Archives for February 2023

In one, two, five, or ten years from now, what’s the value of being able to say, “This is the life I’ve chosen, not the one I’ve settled for.”?

And what needs to happen today for us to be able to say it then?

I often read about the cost of healthcare and health insurance in the United States, but it feels distant to my life and experience in the United Kingdom, so I don’t give it much thought.

A couple days ago, though, I was in a pharmacy in Orlando and overheard a conversation between an employee and the woman in front of me in the queue.

The woman was picking up three different medicines. One was $30, the second was $45, and the third was $420. The employee asked if the woman had insurance. She didn’t. She paid for the first two, but couldn’t afford the third—despite saying she needed the medicine on a daily basis.

It then occurred to me that I’ve never seen this situation play out in the countries I’ve lived; not in New Zealand, Australia, nor the United Kingdom. I’ve grown up with my baseline assumption being that people should be able to access the medicine they need at a reasonable price. Yet the one time I’m in a pharmacy in the United States, I see someone have to walk out without the medicine they need. I was dismayed and saddened at the situation. It felt all sorts of wrong to me.

I don’t know enough about the US healthcare system to make any broader commentary on the subject, but sometimes it’s a single data point or anecdote that can serve as the most powerful of lessons.

My bet is most businesses run on “good enough”.

That new product, service, upgrade, refresh, rebranding, or release is good enough.

But, we can almost always do better.

And if we can do better, why don’t we?

If we choose to not invest further, that’s OK. But we should have a deliberate, specific, and clear reason for doing so.

Google’s stock dropped 8%—or $120 billion—after a live demo of its new chat-based AI assistant, Bard, went pear-shaped.

The question for Bard was simple enough: What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?

Bard offered a number of answers, one of which was “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”

Astrophysicist Grant Tremblay followed up on Twitter by saying”Not to be a well actually jerk, and I’m sure Bard will be impressive, but for the record: JWST did not take ‘the very first image of a planet outside our solar system’”.

This mistake has shone a light on the credibility risk inherent within chat-based AI and their underlying Language Learning Models. However, I’m confident these wrinkles will be ironed out relatively quickly. What’s more interesting is (1) how fickle the market can be, and (2) the importance of checking, and double checking, and triple checking before any demo—let alone one of the most important demos of the decade.

Google’s stock will bounce back, I’m sure of it. But they’ll definitely sense check better next time.

Embrace the constraints
With practise; we get better
A new perspective

With more than 1.4 billion people, India has recently passed China as the world’s most populace country.

One thing that stands out to me in the analysis is the population growth trajectory for each country.

China reported its first population decline in 2022; despite the one child policy ending in 2016 and all restrictions on family sizes being lifted in 2021.

On the other hand, India is set to continue growing and should surpass 1.5 billion people in the 2030s.

I’m not going to attempt to predict what may happen as a result of this turning point, but it certainly feels significant that for the first time since the UN started collecting population data China has been overtaken.

Getting a product to market may feel like a victory, but it’s just the beginning.

Whether it’s product returns, bugs in the code, or maintaining a reputation for good service, things will always go wrong. And if left unattended, small issues will snowball.

When deciding whether or not to bring something new to the world, it’s important to not just calculate the upfront cost, but all the work that follows.

I’ve been giving Magisto a go. It’s an AI-based video editing software for iOS and Android.

Whenever I’m on family trips, I film parts of the journey with the intention of making a small highlights reel.

Unfortunately, the highlights reel never happens. For all my good intentions, the friction of after-the-fact editing on a computer is just too much.

So I went hunting for a very specific type of software: one that would automatically select the best parts of my footage, stitch them together with music, and produce a small highlights reel with minimal effort.

The important thing with Magisto is providing it with high quality input video. No amount of AI is going to make bad clips better.

Magisto really shines when it is fed short-ish clips with significant movement or audio; it really feels like it can sense the right moments to put into the final video. I also like the feature to limit the final output’s length. This forces the software to be more discerning with its clip selection.

The cool thing is that instead of a random collection of clips sitting in my Google Photos, I can now have a highlights reel in less than 10 mins! That’s useful.

Maru and I almost missed our flight to the US on Friday morning. All train services across the UK were closed due to strikes by rail workers, so the only way for us to get to London’s Gatwick airport was a 2-hour Uber! Add to this an error on my part where I almost sent us to the wrong airport… and we were on struggle street.

As the Uber schlepped through central London’s treacle-like traffic, we constantly checked our phones for the updated arrival time. We were looking up travel insurance coverage and discussing what we’d do if we needed to book an alternative flight.

Those were the headwinds.

Then came the tailwinds.

Our Uber driver was a hero. He avoided the clogged motorway, snaked his way through back roads, and I’m sure broke a number of speed limits on the way. Once we arrived, there was no one in the visa check or bag drop queue. We got lucky again with almost no line at security. Of the 65 gates at Gatwick, ours was one of the closest. We got on the flight.

Some days we’ll only get headwinds, others only tailwinds, and sometimes a bit of both. I like to pause and appreciate the tailwinds. Especially when a specific combination of events had to go right for the final outcome to be a success.

“Something smells…”

Off. Like smoke. Fishy. Old. Musty.

When there is a literal bad smell, we don’t stop until we’ve hunted down the culprit and gotten rid of it.

Yet why is it that figurative smells—in our friendships, relationships, and workplaces—are ignored?

A smell is just a signal that something is wrong. The hard graft is figuring out and dealing with the source.

Chelsea Football Club just paid an English-record £107 million for the young Argentine superstar, Enzo Fernandez.

Fernandez’s performance in the recent Football World Cup earned him the enviable title of best young player of the tournament, so it makes sense that his skills are in demand.

However, what’s truly startling is the increase in his player value in such a short amount of time. In August 2022, Fernandez was bought by Benfica, a Portuguese club, for £10 million. A 10x return in less than half a year is better than the wildest of Venture Capital returns.

When football player and tech valuations converge, ROI is just the first part of the puzzle. The validation of that value comes next in the form of goals and free cash flow, respectively.

A lot of companies talk about being data-driven, yet fail to define—explicitly—what it means in practise. Being data-driven is seen as being a de-facto good thing, even though many can’t describe how data-driven decisions are made in their company.

A colleague described the idea of a data continuum, which I found useful to building a more deliberate mental model for how a team or company uses data.

On the one end is “No data”. Everything is an intuitive decision.

On the other end is “Data-driven”. This is where every decision is made with data, the data wins every time, and there is little room for nuance.

And in the middle is “Data-informed”. This is where data is preferred when it’s available, but its always supplemented with some combination of qualitative insight, research, intuition, experience, or conscience.

On either end of the continuum, the world looks black and white. But all the colour is found in the middle.

To nitpick is to “give too much importance to unimportant detail”.

Everyone has a different Nitpick Line.

Depending on our field of study, the people who coached us, or whether we had a cup of coffee this morning, all of it can affect where we draw our line, and where we draw the line for others.

But I’ve learnt something over the past few years. If we approach a nitpick situation with (1) an assumption the other person has good intent, and (2) that they may know something we don’t (which in almost all cases, they will), we can use their feedback improve our craft. This even works for the things we disagree with—we just update our mental model, tastes, and heuristics for next time.

And when it’s our turn to give feedback, we should (1) think deeply about what’s critical vs. what is a nitpick, (2) pull no punches on the important stuff, and (3) get comfortable with everyone else’s Nitpick Line always being a little different to our own.