Art credit @Madison Harney
Spark of the Week
Today I’m pondering the prevalence of bikeshedding on the topic of efficiency. As we see the drive to “30% cost reductions with AI” everywhere I get a sinking sense (a personal right hemisphere indicator) that we are missing an important big picture lens.
Our Finance driven targets are blinding us to the real opportunities that exist in this shifting era. Adding or subtracting from the process of business today is not likely to yield transformative results and the slack we are eliminating might be exactly the thing we need to find the more productive path. The question is what to do instead. Still sorting that bit.
Reading and Pondering
Theory of Mind and AI - the threads are thin
Anthropic pays for copyright infringement
OpenAI and Recruiting tech - (h/t Thomas Otter ) and/or maybe this is a trojan horse (h/t Anita Lettink )
The downside of usage based pricing for customers [Meg’s thought - while pricing is critical to business execution it is not a substitute for having a product that actually solves a real customer need]. More on this here
Architecture and Operating model agility must drive your strategic moat.
Insurance costs rising (again/still?)
Silicon Valley monoculture and reading canon
Communication is hard (or as Justin Bieber said, what do you mean?)
Distribution criticality to GTM strategy (tl;dr go where your customers are - not where you want to be)
Causes of customer churn
A case for product-led software businesses (h/t Mike Ettling )
SVB 2H 2025 State of the markets report
High impact metrics [for a deeper dive read up on control points here]
Innovation v. Margins - your analysis better include insight into your competitive moat. (h/t CJ Gustafson )
Care tax - an often gendered expectation of emotional labor in human thought leaders.
Architecture of AI Transformation - Augmentation/Automation/Collaboration
200B Data Center buildup in the South pushback (environmental concerns for energy and water as well as concerns that the jobs created are for building not running so they don’t have long term benefits to the region)
Cool new UI Interaction model - speech without speech (!), or real world telepathy
Fossil Fuel Subsidies (doubled since 2017 to 31B or more)
Work and Jobs
PE CFO expanding job requirements (heavy strategy and growth focus)
Data on the entry-level job squeeze for new college graduates (and the growth of blue collar jobs) - h/t Gad Levanon
Read this summary of this book about how affluence is used as a proxy for competence.
996 work - we are back in the dot-com days where engineering teams were encouraged to “expand your capacity”. – suggestion read/follow this instead (h/t Han-Shen (Han) Yuan )
Diella - AI minister of Albania focused on anti-corruption
Enshittification and P(catastrophe)
AI models hallucinate to avoid saying I don’t know
100% p(doom)
SEO destruction lawsuits begin
Fun and Funny
Waymo lives at our house apparently
FINALLY - Spinal Tap Sequel [the Fresh Air interview was a fun listen - reminded me of how important comedy albums used to be to the cultural conversation - ah nostalgia]
It’s never too late to get [or benefit from] a personal trainer
Lifehacks - AI and Others
Let AI read you google docs (I don’t seem to have this option yet, but looking forward to it)
Looping Back to You
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** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
