be good at.

Systems

I know I'm not alone in this, but I think "everyone should learn to code" has always been the wrong way to think about kids, technology, and job prospects. Writing code (and doing it well) is a really specific subset of something much larger, which probably has a real name, but I'm simply going to refer to as "systems"-driven thinking. Basically, can you break something up into logical pieces, see patterns, and translate things you're trying to do into processes or concepts that work at scale. Whether you're building software, using it, or just trying to deal with its existence, thinking this way is really useful. As someone who does very little coding of any sort anymore (and was never very good at it), the ability to think of the things around me as objections and functions has served me well, and I've seen a lot of people who can't think that way struggle.

History

If there's anything we've learned from watching the Boomers grow up, it's that every time it feels like the "end of history", it's not. All kinds of old things are becoming increasingly relevant, from the roots of World War I, to the underpinnings and motivations of the New Deal. So many concepts and institutions that make modern society work have atrophied, set on cruise control and forgotten, or stripped for parts over the last forty years or so and at some point we're going to have to rebuild them. Trust-busting, the relationship of labor and capital, international trade, and the idea of what borders mean and what they're for all seem like ideas that need to be redefined, reasserted, or both. Anybody with a really great grasp of history is going to be able to skip a lot of steps in an otherwise very painful, trial-by-error process.

Communications

Whether we continue to live in what we recognize as a democracy, expand into something even better and more involved, or descend into factions and mobs, mobilizing people is going to be a huge part of it. I'm not talking about being comfortable using Twitter -- I mean actually getting people to stop, listen, and consider what you're saying. It's really hard. I'm actually pretty good at getting people to understand technical concepts they struggle with but want to understand. Getting people to consider societal/political/economic ideas they actively distrust is a whole other ballgame, and it's something I'm not especially good at. But some people are, and if that's a skill you have, I think you're going to have very little trouble finding relevant work over the next fifty years or so.

Materials

We make too much garbage, and we have no idea how to live in a way that isn't based on making and disposing of TONS of stuff. I don't know how this ends, but if it doesn't involve all of us choking on millions of plastic bottles, we're going to have to figure something else out. Plus, materials seem to always lead to really cool advancements, even if they're subtle -- from batteries to all the crazy stuff we do with aluminum in consumer electronics. And they are currently the limiting factor on a lot of things, even though we always seem to be getting better at it. Let's just say if my kids show any aptitude for chemistry (that would definitely not be from me), I'm going to be very supportive.

Bonus Answer: Proximity to Stupid Capital

This is actually the best and worst answer, in that I'm the most convinced it'll be useful, and I'm the most scared it's what my kids will end up actually being good at. But honestly, you can't go wrong with rich idiots thinking you're worth bankrolling. It's gotten a million terrible businesses started, and more than a fair share of them acquired. It represents everything that is wrong with 2020s capitalism --- a bad idea attached to established financing is more valuable than a great idea that has to earn financing on its own.

I won't give my kids this advice. But it'll be in the back of my mind if they're banging away at some dead-end job and living in my basement at 25.

Where The Good Jobs Are, (Part 1)

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 15:45:25 -0400

One time, when I was in college — at some point in the dreary middle, so let’s say 2002-2003-ish — I asked my Dad what I should try to do for a living if I wanted to maintain the ability to step up or step down my work. This was mostly because (at the time) I was looking for a way to be in a touring punk rock band without having to mooch off my parents forever, but it’s actually a pretty reasonable question for a lot of more practical concerns, even if I wasn’t really thinking about them back then. Careers and the ability to sustain yourself financially (let alone do what you want) come into conflict with raising a family, continuing education, getting involved in your community, etc.

This is a really hard question to answer, and now that I have kids (albeit ones who are not worried about this in any way whatsoever yet) I realize that a lot more. I was asking my Dad to take knowledge of both me and the world as it was, project how both of those things would grow and change over the next decade or so, and prescribe some kind of method for how they should interact. It’s a big ask, but I guess that’s why we have parents.

In my case, my Dad gave what in hindsight was a pretty amazing answer. He said a lot of people were obsessed with everyone gaining skills in “technology”, but the real thing that was going to become valuable was the ability to sort through a lot of information, sort out the good stuff from the junk, and summarize what in the hell was going on to people who were both busy and unable to parse that same information as quickly. This was a problem everyone was sort of skating past at the time, because they were relying on the benefits of a 20th century infrastructure for thinking, evaluating, and validating claims, and assuming the benefits and status quo of that structure would scale as everything went online and everyone became deluged with every possible claim and perspective at once. But that scaling of our ability to make sense of things wasn’t going to happen by itself (or maybe at all), and that was where Dad thought the skill gap would be. He also thought I could be good at this sort of thing (this is something old millennials aren’t universally good at, but in my experience are disproportionately good at compared to other groups), and that I could do it in bursts, in between traveling the world playing songs about how I refuse to wear a tie or whatever.

Imagine this awesome, disgusting idiot asking you for long-term career advice.

Good thing we have parents

So basically, Dad predicted the fake news apocalypse of 2016 — among other things — well over a decade before it happened, whether he intended to or not, by simply trying to give his skinny, hoodie-wearing son some direction in life. That’s pretty good, and it rivals his mid-90s prediction that really, really good flat panel displays would become unthinkably cheap within twenty years.

In addition, one of the great things about my Dad’s answer was that while I was looking for him to say something like “learn to operate a CXZ-2202 lathe machine, you can make $80 an hour and work seasonally” and make my immediate problem go away, he actually gave me something that opened up far more possibilities than that. Those possibilities became clearer over time, especially as I worked several technical writing jobs, moved from there into technical product marketing, and from there into more general business and organizational roles. All this stuff stacked; no matter what my job title or day to day was, I never really stopped spending most of my time inhaling information and trying to spit out a coherent summary and maybe some sort of larger perspective that put multiple problems and/or opportunities into proper context.

Like I said, I have kids now, and I’d really, really like to give them as good of a launching pad as I got from this conversation. So I spend a lot of time and brain cycles looking for the larger trend of things, in the hopes that I have that (and my kids’ inclinations) figured out well enough to give them some direction if they ever ask.

I can't stop her, I can only seek to contain her.

So what's my answer? That'll be part two. Unfortunately, it's a little dark, so I want to think it through a little more. Maybe that's 2020 talking (or the remnants of 2019), but I'm more than a little worried I might be as prescient as my Dad in this case.

But I can't wait too long. Knowing my almost four-year-old daughter, she might ask me this in a couple of weeks, so I better be ready.

Editorial Independence and Money

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 22:37:34 -0400

Like any normal reader, I have mixed and varied reactions to the things posted on Deadspin, a venerable and popular blog presumably about sports but more about… things. However, I do not have mixed feelings about whether Deadspin should exist, or whether it has written, reported, and uncovered some truly incredible things in addition to creating the Hater’s Guide to the Williams Sonoma Catalog. My feelings to both of those things are extremely affirmative.

So it’s too bad that in the weird, continuing jihad against everything ever associated with the defunct-for-a-while Gawker Media, a bunch of private equity -- look, let’s just say “people” instead of “morons” -- are effectively driving the site into the ground and out of existence with not just a bad plan for running a website/business, but a boring one. Does it get any more predictable than —

stuffing the site with the loudest, most annoying (autoplay!) advertisements possible, and tons of third party tracking javascript
driving out beloved staff members and clearly skilled, well-credentialed, leadership (not over money, but editorial practices)
hiring a bunch of bros from Forbes and other worthless, despised internet organs
… and finally putting the kibosh on what makes Deadspin, well, Deadspin but issuing an ESPN-style “stick to sports” mandate that couldn’t possibly, in a million years, work?

No, it does not. These goobers are wrong, they are murdering something that should probably exist, and they will walk away with nothing. This isn’t an investment in anything other than eliminating Deadspin, which was probably the idea.

Don’t get mad, get even.

But anyone can say that, and a lot of people will do exactly that, and do it better than I ever could. So instead, I’m going to ask this — how do people like the writers and minds behind Deadspin, Splinter, and other publications that disappear at the whims of a billionaire protect themselves from something like this?

I’ve seen lots of editorial unions pop up recently, and I think unions are cool and a good idea. But ultimately, I don’t think they’ll do anything to stop this kind of publication murder. The private equity guys are going to ruin Deadspin in ways that can’t be countered with collective bargaining, and in the end they’ll simply make it so no one wants to work there, so no one will, end of story. Unions work when there’s a threat of mutually assured destruction, but the problem is that the union can only destroy Deadspin; it can’t destroy Grey Hill Partners or whatever the hell they're called, so if those guys are fine with Deadspin being destroyed (and they clearly are), that’s what will happen. Checkmate.

Ultimately, Deadspin can’t be saved because Deadspin — like the editorial staffs at most publications — doesn’t control how they make money, and therefore are at the mercy of business people. Now again, if those business people need the publication to work, they have some skin in the game, and you can reason/bargain with them. I have worked at organizations with this shared fate; where business people want to make money off of great journalism (or at least good, useful journalism), and that dance is danced. It’s fine.

But a lot of situations are not like that at all, which too often leads to hastily formed, realtively weak unions making “HOW DARE YOU, SIR” statements on Twitter and not a lot else, other than a slow bleed of talent and the eventual defenestration and Sports Illustrated-fication of a publication. This is no way to grow a media ecosystem.

Great journalism needs business allies, with aligned interests. It just does. And I really do think that means some journalists need to go into business (and some do, but I want MORE), just as more technology companies need to form without raising huge amounts of venture capital that then necessitate huge returns that themselves necessitate deception and monopolies and anti-civic behavior. Can you imagine how great Facebook could be (as a product) if they only ever wanted/needed to make $100 million a year in revenue? Does being able to have 50,000 employees and buy Oculus Rift and all that make up for the cost of needing to ruin democracy to meet revenue targets? I would venture that it does not.

Similarly, journalism HAS to get into advertising, or whatever form of revenue it expects to generate in order to pay its bills. Outsourcing to third party ad networks, Facebook, Google, etc., is cutting a deal with the devil. Saying “you handle the money, and we’ll handle the journalism” is a fine way for two journalists to start a publication. It is not a fine way to work with a bunch of people who don’t actually care about journalism.

So that’s what I want. I don’t want Deadspin writers to go find a bunch of business people and try again with a bigger promise of editorial independence. I want someone who is mad, right now, about what’s happening to Deadspin to build a business — even a small one — that is focused on owning it’s own financial future, so it can determine its own management and policies, and make sure this kind of thing never, ever happens to it again.

Not sure I can help, but if I think of any ideas I’ll let you know.

The Clueless Majority

Sat, 26 Oct 2019 19:28:28 -0400

It's been an interesting couple of years for minority-majority relations. So many of the different have/have-not dividing factors in American society -- gender, race, wealth, geography, even technical knowledge -- seem to be chippier, more emotional, and increasingly called out by people on the less advantaged side. Sometimes it's because the situation for the people on one side is getting worse, and sometimes it's just because those people have a means of making the divisions visible, or easier to understand. But either way, there's huge, multi-factional backlash in almost every power dynamic today, and it has a lot to do with why every issue seems "more polarized".

It's always relatively easy to dismiss basically any dividing line you're on the "right" side, or "easier" side to be on as the result of victimhood culture, or if you're less inclined, to figure out a way to exclude yourself from the advantaged group. That doesn't mean there are literally no people who live in artificially generated oppression (there's basically someone doing this in every office/workplace/organization, right?). But it does mean that when you dismiss or rationalize away a dividing line, as people on the easier side naturally have a tendency to do, more often than not you are missing something.

I read a story about a basement comedy show in New York where a couple of performers felt obligated to call out the fact that Harvey Weinstein was in the audience. He -- unsurprisingly -- did not like being called out and mocked for the long list of unspeakably despicable acts he's accused of.

“This scene was uncalled for, downright rude and an example of how due process today is being squashed by the public, trying to take it away in the courtroom too,” the representative said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “Accusations are, in fact, not convictions."
The Washington Post

To me, this is a great example of why so many of the traditional societal norms we rely on to interact, establish moral authority, and assess situations feel like they are falling apart, or just not working anymore -- and despite the histrionics from Weinstein's rep in that statement to the Hollywood Reporter, they're not falling apart because a bunch of young, semi-professional comics decided to call out Harvey Weinstein in a bar. To think that they are completely misses the point in a way only people on the right side of social divide can.

Family as micro-society

Humans, like all animals, inevitably deal with the concept of "power", including who has it and who does not. Some of us are bigger, stronger, smarter, faster, more charismatic, whatever, than others. In life, almost immediately, we create some kind of methodology for dealing with these discrepancies. My daughter is a year and a half older than my son, and (as I write this) they are young enough that it's a massive physical difference. A very physical three and a half year old has an immediate power advantage over a generally peaceful two year sibling that she has to decide what to do with.

Now, she also has parents, who are both way bigger and more powerful than either her or her brother, and that gives us the ability to build a little society, with rules in it. We inject concepts like fairness into their interactions, and we enforce those concepts with our own power, in an attempt to both (a) create a somewhat equitable little society in our home, and (b) model that kind of society for two little developing citizens.

But, just like in life, our enforcement of these laws has normal biases that determine what the actual society of our home is like, versus the one we think we have. My daughter, for instance, like any smart three year old, has learned that by being older and thus more verbal, she is better at blaming her brother for things than he is at defending himself. She explains her side of the story, her brother can't, we start to believe her, he gets frustrated and reacts in the only way he can -- by hitting her -- and he gets dragged off into his room and punished. I know how this works, as I too was a little brother to a smart, verbal sister.

But I had good parents, who were aware of these sorts of in-home biases, and corrected for them pretty well. In the end, we actually had a fairly equitable in home society, and that's one of the reasons why I have good, open, baggage-free relationships with my parents and my sister. We can laugh about the inequities that existed because my parents did a generally good job at mitigating them (and not letting them create vicious cycles), and because as my sister grew up, she quickly internalized the value of that healthy in-home society and did less and less to sabotage it for personal gain, and more and more to protect it. As the youngest, I had the least amount of ability to do damage, but I too picked up these cues (including when my sister turned down chances to turn her inherent advantages into unfair outcomes that would benefit her) and basically grew up into a decent human being.

Society as a family without parents

When Harvey Weinstein's camp claims the moral high ground in an encounter like the one in the aforementioned comedy club, they're framing everything as if it's happening in an equitable society with consistent elements of individual rights and due process. That assumption is inherently part of the argument, just like it's part of the Trump administration's arguments against impeachment.

But the hypocrisy here is immediate. The very nature of what Harvey Weinstein is very, very, very credibly accused of is possible only due to the fact that the people he abused and assaulted did not have their individual rights and due process protected. Weinstein's message takes umbrage at a lack of societal decorum only when he needs societal decorum to protect him -- and for years and years, not only did he not need it, his lifestyle, outlook on life, and day to day routine actively required not respecting societal decorum in any way, at least when it came to limiting his actions or holding him responsible for them. He used his position, power, and wealth to completely circumvent the very idea of societal decorum so he could assault people.

Similarly, the Trump administration is operating in comedically bad faith. They control every lever of law enforcement except one, which is impeachment. And while they visibly enjoy flexing that power at every possible opportunity, with total impunity and 100% self-interest in mind, when it comes to that one other lever, they immediately demand that societal norms -- any norms you can think of -- limit the power, or even remove the existence, of that lever.

These bad-faith actors are like older siblings in a house with inattentive parents. They are happy to let the law of the jungle define how we interact with each other, until all of a sudden the jungle isn't favorable to them -- that's when you run to Dad and tell him to stop looking at his phone for a second.

Principles and academic arguments can matter, and we should build a society where they do matter. But that society is not one where those principles and academic arguments are applied only in defense of powerful people who have unexpectedly lost the ability to do whatever they feel like. Very few people are going to have sympathy for Harvey Weinstein receiving a relatively minor extrajudicial slap-on-the-wrist (being mocked at a comedy club) even if (and I know, roll your eyes, I'm rolling them too) he is potentially not guilty, when there are thousands and thousands of people abused, punished, exploited, and effectively tortured extra-judicially by Weinstein and people like him. In other words, you're not going to be able to successfully argue the relevance of due process to the masses when the masses frequently receive no due process rights from people like you, or the state, at all.

"It's a meritocracy!" claims are similar. They make sense in theory, and they definitely make sense in certain small social circles. But people aren't stupid -- they are constantly witnessing non-meritocratic outcomes, from family businesses, to legacy admissions at elite schools, to sons of senators becoming senators. They see and experience obviously different criminal justice outcomes, public service outcomes, political outcomes, and even consumer outcomes from various captured markets. They are pounded with more and more examples every day, in their own experiences and in the experiences of other people like them facing similar circumstances. You can make the argument that this is a system people should like -- that family businesses and inherited wealth have moral and social benefits that outweigh the benefits of a meritocracy, or that we are safer and happier by (extreme eye rolling) having different criminal justice policies for different kinds of people. But you can't deliver that second experience, and then retreat to the benefits of meritocracy and equity when people want a version of the world that's skewed a little bit more towards them instead of you and expect your argument to stick.

In business, this kind of self-serving hypocrisy is best represented by the idea of socialized losses, and privatized gains, and we do it all the time. It sucks, it's biased for people who have inherited, unearned advantages, and it pisses the average person off. In society, it's "let me use my power advantage uninhibited until I run out, at which point we should all have equal power". In meetings at tech companies, it's "let's use data until the data says my idea is bad, at which point let's use vision and experience" (and vice versa -- when someone else's experience trumps yours, all of a sudden this needs to be validated with data).

The view from the top

I am a mid-thirties, married, upper class white male with cute little kids who lives 30 minutes by accessible mass transit from New York City. I grew up in a nice, quiet suburb with two healthy, funny parents with post-graduate educations, and a big extended family that loved me and watched my back. I even work in technology! There are very, very few ways for me to feel like the odds are against me in any way, but even I can feel isolated and weird and unsupported and alone if I try hard enough. ("The business world is biased against introverts! I don't look good in suits!!! PEOPLE PREFER LIARS!!!!")

And that's the challenge, I guess; understanding that in the vast, vast amount of scenarios that exist, the checks and guardrails of society need to be put in place to protect people from me, not to protect me, and that I don't need to feel attacked or threatened by that. If you're a dude at a tech company in your 30s, and you have women in your 20s reporting to you, it's not that much of an imposition to take into account that you have certain levers available to you that others don't, and to go a little bit out of your way to make sure you don't push on them. It's also not that hard to resist taking massive umbrage when, despite your best efforts, you fail, and realize (or are told) that you've leaned on one of them. In fact, sometimes people will assume, or "accuse" you of doing that, and they will be wrong, or confused! OH MY GOD WHAT AN INJUSTICE. Just stay calm, be honest, and try to think about the scenario from other perspectives before you immediately declare your corner is under attack.

Ultimately, the problem is that we do live in an inequitable society, and it's difficult to maintain that unless you install some very real principles (ask the French), or are willing to go full-on, brutal caste system to protect your interests (ask... well, there are lots of places to ask).

I don't want to do the caste system thing, and "let them eat cake" is demonstrably unsustainable, so I'm voting for "ease off the personal gain throttle a hair" approach, and hoping we can soft-land this thing.

The Urban Millennial Lifestyle

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 21:48:07 -0400

There are -- and for some time, have been -- a lot of dumb, unprofitable business ideas designed to pique the interest of urban millennials (among others), and propped up by venture capital.

If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent.
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

Are the people who use these services in for a shock if the seemingly bottomless private funding for these services collapses, as it has for WeWork? It's hard to say, as (1) that's a pretty big if given how much potential investment capital just sits around waiting to be suckered by the next WeWork guy or Theranos lady, and (2) part of the reasons people used these services is that they were there. If you couldn't use DoorDash or Postmates (true story, I've never used either), I don't think a bunch of twenty somethings in Brooklyn would just collapse in a corner. They'd probably just get up and pick up food.

What I do find interesting is whether companies/capital look at these high-demand/low-profit businesses and think "forget it", or do they come back and try to meet these needs with real business models?

In a lot of cases, I think there is real opportunity for right-sized companies to provide similar services with much lower revenue and growth expectations, and as a result, with less capital. Wag doesn't need $300 million dollars in capital in order to figure out how to get people's dogs walked, and it really doesn't need growth targets on its back commeasurate with a company that's raised $300 million. This is a dumb way to solve relatively simple problems, but it doesn't mean it's the only way.

In other cases, all that capital is needed to subsidize a service that isn't actually better or more efficient than the alternative. This is Uber (and probably Lyft), so it's hard to predict what, if anything, pops up in the place of those two companies should they disappear. Do people want private car rides from independent drivers if they cost the same as a taxi? What if they cost more?

The elephant in the room, though, is that all of these companies are looking to provide services for what seems like a great demographic -- young educated people with in-demand skills in areas that are often thriving economically. But even these people don't actually have any money, as Derek Thompson (who I'm now citing twice) has also noted. So a (the?) common thread among all of the companies mentioned above is that they're trying to provide expensive, personalized services cheaply to a bunch of people who love services but don't have any money. In a few cases, those services can be provided more inexpensively through technology, but in most cases, technology is really just a device for laundering costs and passing them on to someone else, like a network of contractors. Alternatively, technology is used to make an expensive service easy to access on demand, and then the actual expense is covered by venture capital.

Seems like we can do better, here.

Little Data

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 22:20:52 -0400

I never really had to think about actual business data until about five years ago. Before that, like a lot of professionals, I dealt with lots of numbers, but none of them actually mattered because they were all basically vanity metrics that never got to the root of anything. I tracked things like open rates and leads created via campaign X and all of that, but as someone in a low level support role, or product marketing & copywriting at a small company, I never had to connect the elements of my work to -- literally -- how we made money.

When I joined Contactually in 2014, it was the first time a majority of a company's revenue went through something I was so directly involved in -- in that case, content and eventually product marketing, which by the time I left involved getting people through the trial phase of things and into a monthly subscription. Sure, there were sales people moving things along for certain clients, and eventually working on enterprise deals, but during my relatively short time there (about a year and a half), we made most of our money through self-service, and I was supposed to make or work on a lot of the things that made self-service work, from a business perspective.

Working with a cheaper, self-service business model also significantly expanded the scale of the numbers I did have to think about. We needed thousands of leads to get to our goals, and they came in (and left) very quickly. I spent a lot of time looking at spreadsheets, and "the leads" were sort of an amorphous concept of success to me, versus an amalgamation of actual people. While I didn't like, freak out and run out of the building screaming, I never felt like I had a real grip of what was going on, and instead sort of poked at various marketing tactics that were supposed to work while watching large numbers move up or down in ways that mostly seemed disconnected. I did not really know what I was doing, but I learned a lot, even if it was mostly just learning what I needed to get better at.

I joined FiscalNote in 2015 to go into a very different form of product marketing that was closer to what I knew -- basically glorified sales enablement for fairly large ($10k+) annual contracts. My work teed up a large sales team; it wasn't itself a revenue funnel. I knew how to do this sort of marketing-as-a-service (and how to think about it), so it was immediately less stressful. However, at the time, FiscalNote was still a very young company, and I was sitting in the room and providing supporting material for lead generation and sales processes that -- the more I looked -- were clearly leaning on absolutely atrocious data practices. Eventually, through what I can only assume was some sort of clerical error, I ended up being responsible for large parts of our marketing department, and eventually the entire thing (probably another clerical error). There was no looking the other way at that point.

When I talk about "atrocious data practices", I'm not talking about any one person's individual incompetence, and I don't mean that we were any worse with data than anyone else. What was horrifying is that we were actually pretty normal, and the people working with awful data were all pretty smart. But that doesn't mean we weren't often doing incredibly stupid things. Because while almost everyone was smart, almost no one was cynical about data, technology, or how the two were related.

The number one culprit for us -- and I think for many people -- was that we constantly looked at data exclusively from the top down. What I mean is that at some point, someone set up a giant Salesforce instance, or a Marketo instance, or whatever, and created some basic, automatic process for names, or companies, or something to get sucked into one or more of these systems. The automation works, the names go in there, there's a ton of metadata (probably TONS), and it all looks very robust and thorough. Welcome to BIG DATA.

If you're like everywhere I worked, the initial purpose of this system is to organize Sales, because if salespeople aren't organized and busy, they will kill you and eat you, and whether it's two or two hundred, you probably hired too many of them because someone built a capacity model that said "sales head = $X". Everyone does this, because to some degree it's true, but companies with big growth targets and some amount of traction tend to overstate it. So the salespeople create tons of "opportunities", or "deals", or whatever the basic unit of potential revenue is at your office, and includes exactly the bare minimum of information and updates required for them to be paid out by whatever the specifics of their compensation plan requires. So almost immediately, you end up with tons of zombie data, old opportunities, incorrect information, and outright lies from people who usually get fired after a while. Again, unless you're entirely self-service, this is your basic unit of business data.

Ghost in the Machine

At this point, something weird happens. Maybe it's because leaders come and go, and institutional knowledge disappears, or maybe it's that there's some amount of success, and it becomes taboo to really think about whether any of these systems were set up appropriately. But before you know it, the key decision makers -- and maybe everyone -- has becomes completely disconnected from what this data actually is. Don't get me wrong, people will acknowledge "data problems" in general, and create projects like "clean up Salesforce", and even spend money and time on it. But for some reason, at a certain stage it becomes incredibly rare and crazy-sounding for anyone with any seniority to want to get in and try to basically model out the business manually, without BI tools or whatever. But that means no one actually understands the data -- engineering, or accounting, or an SF admin know the computations that happen (but not why, or what it's supposed to represent in the real world), and business people look at overall performance and look for ones that make it look like whatever has been bothering them is, in fact, a problem.

So you get business assessments of things like "marketing-influenced pipeline" being exceptional, or exceptionally poor, or important, or unimportant, and some hoodie-wearing goober like me is tasked with responding right in the middle of a really good daydream/reminiscence about the 2008 Eastern Conference Semifinals.

And when I do get asked that -- again, because I am a hoodie-wearing goober -- I usually ask a simple question.

"Do we actually know what marketing-influenced pipeline is?"

Incredulous faces. MBA syllabi flicker to life in the minds of people desperate to reference them. "You see, what we're talking about is the amount of opportunity value that was specifically driven by a marketing activit---"

"No, I know that. I mean, how is that calculated at this company, and..."

(this one always ends badly)

"... can I see an example?"

I want to be really clear. I do not think I am smarter than the fictional co-worker archetype I'm lampooning here. I may think I like better music, I may think my jokes are better, and I may even think I have better taste in typography than these people (I do think this), but I do not actually think I'm smarter, because I am a moron about all kinds of things.

But what I'm really good at is detecting well-intentioned self-delusion. I don't know why this is. Maybe I should write about that someday. But detecting well-intentioned self-delusion is both an incredibly useful AND incredibly difficult skill in corporate America, because corporate America -- and I include any startups beyond "garage level", and certainly any startups with serious venture backing here -- often gets through tough days entirely with caffeine and well-intentioned self-delusion.

The business analytics industry, and the B2B software industry in general, knows this. Hell, I know this, because -- very meta -- I work in marketing spinning up elaborate, plausible scenarios for how we can make your self-delusion slightly more well-intentioned and slightly less (more?) deluded.

And all of this is possible because people, especially decision makers, simply cannot resist looking at data exclusively from the top down.

No, You May Not See an Example

Every executive loves a good dashboard. Why is that? In theory, it's because it gives you the executive holy grail of buzzwords... the "30,000 foot view" of a business, a function, or whatever. But what's really interesting, and maybe even more important, is what it doesn't tell you, which is specific instances of any of the trends, rates, or totals its reporting. Oh sure, it'll show you "top five sources of whatever", or "biggest deals of the quarter", but we're talking about a really small, featured subset of data, and often things that you already know intimately. Who sees something call out their third biggest source of revenue and goes "huh, never heard of that one"?

Instead, in a surprising amount of scenarios, you get things like total numbers -- or even better, month over month changes -- with no way to drill down into them directly from what you're looking at (which means you won't go look). Salesforce is notorious for this, or at least it should be, because it's one of the worst offenders while still allegedly being some kind of machine learning powered business wizard. But more times than I wish to remember, I literally could not drill down into the individual data that added up to some key business metric we expected to base a decision on, unless I exported it to an Excel file and worked on it myself. And when I find something weird, you know what I hear?

"Can you put that in a Salesforce report and send me the link?"

And the thing is, I don't blame anybody for asking that, because something like Salesforce, or your CRM or ERP or whatever is supposed to be your system of record. People should be skeptical of off-the-reservation analysis in a spreadsheet by anyone with an agenda, which is everyone, including me. But when your system of record makes it really difficult, or sometimes actually impossible, to audit your data piece by piece, you quickly end up with an analysis and decision making culture that's a messy combination of a few sales anecdotes from the loudest people in the company, and a top-down view of metrics full of unvetted, invisible assumptions.

I don't really know how to solve this institutional problem, but I did find a way to get my arms wrapped around what the hell was going on -- I used this crazy Google Sheets plugin to manually suck in every single lead, and tons of metadata, from Salesforce into a tab called "TEH DATAZ", and then I built a bunch of elaborate queries in with Google's kind of amazing query language to pull in things from different tabs and do a bunch of math for me. I'm not really a spreadsheet person, but I am a reality person, and the thing about having all my math in that stupid, bloated spreadsheet was that when some total seemed odd, or important, I could go check every individual record that comprised that total. And I did, all the time! It was incredibly informative, and literally every week I found everything from bullshit duplicates that were inflating marketing numbers (whoops, my bad guys) to piles of qualified leads that never got sent to anyone, or were marked as "unqualified" by a 23 year old, probably by accident because they had to get through thirty required drop-down fields in Salesforce.

Typical confusing, noisy startup data from more of a self-service scenario.

I've fixed a lot of stuff with this irritating, stubborn insistence on working with both big and "little" data, but I always get the feeling -- wherever I go -- that people resent it. And the thing is, I know it's not just my annoying face they resent (again, different blog post for that topic), because as soon as I go up to the 30,000 foot view again, people are so happy to hear what I have to say.

The difference is that when I say those things, I'm happy too, because I actually believe it, because I insisted on understanding the individual pieces behind the trend before I started thinking about the trend itself. I think we could all be a little happier, a little less defensive, and work for significantly more productive organizations if we stopped trying to avoid that part of the process.

What are we even DOING here?

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 23:09:32 -0400

For those of you keeping score, this here marks at least the fifth time I've re-assembled and (for lack of a less dramatic word) "relaunched" this site. That includes:

several WordPress installations
a few years on Tumblr
two SquareSpace iterations

... and probably some things I'm forgetting. Every time I do this, I try to think about what I really want out of having a website. That is an increasingly complicated, vague answer, but as I get older I'm kind of surprised to realize what it's not.

More than a few years ago, my friend and former Elementary bandmate Steve retired his amazingly-early 2000s, home-built site. He very reasonably stated that, like me, he was getting older, busier, and had less time to putz around with CSS classes and properly attribute block quotes in blog posts. He also mentioned that if he needed to share thoughts we people, he had Twitter and Facebook, and that seemed good enough.

Something really bothers me about that. Maybe it's as simple as just disliking the idea of my own effort being some company's monetizable "user-generated content". Maybe it's that I want to get my hands dirty with some kind of publishing system, even if it's pointless and duplicative, and in the end actually worse for me and anyone reading this than if I posted on something like Medium. Maybe it's a latent DIY-ethos from listening to and playing in punk rock bands for more than half my life.

Whatever the case, Twitter and Facebook don't cut it for me. Twitter is funny, lightweight, and kind of stupid, and I work in marketing so in a weird way it's a sort of cleverness resume that's actually kind of good to have. But it's like writing in sonnets; for whatever reason I feel way less self-important (and dumb) writing 3,000 words on a website I built than numbering out a threaded tweet. I feel like kind of a jackass just writing that.

What's under the hood

So, as a fairly occupied 37-year old Dad who wants a low-maintenance internet playground, here's what we're looking at for the 2020 and beyond world of nate sullivan dot com:

Hosting. I moved hosting to WPEngine. They are great -- I've used them for work, and while they are expensive when compared to the bare bones, "good luck!" hosting I've used for almost fifteen years now, I am significantly less poor than I was in 2006. I can mess with everything and make bad decisions, but they have backup tools and really good support to help me fix things without having to spend an entire Sunday afternoon at Panera clicking on tiny CPanel admin buttons, which is something I don't really have time for anymore.
Domain. This domain is now on https, which is probably pointless, but will -- if nothing else -- reduce the number of warnings you (and I) see when you visit.
Store. This also allows me to safely sell stuff on the site, which is something I want to mess with not because I'm interested in selling things, but because I work for an online fulfillment technology company, and want to play with our product. So that's coming.
Archives. Because I am terrible with domains (and impatient), I screwed up a number of things and have lots of old posts locked away in SQL databases I don't really know how to work with cleanly. A bunch of things made it over, but rather than sort it all out, I'm going to unpublish basically everything. Someday, when my kids grow up, I'll root through those old WordPress databases (there are so many, now) and dig out the best pieces. I really and truly feel bad that my technical incompetence has broken links and taken things that some people have liked offline -- but this is an extremely part-time gig and I'm bad at this. It's actually kind of funny, because unlike most people frantically deleting things, I've actually used this site to teach myself to be held accountable for what I write & say, so I didn't purge things out of embarrassment. My writing is often poor and my arguments inane, but it's not like I was posting "hot chick of the week" or whatever in 2008 and now I'm panicking. I'm just really undisciplined with permalinks and I don't know how to get things out of giant SQL files.
For now, I mostly want to keep writing a little simply because I like to write and it's therapeutic, and also maintain a little bit of a museum on my weird, kind of interesting life. That includes work stuff, music, videos, and other projects I've worked on.

In other words, same old, same old. The site is dead, long live the site.

Why OKRs Kind Of Suck

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 04:28:45 -0400

The last two companies I’ve worked for have used OKRs, a system for company, team, and employee goal setting popularized (and possibly invented, for all I know) by Google. Personally, I’ve been very frustrated by OKRs, and if anything, they’ve made me less productive. I don’t think I was alone, and that’s one of several reasons Contactually scrapped them last spring.

It’s not a bad system, but like a lot of a business theories coming out of the startup world these days, it suffers from a desire to constantly evaluate everything quantitatively that isn’t matched by an ability to effectively measure things that way. In fact, OKRs are kind of the embodiment of this philosiphy, where for some reason startups still attempting to do basic things like define what their product is for and how it works decide that they’re going to operate like a Google, a billion dollar public company with one of the most (if not the most) advanced data infrastructures in the world.

The motivation behind being data-driven is fantastic, because it’s a motivation to not be driven by bullshit or blind ideology. This is a truly wonderful characteristic of the stereotypical venture-backed startup, and probably the main reason why I enjoy being a part of them so much. These companies want to do things that make a difference, not just things that make them feel like important companies, and that’s a big part of why startups have successfully shaken up or even dismantled long-established markets.

But that’s the emotional drive behind OKRs; the practical application is another matter altogether, and one that I think a lot of organizations have really struggled with. Recently, I’ve heard marketing people start referring to being “data-informed”, instead of “data-driven”, which I think attempts to fix the wrong part of the term. What you really want is to be reality-driven, where data is often an idealistic proxy for reality. If I’ve learned anything from the last ten years of work, it’s that getting reliable data and making sense of it is actually very difficult, and very expensive in both time and dollars. It’s easy to say “let the data decide”, until two people are waving contradictory Salesforce reports at each other that they both spent hours on — hours that could have been spent doing unquestionably useful things like talking to customers or fixing obvious problems in your product.

Basically, despite all of our wishful thinking, even rudimentary data science is still really hard for most businesses. But we’ve allowed the still-young analytics industry to convince us that it doesn’t have to be, as long as we buy the right tools. Well, by now I’ve used many of the best analytics tools, and while lots of them are really cool, none of them make the full business data experience — gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and auditing — easy, or even predictable, for a company without significant dedicated resources. Not one.

Back To OKRs

That brings us back to the OKR, an acronym that stands for “objectives and key results”. The “objective” part is fine — OKRs are designed to nest goals so that everything everyone is trying to do ultimately bubbles up to a company goal. If you do OKRs right, they ensure that everyone’s individualized little tasks are all generally pointing in the same direction, which is important if you want to make any significant progress as an organization. Strategically, it’s a really, really good way to operate, even if it’s essentially just a framework for continually using common sense and proper priorities in the workplace.

The problem is the second part — “key results”. See, with OKRs, your objectives aren’t really objectives unless they cause measureable change, which can be a problem for several reasons. If you’re trying to measure something qualitative, for instance, the reflexive OKR-style approach is to bolt some kind of metric to it. Unfortunately, this has a tendency to cause people to radically oversimplify extremely complex, qualitative parts of their business with iron-clad sounding, but actually very dubious logic.

“If our messaging is bad, and we improve it, our conversion rate should go up. Ergo, if our conversion rate doesn’t go up, the messaging isn’t any better, or messaging doesn’t matter. We will let the data decide.”

But wait — why are we assuming that effective communication is directly related to people doing what we want transactionally, like clicking a button? Where’s the statistically significant data that demonstrates how people interact with our messaging, evaluate our product, and eventually make purchasing decisions? In other words, where’s the data that validates our approach to data?

The fact is, for growth-based companies doing anything remotely new, that data is often completely non-existent. So ironically, many companies using OKRs end up building up highly quantified evaluation methods that our powered almost entirely by subjective, qualitative assessments of data. You’re not eliminating subjective decision making — you’re just obsfucating it behind a layer of numbers that make everything feel less random.

Worse Than Nothing

People who desperately want to be data-driven (for good reasons) often respond to these observations with the argument that some data is better than no data at all. I have always vehemently disagreed with this, probably based on the fact that I’ve justified a lot of really dumb things in both my personal and professional life with an incomplete, or logically flawed subset of technically accurate data. A simple example — I make pretty good judgments about personal spending. I’m inherently pretty conservative about cash flow and what I “need” versus what I want, and that’s served me well through a series of wildly different personal finance scenarios, from having literally no money and no job, to buying a house a start a family.

But you know what I do when I want to justify a bad financial decision of mine, or push back against something my wife wants to spend money on? I go online, and I start pulling data. How much cash we have. What we’ve spent recently. What we can cut back on. Anticipated future costs. Because we’ve never successfully built a strong enough financial model to respond to various purchase ideas with a simple, 100% metric-based “good idea/bad idea”, instead it’s up to me to equip myself with whatever amount of data I find useful, and make a decision from there. And unsurprisingly, whatever I thought before I had any data turns out to always be the conclusion “the numbers” indicate as well. What an amazing coincidence! To cite one of my favorite quotes, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.”

And that’s the Achilles heel of the OKR system, as well — tying qualitative objectives to quantitative key results outside of anything other than the most transactional jobs and tasks requires huge logical leaps of faith, and radical oversimplifications that in the end, rarely help you build a stronger business. “Building a product people love” becomes “increasing logins per month”, which probably makes sense in a thousand ways, and makes no sense at all in a thousand other ways. “Increasing brand awareness” becomes “unique blog visitors per week”, because hey, we need a key result, and that seems like something we can measure that would be good. But when the end of the quarter comes, you’re no longer thinking about brand awareness. You’re thinking about unique blog visitors, and in that way, OKRs are often responsible for shackling your team’s very powerful, entrepreneurial brains and turning them into stressed-out, metrics-hunting robots.

Accept That You Can’t Know Why Everything Happens, All The Time.

The bottom line is that everyone is at work for a reason, which means they already have a goal. And what’s ultimately important is that they get as close to reaching that goal as possible, and don’t do things that make reaching that goal more difficult. Marketing teams are probably going to be responsible for generating leads. Product teams are usually supposed to build products that work well and provide value. Sales teams have to close. None of this is rocket science — the real numbers that matter to those teams are obvious, and should be religiously tracked (although it helps to have the patience and perspective to not fool yourself into thinking you can immediately, effectively respond to daily, weekly, or even monthly tracking).

But micro-tracking at more granular layers is often little more than a vanity exercise, and the kind of pointless, administrative navel gazing that startups should be avoiding, not installing. What’s more important is for team leads to look at that one number that really does matter — be it sales, close rate, inbound leads, or whatever — and use their powerful little human brains to assess if the things their team is doing are aligned towards that goal. “Why am I doing this?” is a great question to ask yourself at work every day, and at home, too. When I talk to frustrated co-workers (especially younger ones), and I ask them why they’re doing something they think is a distraction or a waste of time, the answer is still too frequently “because (senior person X) wants this by the end of the week”, or even worse, “because it’s one of my OKRs”. To me, for all of it’s theoretical, well-intentioned benefits, that’s the sign of a system that’s not working.

Thanks, John

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 22:18:00 -0400

John Anderson, my friend and co-worker at Bamboo, passed away from ALS this week. I’ve thought about it a lot — hell, I’ve thought about it a lot since I found out he even had ALS — and while I struggled even talking to him about it, or talking about it with anyone at all, I know he’d want me to write something. I know that, because John always wanted me, and seemingly everyone he worked with, to write something. Something funny, something helpful… just something. He always told us he’d take care of the rest, and I hope he does that here for me now.

As anyone who knew him could tell you, someone in my position obviously can’t write the definitive tribute to John. He did too much, and lived too much, and since he was a half a generation or so ahead of me, it often seemed like he had done a lot of it while I was probably still doing earth science homework, or trying to make my high school basketball team.

All I can do is tell you is what made him special to me, as a random, fairly introverted twenty-something he worked with for a couple of years, and who he made a permanent impression on.

The Pro

John was the first real editor I’d ever worked with, and he was really f——ing good at it. Like, almost intimidatingly good at it. He was a fantastic writer, even-keeled, patient, motivated, and incredibly supportive of writers and contributors in an almost unbelievably genuine way; he sucked the cynicism out of the room like some kind of Bruce Springsteen-loving human air filter. Writing for John as he and Dooley and Gaitten improbably built a successful online community out of essentially nothing was incredibly rewarding for me, mostly because it made him so damn happy.

He was also very likely the classiest guy I’ve ever worked with; the equivalent of your one friend you grow up with who never says anything bad about your other friends because he’s just a better person than you are. I loved having that friend, and I loved having John as a co-worker for the same reason. I’ve always tried to rise above bickering, sniping, and the other stuff that tears apart teams from the inside, but I don’t always succeed. Having John sitting across the hall, quietly, cheerfully busting his ass to make everyone that much more successful gave me something to shoot for, and still does. To me, he’s the gold standard for teammates.

When I joined him on Bamboo’s Marketing team sometime in ’09 or ’10 (I forget), he quickly became our group’s moral compass. I’m not kidding — we were in marketing, after all, and always under pressure to generate results through potentially dubious means. Eventually, we started just looking at John after every idea; if he frowned, we’d bag it. If he laughed… well, game on.

The Guy

The toughest price I pay for being a fairly introverted, borderline anti-social person is that I miss out on truly getting to know certain people in my life who would have been well worth the effort. John was one of those people. I knew him, but I didn't know him, and he wasn't the kind of guy to force you to do it.

Not once, literally, did John ever “bother” me. He never stopped by to yammer about his pet issue, or bitch about something going on at work, or at home. When I saw him (and I saw him a lot) it was almost always for one of three reasons :

he really and truly needed help getting something important done, or he wanted to do something nice for someone
he was excited — legitimately excited, almost like a little kid — about something I just wrote
he had something to tell me about a band he thought I might like, or knew that I loved

I will, like many people who knew him, probably always associate John with great music. At some point, I wore a Bouncing Souls shirt to work, which was practically a secret handshake to someone like him. Once he found out that I was a Gaslight Anthem fan, it was all over — I was in the punk-rock singer-songwriter secret society, of which John was apparently the president. He burned me a copy of Gaslight’s new record once, months before it was even released. I don’t know how he had it, or where he got it, but I didn’t even have to ask him for it. He just brought it to my desk, and said “you’re really going to like this.” In fact, the strongest reaction I think I ever saw from him was when he found out I was in a band, and I sent him our demo.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before???”, he asked, completely wide-eyed. “This is awesome!!! I can help you!!!”

Turns out, my random new friend from work ran an amazingly detailed, meticulously researched mailing list about the local music & club scene, that tons of cool people actually read. He wrote unspeakably kind things about us in it, which I can only assume he believed, because he was so freaking honest about everything else we talked about.

No lie, I think that of all the concerts I attended from 2009 to 2013, about 75% were recommendations from John, including the incredible Revival Tour, which he practically begged me to experience in person. (He was right.) Great shows were the only thing I ever saw crack his professionalism -- the most distracted I ever saw him at work was when we once had a serious meeting with our new-ish CEO scheduled at the same time he knew he'd need to be slamming "refresh" over and over on the Ticketmaster site. We inexplicably managed to arrange having the meeting in the room where John sat, and I'll never forget him looking across the room at me, smiling and nodding as he got the tickets in the middle of the meeting, like a teenager who snuck a 12-pack past his Dad. Best conference call ever.

Some of the gigs he told me about weren’t even listed. I have no idea how he knew about that Gaslight/Dave Hause show at the U Street Music Club, or how he got us tickets; but there I was, with the happiest wife in the world, singing along as John ran, friends-in-tow, into the borderline pit forming at the front of the stage.

“How old is Anderson?”, asked my wife, clearly impressed.

I scrunched up my face and thought for a second.

“I honestly have no idea.”

The End

Unsurprisingly, John dealt with ALS the way he did everything else in life, at least when I knew him — with humor, class, determination, and incredible perspective and love. I’ve never been so glad to have Facebook than when I would open it and see what book he was plowing through now, what badass lifelong dream he was accomplishing, which indescribably enormous hero he was meeting, or inspiring, today.

But that wasn’t the way John was just because he got sick, or at least that’s not what it ever felt like to me. He had already been traveling the world for Bamboo when I got asked to go to Vietnam (and to leave North America for the first time in my life) in 2011. I was pretty terrified, but I chose to do it in no small part because John told me — as bright-eyed and excited as he was when he learned I had a band, or that the Loved Ones might be getting back together — that “you just have to do it”. It wasn’t so much that he told me to do it. It was that he told me to do it like it really mattered, and when you’re 28 and working with a guy like Anderson, you listen when something matters to him.

John probably had a thousand better friends than me, maybe just in the span of my lifetime. People who really did know him, people who are posting amazing pictures online of him from house parties in the 90s with no shirt on, goofing around and being someone I’ll never really get to know, no matter how awesome it would have been.

But life is made up of a lot of different relationships; some big, some small. We know what John meant to the big relationships in his life. All I can tell you – and I think it’s worth saying – is that he aced the small ones, too.

Thanks for everything, John. I won't forget it.

Persecution

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 14:43:43 -0400

I was reading a bunch of posts about how Christian conservatives can/should/will gracefully adapt to a world where their strict definition of behavioral “rightness” isn’t shared by a majority of their fellow citizens.

More interesting, accomplished people have fully-baked thoughts about such a complex topic, but instead of talking about those, let’s talk about a completely different, only tangentially related observation of mine. When I was a kid – maybe 8 or 9 years old – I learned what “persecution” meant from a computer game called Revolution ‘76 that I played obsessively for several years.

I LOVED this game, even though there wasn’t a whole lot of military strategy or anything obviously cool like that. It was basically a policy game – you’d pick recruiting policies, and diplomatic policies, and economic policies, and then a bunch of stuff would happen and you’d react to it by changing (or keeping) those policies. Plus, you’d move troops around and invade Canada, and beg the French to get involved and all that.

Anyways, one of the policy questions each year was about how you’d choose to deal with British loyalists. There were four options, which I think I can still name off the top of my head – conciliation, tolerance, prosecution, and persecution. If you chose a policy that didn’t match the mood of the new country, or the situation on the ground, or your nascent government’s strength, the loyalists would get aggressive, organize, and you’d end up with a counter revolution in New Jersey or wherever.

I didn’t really connect the dots back then – to me, “persecution” was the option you chose when you were doing pretty well, and wanted to make sure you didn’t end up getting distracted from burning down Quebec by an unexpected uprising in Charleston. Now that I’m older, I realize what I was calling for. In short, lynch mobs, kangaroo courts, and political vigilanteism. Errr… oops. The picture above is from the DOS version, but I swear, in on the Apple IIGS it wasn’t just a little frowny face icon; there was a like, a guy hanging or something. Maybe I’m just making that up in my head out of guilt for all the digital Tories I condemned to death as a kid.

My point, I suppose, it that even though it amazes me, there was in fact a time in my life where I endorsed brutal, repressive measures against an unpopular minority group. Fortunately, that group did not consist of real world human beings, and my power did not extend beyond our 12 inch Apple RGB monitor. But still, it makes you think about what persecution really is, and gives you a tiny little sliver of insight into what may motivate some of it.

(short answer : social power, and the fear of losing it)

Mailing It In

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 17:59:42 -0400

I’m not very good at pretending to like things. I don’t like manually doing repetitive work that feels like it could be automated, or eliminated by a better process. I don’t like adhering to bad procedures simply because “that’s how things are done”. I don’t like avoiding a problem because acknowledging the existence of a problem makes someone important uncomfortable.

I don’t like any of these things. But… of course, I will do them if doing them makes sense in the grand scheme of things, no matter how dysfunctional and inefficient that grand scheme may appear to be. I grudgingly do all sorts of things for work, not because I think they are great ideas, but because I think they are the best decisions to make for my organization at the time.

At first, this sounds incredibly high-maintenance, and to normal people, probably pretty annoying. I completely understand that, and trust me, I work very hard to make my philosophy as tolerable and non-instrusive as possible. And in my defense, there’s a good reason I fight against doing work just for the sake of work – I don’t believe in half-assing things.

This is something I’ve found makes me a bit of an outlier. Half-assing is a huge part of American culture, business, politics, and just about everything else. Token efforts, olive branches, and “good faith” (even if it’s really the opposite) are key steps in the horrifying sausage-making that is getting something done in most organizations, not because they have to be, but just because a lot of our office and business habits grew out of historically low-information environments where asking questions was (and still is) often associated with rocking the boat or being difficult. Questions are percieved as inherently combative, even if they’re tactfully constructed and designed to reduce confusion, while mailing in a dumb task is somehow weirdly acceptable, or even seen as an example of good judgment.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with this, but people – smart people, mentors – have been trying to explain the importance of half-assing unimportant things to me for years. Once, when I was home from college, I was helping my Dad build some steps in our yard. Being unskilled (especially compared to Dad) my job was to drill holes in the steps, and then put in the screws. I wasn’t very good at it, and eventually, I stripped the head of one of the screws as it sat halfway in the hole.

At first, I was frustrated, and a little embarassed. After all, to me, Dad always took his time, and always did things the right way. He built things with stone foundations, always pre-drilled holes, measured everything, and used lots of graph paper. If we were going to build stairs, we were going to build stairs the right way, dammit. They’d probably last two hundred years.

Reluctantly, I showed him the screwhead I had shredded, and asked him what to do next.

“Oh yeah, this happens all the time,” he said. “Let me show you what I do.” He took the drill from me, flipped it over, and slammed the base onto the screw.

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

“Sometimes it can be a little stubborn.”

WHAM! WHAM WHAM WHAM!

“There you go.”

He laughed, and handed the drill back to me. I was flabbergasted, and I think he could tell.

“I mean, I have more screws,” he said. “But… they’re all the way up in the garage.” This time, I laughed, even if it was partially in disbelief. Even my father, the engineer, who once designed and built me a beautiful, amazingly playable outdoor basketball court out of bricks that still stands today, knew when to hold them, and when to fold them. The stairs just weren’t that important. If they were, he probably would have made them out of stone.

In truth though, Dad wasn’t really half-assing the stairs project per se – he was just preventing the perfect from being the enemy of the good, which is actually really important. Good projects, systems, and even products are increasingly built iteratively (with good reason), and the last thing you want to do is build big, expensive, labor intensive stone steps when you’re not even sure how long you’ll want steps at all, and you need to finish that retaining wall on the other side of the property before winter.

(As my Dad said at the time, half-jokingly, “in a couple of years, your mother will probably have me tear these out and put in a ramp, anyways.”)

No, the kind of thing I can’t stand is work that is designed to fail, which is what a lot of people spend way, way too much time doing. Dealing with potential investors at EEx (especially big, institutional investors and funds) became incredibly frustrating for me, because after a while I felt like the goalposts were CONSTANTLY moving, and eventually, that they were simply designed to move forever. They might tell you that your pitch deck was too long, but after somehow getting it down to six slides, they’d demand that you include more financial information. Then, when you did, they’d tell you that weren’t thinking big enough, and to include more long-term vision. So you’d do that, and they’d laugh and say “you have to explain how you’re going to do this”, so you’d do that and all of a sudden you’d be at twenty-five slides again, and the whole cycle would repeat, except you’d be out three weeks and a bunch of money, and you’d have flown to San Francisco twice. At some point, you just have to admit to yourself that all the great work you’re doing is pointless and isn’t helping your business, but in a lot of jobs, that’s not encouraged. You’d just keep making that deck again, and again, and again until someone told you to do something else, and then you’d do that.

Back at Bamboo, like any ambitious, growing company, we had a few bad ideas that we really wanted to work, but never made a lot of sense. I remember working really, really hard on landing pages, email campaigns, and messaging for ideas with huge, obvious strategic holes in them that we either wished away, or refused to engage with altogether, because the project was exciting to someone with influence in the company. Then, after the project failed (of course it did), we’d sweep it under the rug and never speak of it again, until the next bad idea started to gain momentum. Those failures were exhausting and demoralizing for me primarily because I didn’t half-ass them (some of my best work isn’t available online because it was for these doomed projects, and has been taken down), even though – looking back – I probably should have done exactly that, and saved my ammunition for better thought out initiatives with real potential, which we also had a few of.

Part of me has always wanted to get better at making this kind of distinction, but another, louder part of me thinks my stubborn insistence on quality whenever possible is exactly what makes me valuable in the first place. Like most things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and I’m just going to have to keep working on finding that happy medium. But the next time you find yourself wondering why we’re still debating the merits of something, remember – when I eventually do it, I’ll do it well.

Things We Don't Understand

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:29:40 -0400

You can divide all the people who might care, or might find it interesting that a company like Facebook spent nineteen billion dollars on a company like Whatsapp, into what are essentially three groups.

1) People who get the purchase, and the reasons behind it

2) People who don't get the purchase, but never claimed to understand why Facebook does what it does

3) People who don't get the purchase, and are horrified and annoyed that they don't get it

First of all, LOTS of people who claim to be in Group 1 are really in Group 3. Let's just get that out of the way, because this isn't a post about false expertise or imagined credentials or anything like that. Analysts and pundits feigning understanding is standard operating procedure, not something interesting.

What IS interesting is how big Group 3 really is — how many confused tech industry people there are struggling to process the implications of this kind of deal. "Nineteen billion dollars for an SMS app? Doesn't Facebook have a perfectly good messaging application, and doesn't practically everyone have Facebook? Even if this is something worth purchasing, how could it possibly be worth SO much money?"

i don't get it either, but that's okay

I'm not going to try to answer those questions, because there are smarter people out there with a better understanding of things like international social networking business models who can do that for you, and because that's not really the kind of thing this site is about. What I am going to do is write about the feeling of suddenly not understanding something you thought you understood, and how to deal with it.

Everybody has blind spots, and in my experience, they're not necessarily intrinsic; they're usually formed — somewhat ironically — from experience and expertise. Anytime you learn how to do something in the real world, you find efficiencies to exploit and irrelevancies to ignore as you learn how to do the job. That's why you get better at your job, of course. Before you know it, you're confident, effective, and comfortable blasting through the questions and obstacles that might paralyze a less experienced professional than yourself.

That's when you get your blind spot. Marketers and media people assume everyone is on Twitter, designers assume that everyone has good taste (and cares about it), VCs assume that all good ideas get funded, developers assume everyone smart can code well, companies with sales lock-in assume their products are competitive, and the Knicks assume great players will demand to play in New York.

(Okay, I can't explain that last one — some people are just delusional.)

This process happens to everybody. You can bring in consultants, and sometimes that helps (hi!), but what's more important than a voice coming from outside your organization is a voice coming from outside your discipline or culture. Facebook doesn't need a consultant from some Bay Area design firm; they already have a very good version of that perspective in-house. What they need is to figure how to deal with people outside that universe who post ugly memes and political rants, and also happen to comprise a majority of their user base.

One of my old co-workers joined a company that made some kind of automation software for the government, and wanted to expand sales to the private sector. Great — except they used their government product/sales/marketing approach to do it, and refused to deviate because it had worked so well in the past, even when it didn't work. They couldn't see past the similarities of the two markets ("the purchasing guy at this telecom company used to work for the FCC!"), and as a result missed the differences. Success had made their world so small and focused that they lost the ability to live outside of it, or even to recognize that this had happened in the first place.

MY blind spot

I brought up the Facebook/Whatsapp deal because it's a great example of this happening to lots of people who consider themselves more resistant to blind spots — people like me. But in my case, I've already been disabused of the notion that I understand international social networking — when I started working for EEx, I was introduced to WeChat, China's enormously popular (and profitable) messaging/social app. Internally, I dismissed it immediately. It was ugly, weird, and full of gimmicks like voice messages and the ability to send a message in a virtual bottle. Everything I knew about software, applications, and human beings said this app was a joke.

As it turns out, WeChat is the opposite of a joke. It has 600 million users, including 70 million outside of China, and more importantly, is an active, immediately-understood method of communication in a huge market, and a vibrant ecosystem for things like Paypal-style payments and additional apps. My blind spot — a combination of my inability to see the potential of a platform based on messaging, along with my own personal preferences for design and usability — kept me from seeing WeChat for what it is. Fortunately, EEx has a great team of people from different disciplines and cultures, and we listen to each other. WeChat seemed insane to me, but the people telling me how important it was did not, so I got over it.

I wouldn't say that's the IDEAL way to handle blind spots; if you're doing strategy or planning, you probably want to focus on not developing them in the first place. But you're only human, and ten or twenty years in an industry is likely to cause them no matter how open-minded you are. In that case, your best defense really is your ability to find and hear those outside voices — the ones that can tell you your technology is weak, your product is lame, or your sales channel is closing.

Hey, nobody said being in charge would be easy.

Animation, Energy, and "The Third Heat"

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 14:57:25 -0400

For someone who is an admittedly terrible artist, I’ve always liked working with animation, even as a little kid. When I was 11 or 12, I started taking animation courses at the summer camp I went to every year, even though I never really fit in with obviously talented “art kids” who usually participated in that sort of thing. There, I learned how to do stop-motion animation, how to think about details at 24 frames a second, and how to convey meaning through different kinds of motion. We didn’t use a computer for any of this – my favorite creation starred a paper cutout basketball player I made with little shoulder, leg, and knee joints. I’d slide him around my background, and shoot one frame at a time on our little camera as he performed one ridiculous dunk after another – and no matter how silly he or my hand-drawn stadium looked, there was something about the energy of his motions that allowed to to express power, or a sudden burst of speed, or a particularly perilous descent.

Anybody watch 30 Rock? Remember in the first episode, when Jack Donaghy describes his famous oven?

“The GE Trivection Oven cooks perfect food five times faster than a conventional oven because it uses three kinds of heat. Thermal technology for consistent temperature, GE precise air convection technology for optimal air circulation, and microwave technology for incredible speed. With three kinds of heat, you can cook a turkey in 22 minutes.”

You probably don’t need me to explain any more of this if you’ve seen the show – but if you haven’t, the whole idea is that Jack is there to fix the ratings of a struggling television show, and decides that what the show is missing is “the third heat”, which comes in the form of Tracy Morgan’s character. Hilarity ensues.

For a long time, unless you were working with broadcast media, there were only two kinds of “heat” in most forms of media and software – the visual, and the written. Take something useful, make it highly usable and nice looking, and label everything really well, and in many cases, you were probably doing about as good a job as could be expected.

This is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for some time. Not only is motion – the third heat, if you will – an essential part of communicating meaning, but the bar for the quality and “rightness” of that animation is much higher than it was less than a decade ago. Animation used in poor taste stands out more than ever (ahem, most PowerPoint users…), but at the same time, static media is increasingly ineffective at getting the right point across. You have to not only understand what you’re saying, but why you’re saying it in the grand scheme of your overall argument, so you can present it a way that ultimately makes sense. The way it moves and feels is nearly as important as what it says, or how good it looks.

Visual interactions are really, really important – the iPhone’s properly scrolling lists (of all things) were one of its killer, industry-smashing features, and the future of design is heavily tied to proper use of animation. Pretty soon, not “getting” motion is going to be like not “getting” the internet. We all need to step up our games to succeed in that kind of world – so dust off your summer camp portfolio (hope you have a VCR), and think about how you can use it to tell your boss, your team, or your customers a better story.

Your Real Problems

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 19:20:16 -0400

(note from the future : this is from back when I was freelancing)

"It hurts when I do this." Well, don't do that.

When I started to put this site together, it forced me to look back on the different people and organizations I've tried to help out over the last few years — places I've worked, friends with businesses, freelance clients, and companies we've partnered with. A lot of times, the cry for help is the same.

“Our website sucks. Help.”

While some people are just completely hopeless and tone-deaf about this kind of thing, most people know a bad website when they see it, even if they don’t know how to fix it. It just feels “off”, in a discomforting way. Sometimes, companies trying to deal with this unsettling feeling hire a web design firm, blow everything up, and unveil a new site. Many times, it has the same problems as the old one, which usually become apparent in a few weeks, once the novelty has worn off.

MG Siegler recently wrote about the lack of radical change to television over the last few years, and made this argument:

"The reason why none of these things end up working out is simply because they don’t play ball with either Big Cable or the content producers — or, ideally, both. They keep trying to solve a technology problem that anyone could solve. The issue is with getting the right content."

In his case, he was suggesting that all the radical UI improvements from set top boxes (Apple TVs, Rokus, Tivos, etc.), which are great in some ways, still aren't relevant to the real problem, which is that large, entrenched companies control television content, and improving the TV watching experience isn't currently in the financial interest of those companies. So every time a company comes out with a "better way to watch TV", they're unable to REALLY change the way we watch, and nothing truly changes at all.

At the risk of spewing inanities (hey, it’s my blog), watching TV sucks because watching TV sucks. You can add as many intermediaries to the equation as you want, but no matter how interested they are in making TV not suck, it’s not going to change the underlying problem, which has nothing to do with them. Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how nice the bluetooth-enabled garbage can is.

This is the number one problem with bad company websites. Your website is lame because the way you think about — and often operate — your business is lame. The best thing someone like me can possibly do to help your organization is think about your business in a better, more honest way. Once you do that, you’ll immediately start seeing what’s REALLY wrong with your site (among other things), and even better, you’ll probably realize how to fix it.

So instead of telling you what’s technically or structurally wrong with your website (which is a useful, although completely separate discussion), I’m going to tell you what’s probably wrong with your business that is adversely affecting your website. Remember, this isn’t just what’s wrong with your “brand”, or your boilerplate — this stuff is in your head, affecting how you operate each day. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

1. You are scared.

It's really hard to make a simple, clear argument when you're hedging your bets. You can't say "our product is better", or "the way our company works is better for you", while simultaneously insulating yourself from the possibility that some people might not agree with that, or worse, may be actively offended by the very notion of it.

One way I’ve seen this impact websites is through what I think of as “checkbox” or “defensive” marketing – the idea that the failure to include certain “key” things leads to a loss of potential business from customers who don’t see their pet topic covered/acknowledged by your site. So you end up with a room full of management people saying things like “we have to make sure we talk about {thing X}”, because that’s something that makes, or could make, the company money. This is exactly how you end up with entire pages basically about nothing (“WE ARE COMPATIBLE WITH SUPER DATABASE PLUS 2009!!!”), and huge site navigation systems that highlight groups of subgroups of these pointless pages that take focus away from what the average customer may actually care about.

By definition, having a business means implying – and arguing – that certain people should come to you instead of NOT going to you, or going to someone else. There’s no way around it; accept that this is the case, own it, and stop assuming that people are going to randomly do business with you just because you happen to exist and don’t step on anyone’s toes.

2. You don't believe in your product/service.

Maybe you really do believe in the purpose of your business -- but you may not believe in your ability to execute it, due to a substandard product or service. The ugly truth is that there are a lot of businesses trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe the product is new, and simply isn't as good as the competition. Maybe you need to get a few customers before you can invest enough money in your service to make it what it needs to be. Maybe you don't even know why your product is inferior -- like your website, it just is.

There is usually SOMETHING better about your product or service; you should probably focus on that (this is where I usually come in). But in many cases, that differentiation either doesn’t matter enough (“it has a real keyboard!”), or sometimes doesn’t even exist at all. I know for a fact that I’ve sat there, banging my head against my desk, trying to come up with a compelling reason for someone – anyone – to buy a certain product or service that simply isn’t worth it. Far too many people think just being in a space entitles them to a small chunk of the market, but the world simply doesn’t work that way, and that’s not a messaging problem. Go ahead, ask Blackberry, or HP. Somebody like me may be able to help you survive your problem, but it’s only triage at that point – you need to get locked in to why your core value proposition is so weak, and fix it.

3. You are lazy.

Defining a strong identity for your organization involves difficult decisions, and saying "no" to a lot of things. It often involves resolving disagreements with people internally, shutting down pet projects and concepts, and identifying mistakes that have been made in the past. Feelings get hurt. Important people who drive really nice cars may end up being wrong, and they might look stupid. Relationships you can normally take for granted will probably have to be managed and repaired.

Sounds like a lot of work, huh? Well, that’s life. If you don’t feel like working, your website is the least of your problems.

4. You don't like your customers.

There really are two kinds of businesses. The first is the kind where you find the solution to a problem, and realize that certain people will happily pay you money to solve it effectively. In this case, you spend most of your time (a) getting better at solving it, (b) finding people who need it solved, and (c) helping those people understand the truth, which is that the problem exists, that you can solve it, and that it makes sense for them to pay you to do it.

The OTHER kind of business is where you find a group of people who are spending a lot of money on something, and try to figure out how to get them to give that money to you. I always refer to this as a “value extraction” business, because in this case, solving a problem isn’t the primary reason you exist. The money is. In fact, there may be no problem at all, just money to be extracted. In these kinds of businesses, the effectiveness of a product or solution is irrelevant, compared to the ability to sell it. Maybe you sell it by becoming friends with people who can cause it to be purchased (“Another 9 holes? SOUNDS GOOD, BRO.”) Maybe you sell it by getting it associated with something else that people actually have a reason to buy (make checks payable to “Gartner, Inc”). Maybe you sell it by convincing people it’s something that it’s not.

Either way, that kind of business often has a very hard time expressing a strong, clear argument for their business, because there isn’t one. And once again, that is a much bigger problem than anything on your website.

Cheer up!

This sounds like a really negative list, and I'll admit, these problems do exist for a lot of businesses, and there's a ton of resistance to addressing them. But in a lot of cases, there's an equally large opportunity buried in there. It could be that you're scared, but really shouldn't be. Or perhaps you don't like your customers because you've been looking for the wrong kind. If you are open and honest with yourself, and ready to do what it takes to fix it, these problems are extremely solvable. And I should know, because that's what I do!

Death by Wedding

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 15:06:20 -0400

Does the wedding-industrial complex deserve some of the blame for decline of marriage? Serious Q [t.co/bvIWNKvlC...](http://t.co/bvIWNKvlCa) via @mattyglesias
— davidfrum (@davidfrum) January 7, 2014

Damn skippy it does. I am going to puff out my chest for a minute (so brace yourselves, or move on), but eight years ago (!!!) I was out on the wedding FRONTIER when it came to my generation of friends, family, & acquaintances. We boldly went with a very nice, relatively cheap wedding in a public park. Maybe 30 people, max. Lots of unhappy non-invitees. Very classy, but also very free heirloom ring courtesy of my Mom. $40 wedding bands from the mall (I wore mine for a few months but just couldn’t get used to it). Nobody cares now, but we took a pretty decent amount of crap for all of this, which slowly eroded over time as people finally began dismissing us as harmless crazy people.

Today, by all appearances, the wedding world is even worse — and God forbid you get married when you’re older, and expected to have money. So, here are my tips for taking back the concept of weddings and getting married from the bandits and highwaymen currently running things from Bravo or HGTV or whatever (I haven’t had cable in five years, cut me some slack).

1. Never get offended if you don’t get invited to a wedding. Somewhere, someone feels really bad about it, but it’s a necessary component to your friend’s attempt to take control of his/her life and marriage. Be cool. Consider it a wedding present. Hang out with the two of them soon, and remember why you actually wanted to be invited.

2. Never assume anything about someone from the way they handle wedding/marriage customs. For a couple years, lots of people (not my wife, though) tried to bully me into wearing a wedding ring, when I’ve never worn any jewelry my entire life. The most awful way was by insinuating that I had some kind of psychological hang-up about my marriage, which is obviously a horrible insecurity to try to install into somebody who just got married. It’s like, dude, I type and play bass all day, my hand is not to be adorned. Accept it and move on. Similarly, we had to deal with lots of “WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN” moments from people who didn’t get invited, or weren’t in a wedding party, or couldn’t bring a guest, or whatever. You know what it means? It means we’re not borrowing money from my parents/new inlaws. That’s what it means. Of course, these people probably didn’t know or understand that at the time (given the obscene state of wedding standards), so no hard feelings, but that’s why I’m a freaking PIONEER.

3. Stop assuming everyone always does all the stuff you just to happen to want to do. Do you want invitations? “Save the dates”? Twenty five toasters? Fine. That’s what you want, and that’s great. Aspire. Cajole. Do whatever it takes. But don’t for one minute think that you’re the one with your back against the wall — you are putting everyone through this, including yourself, because it’s what you are choosing to do. “You’re supposed to get all your kitchen stuff at the wedding though!” Oh please — cry me an upper-middle class liberal arts river. What are you eating off of now, the floor? Pull this card when you need a kidney, not a (PROFANITY) serving tray.

4. At the same time, if people want to spend tons of money, let them. Although I really and truly believe most people these days who have giant weddings do so against their true desires, your friends having a huge wedding is not some kind of bizarre smoke signal meant to pressure you into matching it someday. Not everything is about you, fella! Just be happy you got invited to a $40,000 party — how many of those do you get to go to? “NICE ICE SCULPTURE, BRO!!!” It’s not hard. We don’t all have to have the same wedding, or any wedding, or a boring wedding at city hall. To paraphrase every parent ever, if your friends are actually bullying you into adhering to their idea of a proper wedding, they aren’t your real friends. And your real friends? They’ll understand whatever you do, unless you suck and they’ve just been staying in touch with you to go to your giant, expected wedding shindig, in which case you have bigger problems.

As I tell every 20-something who asks me (and yes, ONLY THE ONES WHO ASK, no one actually wants unprompted advice from grizzled old men), the person you marry isn’t any different the day after you marry them, nor is the quality of your actual marriage driven by what goes on at the wedding itself (unless you push her down or something during the ceremony, that’s probably a little scarring). Everything that takes your focus away from, you know, your actual day-to-day life with this person you ostensibly are building your world around is very likely either in your head, or a distraction caused by our stupid obsession with stuff and commercializing & branding everyone’s “moments”.

Anyways, scoff all you want, but… eight years and going strong, folks. Or you can trust some wedding expert who finally “got it right” the third time. Your call.

Garage Bands and Agile Development

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 17:49:15 -0400

Last year, me and the other guys in Six Foot Machine put out our first release, (get it here for free!) a ten and a half song album entitled “Monday Night Miracle”.

SFM records are fundamentally different creatures than literally all of the other albums I’ve worked on in the past. While I’ve started to explain some of the logistical differences here in the past, I found a much better analogy the other day, related to work.

“Waterfall” and “Agile” development is in the news a lot these days because of the healthcare.gov rollout, and of course, its problems. This is going to be an oversimplification – and I’m not an expert, just a frequent witness to this kind of stuff – but the gist of it is that in “waterfall” style development, everything is done in one big piece, while “agile” development is rolled out as soon as possible in its most basic form, and pieces are improved & added as you go.

</sound of any developer/project manager reading this freaking out and demanding details and exceptions be stated, and referring to books from 1997>

Now, when I say I’m not an expert, I mean in the purest sense of this. There are certifications and books and generally accepted schools of thought on these concepts, but honestly, they bore me and I’ve never needed to speak in those terms, so I don’t. There are plenty of people who do, so if you’re interested, you should ask them and not me. But the general principles behind these methods are really important, because they’re more about approach and priorities than technical or process specifics. Waterfall style work – even non-development work, like writing something on your dumb blog – tends to put a very strong emphasis on the importance of the whole being bigger than the sum of it’s parts. Your vision is this big, functional system, and if it doesn’t do everything, it doesn’t really do anything at all. On the other hand, Agile style work lets you get something very basic out there and in something close to the real world; you very quickly understand the costs and benefits of your general approach, instead of doing all this work and then realizing it’s fundamentally impractical or ineffective after putting in months or years of work.

No matter what you’re building or trying to accomplish, you’re probably working somewhere along the spectrum covered by agile and waterfall. When I used to build product videos, I initially started off – as a web generation guy – doing things with an agile approach. I would storyboard out scenes, put together an extremely rough cut, and then show my bosses and co-workers and get feedback.

In my case, this was almost always a disaster for a couple of reasons. The biggest one was that I had a complete vision for the final product that people couldn’t grasp from a storyboard and rough cut. There were too many little touches and details that I simply couldn’t convey the value of without actually having them in place. In that particular situation, basically my work didn’t accomplish ANYTHING, or have ANY VALUE at all until it was completely done. It was a waterfall style project, whether I wanted it to be or not.

Increasingly, I started doing more work that way, but only because of the nature of what I found myself doing. When I was doing something new (investor decks, for instance), and wasn’t sure if it was worth doing, I’d almost always work from a more agile perspective – and when I didn’t, and tried to keep the whole thing to myself until unveiling the finished product, it usually blew up in my face.

So there you go. If you can solve a big chunk of the problem without perfecting the solution, or you’re trying something new, agile is a great approach. If the outside community can’t add value, or if your solution is truly useless until it’s completely finished, you’re probably stuck working on a waterfall. Naturally, you can see why big, giant waterfall projects are really scary, and extremely risky, and conversely, why risk-averse people LOVE agile development, even when it’s impractical.

Now, what the hell does any of this have to do with making records? I’ll tell you.

My shock, and initial resistance, to the way SFM produces our finished recordings is a lot like some middle-aged software developer who’s used to building big, detailed, waterfall projects, and is thrown into an agile environment. All of my old records were waterfall projects, in fact. Here’s how Glenn’s Army would make a record.

1. decide it’s time to make a record
2. figure out how much money we could spend
3. figure out how many hours we could book in a studio for that amount
4. figure out how many songs we could do per hour (.28 or whatever)
5. decide the length of the album
6. decide what songs to include, and start writing whatever was missing
7. book studio time
8. get really, really good at playing all of those songs, over several months, in the exact way we’d need to play them at the studio
9. go to the studio for several days and do everything perfectly (or as close to it as possible)
10. have a record

Everything about this screams waterfall; maybe it’s not a big surprise that two thirds of our band works for the federal government today. Our projects worked because we got really good at setting requirements, meeting deadlines, and accurately assessing our capabilities and the capabilities of the people we worked with or were dependent on. When things DID change, it drove me (and probably the other guys) bonkers. On Fight Songs, Andrew wrote – I think – two songs pretty close (for us) to our recording time, and I really didn’t want to add them. It’s not that they weren’t good. It’s that they weren’t part of the original requirements, and that terrified me. They ended up being two really good songs, but adding them was not without risk.

This process, with or without a studio, was how I did every album for every band prior to SFM. Plan, plan, plan, practice, until the big day. BOOM. Record. Success was driven entirely by our ability to plan ahead and accurately project future situations. When Elementary recorded our studio full length in 2011, I went right back to my old playbook and ran the same process verbatim.

Today, as with software, improved, cheap tools and the internet have completely blown up the necessity – not the value, but the lack of choice – that’s always come with musical waterfall development. While famous artists or rich guys could screw around in different studios and do things piecemeal, that was rarely the case for small bands with few resources. Today, SFM is a perfect example of the previously nonexistent choice facing musicians. As a post-2010 band, we basically prepare for nothing when it comes to recording. Jesse will usually put together a very simple, structural demo of a new song literally the day we record it, and send it all to us to mess with and think about. From that point forward, unless we actually change the structure (which is rare, but not that hard to do when we choose to), the final song you hear a few months later is based on that very skeleton, even though every single part – guitars, drums, bass, vocals – has been completely re-done. The bones of the final track exist from day one.

Is this better? Boy, I really, really don’t know. It’s certainly better for us; we’re adults, and we only get to practice once a week. In high school and college, Andrew and Steve and I would practice three or four times as often when writing or working on a record; if I recall correctly, we recorded almost nothing until it was time to go to the studio. If SFM did that, we’d never have any songs. We’d simply have forgotten them by the time we played again. The side projects Steve and I are working on today, in fact, are somewhere in the middle of these two approaches, and we don’t make progress anywhere near as quickly as SFM, largely due to the constraints of waterfall style song development. We forget things all the time, retrace our steps, decide things are bad after working on them for weeks, and constantly deal with other forms of adversity, because we lack the agile development skills the other guys in SFM (i.e., not me) have.

Is agile development of music less “artistic”? I don’t put it in quotes to be a douche; in fact, to me, a lot of times it feels like it is. But some of that – maybe all of it – is based in nostalgia, and it’s important to be aware of that.

Anyways, the point of all this is that SFM has a new album just around the corner built exactly this way, and like just about everything else I’ve ever done, I’m really excited about it. Sure, I love the music, but I also love that I’ve been able successfully adapt in order to make sure that music actually got made. Old dog, new tricks, and all that.

About Capital

Wed, 02 Oct 2013 05:52:21 -0400

You know what’s worse than the government wasting money? That money not getting spent at all.

Private equity firms are sitting on some $1 trillion in “dry powder,” or uninvested capital from previous fundraising rounds. Like cash-heavy companies in the corporate world, the firms are hoarding more cash, partly because they’re having trouble finding worthy investments amid economic uncertainty and a dearth of cheap debt that helped juice returns in the pre-crisis days. It’s also taking longer for PE firms to exit their investments, as M&A and IPO activity remains choppy. Thus, many PE investors are locked into funds that sit on a large share of their cash and charge them a hefty management fee—usually 2% of assets per year—for the privilege.

It’s not like these funds should be somehow “required” by society to spend this money. That’s obviously ridiculous. They are supposed to be finding investments that will generate a positive return, and they don’t feel confident they can do that, so they are sitting on the money, and sucking out 2% management fees until they have to give it back. From a financial self-preservation perspective, that makes sense (from an efficient distribution of growth capital, not so much).

Here’s the real takeaway, though. We must stop telling ourselves that capital, in private hands, and regulated solely by profit incentives, inevitably leads to growth. In the right environment, maybe it does. Combined with sufficient broad, non-profit motivated public investment (grants, university research, public works), I’m almost certain it does. You’d never want to strangle out private investment given it’s track record in society.

And yet… that’s exactly what we’re doing with public investment. Constantly reducing public spending — especially outside of defense — to the bone, and cutting high end tax rates, puts a staggering amount of potential growth capital in the hands of a relatively small number of groups that are looking for pure financial returns. In general — and this is now from significant personal experience, so I’m not just pulling this out of a bong with a Che Guevara sticker on it or anything — these people aren’t creative. They aren’t imaginative. They don’t can’t about solving problems. They are frightened by and largely hostile to change, new pricing models, new markets, and new ideas. In other words, they are bad entrepreneurs.

You know the story about the determined, self-made billionaire, who mortgaged his house and maxed out all his credit cards because he believed in his business, and that’s what it took to make his enterprise successful? I know it, because that’s what every investor seems to want. And you know what? That’s exactly the opposite of how a giant private equity firm thinks. They would never take those risks, because they’re too big, and have too much to lose.

This is why trickle-down economics, at the scale we’ve applied it, doesn’t work. It requires us to pretend that the very, very rich — both individuals, and companies/funds/etc. — are similar economic actors to regular people, and that they’ll behave in a similar way. For instance, a thriving middle class is full of people who spend most of their money, and save a little bit, creating enormous opportunity for poorer people to create businesses based on that spent money.

But that’s what someone making $75k does. That’s not what someone sitting on $100 million, or $1 billion, or $100 billion, does. They can do basically anything they want with a small percentage of what they have; they’re simply less dynamic than a large group of diverse minds working with that same block of capital.

We’ve all been conditioned over the last thirty years — myself included — to believe in the dynamism of unregulated, private capital, as if it was a monolithic concept of the universe that simply “worked” on it’s own, once it was uncorked, like nuclear fusion or something. It’s not. Again, at scale, It’s a small number of extremely comfortable people looking to make safe returns without overturning the apple cart. You’re not going to the moon in the 1960s on the backs of private equity, not because it’s impossible, but because private equity never would have done it.

People talk about the government as “the lender of last resort”. in fact, the government’s willingness — even tendency — to lose money on things is increasingly making it the venture capitalist of last resort. And we’ve undercut it’s ability to do that.

As a society, we really, really have to stop fighting the fights from the 60’s and 70’s. Our inability to think outside of that box is why I can sit here and propose vital, life-saving reforms to private, capitalist innovation and be immediately dismissed as peddling “socialism”.

You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?

The Weakerthans & My Cat

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 09:29:14 -0400

I first heard The Weakerthans in 2002, when we were in school in DC for the semester, working on this record — I mean studying. One of Steve’s roommates convinced us to go with him to a show at the Black Cat, and I figured it would be cool to get out and do something with other people, since I had been in college for two years at that point and never tried that.

It’s always weird to see a band you don’t know anything about but like immediately, particularly if that band is The Weakerthans, and a decent chunk of their appeal comes from their lyrics (which you don’t know, and can’t really understand live unless you do know them). So I thought — hey, this band is actually really good — and then went home and promptly forgot about them.

Very soon after that, the band released “Reconstruction Site”, which I found on the rack at the radio station doing our weekly show back in Richmond. It was really good; immediately accessible, simple but well-thought out arrangements, and of course, really deep, interesting narratives. I had no idea just HOW deep and intricately constructed all of that was at first (read the wikipedia page), but figuring it out just made me like the record even more over the years.

Reconstruction Site is also one of those very rare albums where it feels really long, but never boring. Obviously that’s no small feat, and they completely avoid the eighth/ninth-song-doldrums that I always have trouble getting past when I make albums. Anyways, the point is that I really, really like this thing, and as the time goes by, I only like it more. Four years later, they released a follow-up, called “Reunion Tour”, which — being lazy and cheap — I never bought until about two weeks ago when I needed something new to do work to. After a week of listening, I’m actually a little disappointed. I definitely like the album, but it’s a shorter, more experimental record and probably by necessity, it’s just a different, less epic experience than its predecessor.

… except for one thing. On Reconstruction Site, there is a GREAT song from the perspective of a depressed person’s cat, called “Plea From a Cat Named Virtute”. Musically, it’s super catchy and upbeat, easy to follow, and one of my favorites on the record, with a giant climax of a bridge, and basically everything you could really want from a non-pretentious, energetic indie rock song. I knew all this when I first heard it, and of course back then, I had never had a pet, let alone a cat.

But man, if you DO get a cat, and you actually like him, this song takes on a whole new significance. As I’ve written many, many times, I spent most of 2006–2007 jobless and lying on the floor in my smelly, cold basement being depressed and talking to young Coby the Cat, an experience that is probably a way more influential part of my life than anything like that really should be. Keeping that in mind, here are some lyrics, verbatim, from the aforementioned song:

“Why don’t you ever wanna play? I’m tired of this piece of string. You sleep as much as I do now, and you don’t eat much of anything.”

If Coby could speak English, this is exactly what he would have said in 2006.

”And listen… about those bitter songs you sing, they’re not helping anything. They won’t make you strong.“

WHAT THE… DID MY CAT WRITE THIS SONG???? He then goes on to describe this awesome party they should have, and all these people and animals they should invite, how he would cater it by killing birds and mice, and how much fun they could be having if they’d stop just moping around and feeling bad for themselves. But despite the silent pleading, I — I mean, the guy — doesn’t seem interested, leading to this harsh accusation:

”All you ever wanna do, is drink and watch TV… frankly that thing doesn’t really interest me. I swear I’m gonna bite you hard and taste your tinny blood, if you don’t stop the self-defeating lies you’ve been repeating since the day you brought me home… I know you’re strong."

First of all, I have this song cued up on iTunes, but I just pulled that entirely from memory, which should give you some indication how welded into my brain this song is. Secondly… wow. No, I wasn’t drinking in Cleveland, but I specifically remember sitting there, watching Judge Judy at two in the afternoon while my wife was in some God-forsaken pre-industrial country for three weeks at a time, and Coby would literally sit there on the table and stare at me, meowing what I assume was the cat-equivalent of “can we do something else?” The little dude was my own personal combination of Lassie, Jiminy Cricket, and Wilson the Volleyball from “Castaway”. It’s very hard to properly express just how much the combination of complete social isolation and pet ownership can affect a person. My wife and I decided together that it was eventually time to get out of Ohio and do something more satisfying with our lives. We didn’t consult Coby the Cat on that decision, but the scary thing is, I spent SO much time alone talking to myself through him (yes, out loud, like a crazy person), that functionally, his seemingly irrelevant cat actions actually had serious influence through me. And I never forgot that this song, at roughly the same time that I figured out what it was about, was LITERALLY HAPPENING TO ME IN REAL-TIME.

That brings us to the next record, which contains a follow-up song about this same cat, entitled “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure”. Loving the original, I eagerly listened and paid attention to everything, wondering if (though not necessarily expecting that) this song would reflect my current situation as well as the original had.

It does not, although it’s a really good song. In fact, taking all this into consideration, it is currently the saddest song I’ve ever heard in my life. I honestly have trouble listening to it, because instead of reflecting my successful escape from (unofficial) depression and apathy, it’s a story about the worst-case alternative. In the sequel, the pleading cat eventually gives up trying to reach her owner, leaves home, and thinks about how much she loved him, and all the good times they had, until she FORGETS THE NAME HE GAVE HER. Oh yeah, she is also very cold, because she lives outside now. And all of this is done with typical Weakerthans imagery, and cat-ownership experience (my wife eventually met the Weakerthans, we can confirm that at least some of them own, and really like, cats), making it all the more horribly authentic.

Now, I could handle a sad song about a cat. Lots of people have cats. Many cats are unpleasant, and irrelevant to other people’s lives. No problem there. But it’s not really about the cat, per se; it’s the whole story — the idea that there’s another, unbelievably more depressing way someone like me could have reacted to the situation I was in. That there’s a colder, less caring alternative to the response I had to Coby the Cat (“oh my God, my cat is more motivated than I am, I have to get out of here”). It’s not just sad, it’s jarring, and scary, AND sad.

“after scrapping with the ferals and the tabby, let you brush my matted fur. How I’d kneed into your chest while you were sleeping, the shallow breathing made me purr. But I can’t remember the sound… that you found for me… but I can’t remember the sound… that you found for me…”

OH MY GOD, ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? The thought of that poor little dude out there, cold and scrapping with ferals, because I couldn’t get my @#$% together and he just had to give up on me after spending his entire life trying to get me to do something, is utterly devastating. I am immune to standard issue artistic emotional plays (ask my wife; there’s nothing funnier than watching some dramatic “Parenthood” scene or something with her, and she looks at me crying and is like “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? DO YOU EVEN HAVE FEELINGS??”), but this is different. This is like a customized series of songs, over multiple albums, designed specifically to make me feel terrible.

And it’s just really, really well-done. Congratulations, Weakerthans. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to race home and hug my cat for forty minutes.

(Postscript from the future… my God, it’s a trilogy now, and I’m a wreck. Good context here. I don’t know what to say, except that I really, really miss Coby the Cat. He passed in 2018 and I think about him a lot.)

When Product Quality is Inherently Optional

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:48:59 -0400

Betanews tries to figure out if anyone’s going to be able to compete with the iPad, and comes up with this piece of analysis.

But Google, like Microsoft, doesn’t have a reputation for quality that’s required to compete in this space.

This unintentionally hilarious quote tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how lazy and entitled most of the electronics & software industry has gotten thanks to the go-go 90’s and 00’s. I mean think about it – Google and Microsoft have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to competing with Apple, but one major problem they share is, you know… product quality.

Don’t you love how “quality” is just one of any number of checkboxes on a long competitive analysis list? “Well, we have more USB ports, and a discrete GPU, but your stuff isn’t detestable crap, so we win, two to one.”

The fact is, with the exception of the Xbox (which isn’t the driving revenue leader at the company, and has been loss leader for most of its existence), Microsoft’s (genius) business model simply doesn’t hold them accountable for its design decisions and product quality. Don’t get me wrong, that’s absolutely brilliant from a business perspective, and it’s given them the ability to experiment with all kinds of nutty cross-product integration ideas (Microsoft GrooveLiveMesh Professional 2009 Edition!) over the years without any real sales consequences. But the fact is, when required to deliver something that appeals to the people who have to use it every day, and especially when attempting to unseat an incumbent who’s already doing it, the non-Xbox part of Microsoft isn’t prepared to go much further than a big press event, concept video, or acquisition. Their biggest, most impressive achievement is building an enormous, amazing partner and channel system tasked with the sole purpose getting other companies to build products for them, get them in stores, and deal with angry, confused end-users. It’s amazing, it’s innovative, it’s complicated, and it’s made Microsoft a staggering amount of well-deserved cash. People focus on products (which makes sense), but Microsoft’s incredible “get other people to make us money” program is the defining secret sauce of the company, the way supply-chain management is rapidly becoming a key, understood-but-still-underrated difference-maker at Apple.

And while that “don’t call us, call Packard-Bell/Compaq/Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.” system served as the backbone for the PC explosion that changed everything and made the modern internet – such as it is – commercially viable, it doesn’t result in a consistently positive (or consistently anything) end-user experience, and never has. Consumer environments where five different vendors can blame each other don’t often foster accountability. And now, all of a sudden, that user experience, and that accountability matters A LOT, partially because of unprecedented competition (both in innovation and price) from Apple, and partly because years and years of free corporate IT money has allowed the world of third party hardware manufacturers to lose any kind of competitive edge or empathy with end-users.

Google, on the other hand, appears to be going through serious growing pains, and seems unable to execute on much of anything these days. They may or may not figure themselves out sometime in the near future, but I don’t expect them to put out a high-quality, end-to-end (software + hardware + ecosystem) consumer product before they do.

Either way, the push is good for Apple. But so much of the push is talk, and concepts, and vaporware. Even if they get caught up to in specs, or features (as has happened with phones in some ways), their huge advantage in distribution, support, ecosystem, and brand is something that takes years to build, if you’re even able to pull it off. Apple is doing this stuff right now.

I think, if fully committed, Microsoft could do it. But I don’t think they’ll ever be fully committed to anything, and they’ll ultimately fail. The easy-enterprise money is just too tempting, and it’s too deeply infused into the company’s DNA at this point.

Anti-Social Media

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:51:00 -0400

I have a pretty obvious love-hate relationship with social media. For simplicity’s sake, and to start a post with some concrete statements instead of directionless blather (which I will save for the middle and end), here are some things from each of those categories.

HATE

I hate how important people make social media out to be.
I hate how much attention it gets in the media as a result of being disproportionately useful/engaging to people in the media.
I hate how obviously many social media tools are designed for the perfect user, instead of the kind of mouth-breathers (like me) who will actually use it (Facebook and Google, especially).
I hate that my most annoying friends are the ones who participate the most, and that the vast majority of my interesting friends barely participate at all.

LOVE

I love the user focus of social media sites (at least the good ones, which are often the popular ones) – off the top of my head, I can’t think of another industry that cares more about your experience using their product.
I love how services are held accountable for no longer caring about their audience. MySpace stopped caring about what it was like to use MySpace, and they died almost instantly. Facebook annoys people, but that’s only when it’s necessary to meet their increasingly weird business model. They still care about – and put a lot of work into – the experience.
I love the way it fosters creativity among people.
I love the way it cuts out the media from the places where it has the least value (I’m thinking largely of sports, here).

Looking at this list, I think what I really like isn’t social media, but internet publishing tools, which is probably why I get such an irrationally big kick out of maintaining a fairly comprehensive, largely unread web presence. If I were someone else, I’d be a social media juggernaut; I think of things that I think are neat and worth telling anyone who cares ALL THE TIME. But I’m me, and the idea of bothering people so I can tell them what I think about something they very likely aren’t interested in is inherently repellent to me.

As somewhat of an aside, I also have this dorky love of data services that talk to each other. When I was a kid, my Dad taught me to program in various forms of BASIC, and one of the most satisfying things I ever did with it was write a little program that could open a text document and import various elements of it. I just thought it was so cool that I could access data from a whole other world, and connect it to something built for a completely different purpose, where it could have totally different uses. I think that’s the same thing I love about the API-driven web era, where these hundreds of services all talk to each other and allow you to push and pull data. I love when different technologies can talk to each other; that just seems like the root of so many good potential ideas.

But like I said, I’m starting to realize that has a lot less to do with social media specifically, and a lot more to do with web technology, which simply facilitates social media (among other things). I’ve gotten really, really curmudgeonly about Facebook ever since they rolled out the idea for the Timeline thing, going so far as to basically hide/delete (whatever Facebook actually allows) pretty much all of my contributions. I haven’t put anything up in a few months, and I honestly think I’m really done with it.

Here’s the problem for me in a nutshell. Ultimately, I’d rather talk to myself than to someone who doesn’t care about what I’m saying. If you know me really well, this is obvious – I will absolutely talk your EAR off, and then you’ll introduce me to someone at a party and I’ll find the first excuse to go stand in the coat closet and think about sports or the internet or some band I was in a decade ago, unless that person seems legitimately interested in what I’m saying, in which case I have a new friend (this happened twice in four years of college). People assume that means I’m shy, but I’m not shy at all. I just sang a horrible lounge version of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer to 120 co-workers and assorted strangers in Vietnam, completely sober, while walking around like I was backing up Run-DMC. Why? Because they asked me to sing. You wanna hear me sing? You got it. Am I going to ASK you to listen to me sing? Probably not.

I think the reason Facebook makes me increasingly uncomfortable is that they’re so interested in promoting my thoughts/pictures/activities on my behalf, instead of simply letting me choose when to do it. And that’s no better than me bothering people myself – now I’ve simply got Facebook running around asking people if they’ve watched me sing karaoke yet, which is only one degree away from me annoying people myself. I don’t like that.

Elementary’s own Feathers recently shuttered his blog/website (it’s significantly older than mine), and made the now standard remark that he’ll still be writing on Twitter and Facebook. That really seems to be the direction everyone is headed in, which seems to indicate people have had – all this time – very different goals than I when it comes to their little respective web presences. I tried it, but Twitter doesn’t do it for me; it’s too restrictive, and utterly pointless without the social component (which I’m unwilling to foster by brute force, as seems to be the normal way to do it). And Facebook seems to be more about dumping a bunch of information into Facebook’s digital brain and hoping they use it in a way that people find interesting, which seems way too lazy and conformist for me to find worth doing.

But at the same time, would many of the pointless conversations I have via email be more interesting if they were on Twitter, where other interested people could add to them? Probably. Maybe Jeff and I just need to make a new rule – something like “we can only ask each other Celtics questions on Twitter”.

Who knows. Maybe I’m just too old for this stuff; the tail end of the millenial generation still has one foot in the 80’s, after all.

The Case of the Missing Cell Phone

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:55:52 -0400

A couple of months ago, a got a new phone for the first time in five years. Given that I work with nerds, and live in a pretty affluent part of the richest country in the world, most people reacted to seeing my new phone with the following statement.

“Why didn’t you get an iPhone?”

Most people expect a better, probably more ideological reason than “I’m on a weird, manually negotiated plan with Verizon, and as a result, getting an iPhone would cost me a lot more money”, but that’s the only one I have. The iPhone looks cool, and I bet I would enjoy owning one, but I don’t, and that’s pretty much the end of that. Given that I’m not exactly lacking in the “Apple branded consumer electronics” department, I think I’m going to be okay. They aren’t making you move out of Fairfax County for not owning an iPhone… yet.

One thing that’s interesting, though, is that absolutely NO ONE I know is impressed by my new phone, other than me. Sometimes, this surprises me, but then I realize that I’ve been using a Samsung 400bxq or whatever it was called since they invented YouTube, and that I’m probably pretty easy to impress. Having a functioning web browser on your phone might still be recognized by many as the luxury that it is, but it’s not something that blows people’s minds anymore. The same goes for Facebook and MP3s and decent looking video capabilities.

I’m beyond okay with this. I’m thrilled. I’m a dork, and I love cutting edge technology and what-have-you, but it’s not a social outlet for me in any way whatsoever. Not only do I not need to have the coolest phone in the room, I actually find it undesirable to. I mean, who really wants to be known for the consumer products they own? What kind of an identity IS that? I’m the same way with musical equipment, another dorky universe that people take way, way too seriously. Most of the time, people see my bass — which I love — and want to know if it’s Mexican, or Japanese, or what kind of wood it’s made out of, or some dumb thing like that, so that they can tell me how much better the one from Norway that’s made out of titanium is. Every once in a while, someone tells me that I have the greatest bass in the world, and how much better it is than theirs, and I have pretty much the same disinterested reaction. I like it. It is what it is.

But back to my phone. I’ve only lost one phone in my life; a $35 Cricket (a crappy regional carrier, if you haven’t heard of them) model from back when we were putting the screws to Verizon for a month or so. It wasn’t worth much, and we were getting rid of the service, so I was admittedly careless with the thing, and eventually I left it in someone’s car or something. Lesson learned. But other than that, I’m pretty careful with phones — which is why I was really surprised when I couldn’t find my new-ish phone the other day.

Some background; the last time I remembered having it, I had just come inside with my bike (I was listening to music on it), and put it on our front counter. After that, I don’t know what happened, but I still had the charger and the little headphones that came with it. After about two weeks of not having a phone, and seeing if it would turn up, we started really tearing up our house (and cars) trying to find it, but to no avail. Usually, when I lose something, there’s a scenario in my mind that, however unlikely it seems, would explain the loss of whatever is missing. Here, though, I had nothing. Where the hell could I have put it? Where do I even go these days, anywhere? And who would want to steal a Palm Pre 2?

This is where things get interesting. We remembered that we had called the phone a day or so after I lost it, and that for some reason, it had rang. It’s a Palm, though, so it basically dies without a charger after about 16 hours of standby; how was it ringing? My wife, who is somehow both incredibly naive and frighteningly savvy, decided to do some digging, and started checking our phone bill. The bill itself wasn’t any different than normal (which is why we hadn’t noticed it before), but the call log was different than what we had expected. A few days after my last call on the phone… it started calling people. And texting people. A lot. Even weirder… they were LOCAL people.

No calls to France, or Mexico. No app purchases or anything like that. Just tons, and tons, and tons of texts and a few phone calls to people within a few miles of our neighborhood.

Being equally naive myself, it took a minute to dawn on me. Someone from our neighborhood HAD my phone? And was using it casually? What could they possibly be thinking? Surely, it wasn’t of any long term use; we’d obviously be suspending the account before we ended up paying for another month of service, and then what good would it do them? Why wasn’t it already sold on Ebay, if it was worth anything? And WAS it even worth anything? It was a freaking Palm, for crying out loud. It was, in phone terms, about as sexy and desirable as our Hondas.

As I stood there, pondering the infinite possibilities of all this, my wife decided to be more direct.

She started calling the numbers.

Yep, no dallying around for her. She was direct, but friendly. Hello? Can I ask who this is? Have you happened to get any calls from a 401 number lately? All in her just slightly/maybe a little flirty voice I don’t think I’ve heard since college, or since she was trying to get our cable bill lowered before we cut the cord a few years ago.

She took copious notes of her conversations, and very quickly, the picture started to get clearer. Everyone we called was an uncomfortable sounding high school boy; one of the nicer ones practically told her his life story. Name, hobbies, where he went to school, where he had been accepted to college, the whole bit.

We Googled, and Googled, and Googled some more. In minutes, we had graduation lists, basketball team pictures, and a lot of names. But ultimately, my wife didn’t need much of it for anything other than satisfying our curiosity. Within an hour, she had convinced the thief — through one of his friends — to give up the phone, no questions asked. We got an address to pick it up (under a for sale sign, I kid you not) just a block or so from our house, and sure enough, there it was, no worse for wear.

He blanked the phone (wise), but also forgot to tell his friends to stop calling and texting it (less wise), so within another 20 minutes, we had his name, age, and position on the local high school football team (6’2, 140lb sophomore tight end — hit the weight room, dawg). My wife even got him and another one of his friends to accept a Facebook friend request, which absolutely blew my mind.

We laughed, and Palm is actually pretty good about restoring everything (IT’S IN THE CLOUD, MAN!!!!), so my phone is pretty much completely back to normal, minus a bazillion MP3s, which I’ll put back some day. But the really amazing thing here is just how disconnected I am from whatever teenage society is these days. I mean, seriously, what was this kid thinking? If you’re willing to take (possibly while I was playing basketball, that’s our current theory) my cell phone, and then use it indefinitely, even telling all your friends that this is your new number, how are you able to be convinced to RETURN it when we have absolutely no leverage? And if it’s because you’re just a nice, considerate, kid, then WHY DID YOU STEAL MY PHONE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

So many questions. Did you think we’d actually pay your imaginary cell phone bill for you? Did this phone (somehow) make you look cool to the other 16 year olds for a few minutes? Don’t all kids have cell phones now, especially in Fairfax County? Did you actually buy a proprietary charger for this cell phone, knowing it was going to be shut off in a few days? Or did you steal one of those from someone else?

I dunno. But thanks for not throwing it in a lake, I guess. That’s what my generation probably would have done.

Quarters

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:41:00 -0400

(new 2023 editor's note): I finally scraped this out of an old SQL file. It's not actually very good, but I've been writing schlocky dork prose for 35 years now and ending sentences with prepositions for almost as long, so I've just decided to stop being embarrassed and celebrate the late-20s version of myself.

(original 2009 editor's note): I wrote this the other night, after staying up way, way, way too late trying to get "Die Hard Arcade" to work, and then beating it despite the fact that it was terrible and not that fun. It's one of those things where you say, hey, it's 1:30am and I'm going to be exhausted in the morning, I might as well stay up until 2 thinking about why, right?And that sort of thing makes sense for some reason, probably because you're exhausted, ironically. Anyways, you've been warned -- delirium often produces strange nostalgia and poor writing.)

There are two kinds of people in this world; people who know you can emulate old arcade games on your computer, and people who don't. And really, there's not a lot of middle ground between the two -- either you're a dork about this, or you're not.

I happen to be a huge dork about this, and it's my parents' fault. When I was a kid, they didn't buy a Nintendo during the absolute apex of Nintendo-dom, also known as the years between 1987 (when I was 5) and, I dunno, maybe 1992. As a result, I missed out on a huge part of growing up -- playing Nintendo games constantly for a few years, until finally getting overstimulated and ultimately sick of them.

I did not go through this vitally important period of time ("pre-adolescent de-dorkification", as it's clinically called), because my parents basically kept accessible video games out of our house. Yeah, we had a computer, and eventually I had a Game Boy, but both of those were heavily monitored, and simply weren't the same experience as playing Blades of Steel with your cousin from dinner to bedtime (I did this later, at age 17, when it was somewhat less socially acceptable). As a result, video games remained freaking amazing to me for way, way, way too long.

This was about as intense as we got in my house.

The biggest example of that was my near-obsession with video arcades. Back in the day, before home systems and televisions were so ridiculously amazing (well, not mine, but other people's), the games you played at home were often based on much, much better versions that ran on giant, stand-up cabinets you put quarters int---

… wait a minute, why am I explaining this? You all remember arcades. The important thing is that compared to home systems, arcade machines were AWESOME; they had better sound, better graphics, better displays, they ran faster, and they often had cooler controls (like steering wheels, guns, a million buttons, etc.). Home video game systems were constantly seeking an "arcade-like" experience -- an actual "arcade" experience was clearly impossible from a technical perspective, so home systems would just try to get as close as they could. It was often laughably pathetic, but we didn't hold that against home systems; the arcade machines were just too good and made for an unreachable standard.

When you combine crazy, overwhelming visual and auditory stimulus, a lot of action, and a "HURRY, HURRY!!!" urgency to a virtual experience, your mind fills in the unexamined blanks with the best possible content.

Now, if you think arcade machines were cool for kids who HAD Nintendo (or Sega Genesis, or whatever), imagine how they looked to the poor idiot whose video entertainment was limited to "Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego" and "Oregon Trail"? Yeah, much, much cooler. Plus, you throw in the fact that because you had to actually put money in the machine (and basically pay per second of blissful visual stimulus), and there was, more or less, about a zero percent chance you would get tired of these games, let alone finish any of them. I got pretty good -- when I was seven, my dad used to give me a dollar to play "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" at one of the rest stops on the New Jersey Turnpike; by the time I was nine, he couldn't give me a single quarter unless he wanted to hang around Sbarro's for twenty five minutes waiting for Bebop and Rocksteady to finally kill me off.

This is how we used to roll.

At any rate, the point of all this is that these machines were incredible; you never got to play any of them long enough to really see the flaws of any one game -- the entire nature of the machine meant you always left wanting more (unless the game really, really sucked, which did happen sometimes). When you combine crazy, overwhelming visual and auditory stimulus, a lot of action, and a "HURRY, HURRY!!!" urgency to a virtual experience, your mind fills in the unexamined blanks with the best possible content -- this happens with certain movies, especially when you're a little kid (or the kind of person who writes Star Wars fan fiction, which I am not). There always seemed to be so many things you would do in these games if only you had time, but of course, you never ever did -- that's the way the games were designed; they were so good because they only focused on a few things, and then they forcibly directed your attention to them, because they could.

If you're any kind of dork, you know that now, twenty years later, it's not even remotely difficult to download these games and run them -- literally emulate the exact code that the arcade machine executed -- on your desktop PC. The games are laughably small; I sent an email this morning bigger than the original Turtles arcade game, so you can download hundreds of them in minutes -- and you'll quickly realize how terrible most of them are, once you actually have a chance to pay attention to them.

Remember, these aren't conversions or anything; as far as the game is concerned, you're standing in Chuck E. Cheese playing this thing in 1990. You'll even see the "WINNERS DON'T USE DRUGS" message on many of them (remember that?), complete with the signature of some long-forgotten Surgeon General. Because of this, the software you use to play these games actually has a button that simulates putting a quarter into the machine.

Think about what this represents. I spent significant amounts of my pre-teenage years essentially begging my parents for change (usually unsuccessfully) just so I could play the very game in front of me, which is flashing the very same "Insert Coin" message it displayed at Papa Gino's two decades ago, right before my dad yelled for me to come sit down and eat my baked ziti. If you had given me a quarter right then and there, there is a 100% chance I would have used it to play TMNT. In my seven year old brain, money equaled another two lives for Raphael (he was my favorite).

Now, I press "F5", and the machine makes the overly triumphant little victory noise, no less earnestly than it did back in the day. Two lives.

I press it again. "DING!!!" Two more lives. I press it over and over, as fast as I can, like one of those rats they get addicted to the little lever that dispenses cocaine. The machine can't even keep up, beeping away as fast as it can, until Raphael has 36 lives.

Thirty six lives. In 1990, I would elect to jump kick the bad guys to death, even though it took three times as long as just mashing the "Attack" button, if it would save me a tenth of a life in this stupid game, and now, I have thirty six of them. Even though I'm twenty something years old, and have car insurance payments, this is a jarring experience. Zimbabwe's currency didn't plummet this suddenly. Am I ready to live in a world where the physical well-being of Raphael is so worthless?

The answer, sadly, is no, I am not. The issue of inflation here isn't totally irrelevant -- with too much "currency" (turtle lives, really) in the system, the game effectively loses any and all motivation for playing well. Without the thrill of imminent, impending death, you start to pay attention to how repetitive all the enemies are, how static the backgrounds look, and how everyone falls down the same way. The music loops, you start to notice absurdly obvious, money-eating tricks in the game (unexpected, difficult to avoid things that kill you instantly -- not that it matters now, "F5" takes care of that), and eventually, through sheer attrition, you plow through everything and anything the game can throw at you.

What is this billboard even advertising? Ohhhh.... "Trapcorp"... that's... why it falls on you.

The biggest irony is at the end, when you fight the last guy (anyone remember "Shredder"?). He continually clones himself -- this was absolutely horrifying when I was a kid; it made the task of killing him seem totally insurmountable -- so you basically have to kill him twenty times, all at once. Now? Shredder can't clone himself fast enough. He can kill me fifty times with that stupid little laser gun of his, and I just keep coming back, stronger than ever, like Neo at the end of the Matrix. I am not playing by the rules of his universe. I am not dependant on the whims of mom's quarters, or anyone's quarters. Shredder has no idea; he is laughing maniacally every time I die, probably assuming that this is really frustrating me, and that his resilience is making Konami a crapload of money.

This is supposed to be incredibly hard.

Eventually, he dies, with the (incorrect) knowledge that this epic battle has cost probably close to seven dollars; by mom-standing-behind-you-in-the-arcade standards, that's the practically the bridge at Antietam, and I'm George-freaking-McClellan. In reality, it's nothing like that. All I've done is push down an old, irrelevant foe who doesn't even know what's going on. I may as well storm into the old folks' home where my second grade gym teacher probably lives, and wave my diploma at him.

"YOU SAID I WAS A QUITTER!!! YOU SAID I HAD NO FOCUS!!!! LOOK AT ME NOW, OLD MAN!!!"

Just like the guy who made me do sit-ups, Shredder and the five hundred bazillion purple, orange, yellow, and white ninja-looking dudes I've laid waste to were simply about the challenge of meeting an impossible goal. Winning (no matter how you did it) had no point, so much so that it was never even seriously considered when the challenge was designed -- imminent failure was always part of the plan.

I hate when things are like this, and yet, they almost always are. How many other things consisted of me pursuing a far-off definition of success that was never actually related to the point of the exercise? Junior varsity basketball? High school science projects? Higher education? Every band I've ever been in?

That was the thing about being a kid. You believed in these pursuits and their ostensible goals so much, so purely, that if by some technological innovation or weird sleight-of-hand, you can now actually put yourself back there for a minute, the perspective is a little overwhelming. For one of the birthdays that came and went during the arcade era, part of my present (my favorite part) was that my dad went with me to the arcade, gave me five bucks to play TMNT, and stood there, letting me play for as long as those five bucks would last. I remember being almost delusionally excited about this, and the prospect that I might actually beat the game.

I got pretty far, but eventually, I ran out of money. And my father cut me off at five bucks, just as the terms of the deal specified. I was disappointed, but then we ran off and drove go-carts or played miniature golf or something (which, hilariously, probably cost a lot more than five bucks) and I quickly forgot. Considering how much I now realize -- twenty years later -- I enjoyed not winning, I think that was probably good he stuck to the plan.