Nate Sullivan

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

1. "The Funded Dead", an explanation/summary of VC-backed companies that aren't totally failing but can't raise more money
2. 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):

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:

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.

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".

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

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.)

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. 

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.

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.

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.