The bubble bursts when Apple announces it's doing good enough (private/secure) LLMs on device. At that point the capex on cloud infra starts to come into question and the dominos start to fall...
The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report for August, published by political consulting firm Slingshot Strategies, polled 8,000 Americans. Only 14% of those surveyed said FSD would make them more likely to buy a Tesla, while 35% said the technology would make them less likely to purchase one.
But it is broken. There is a shortage of every type of trades worker. Sure it's been great for existing trade folks because there are plenty of jobs and the pay is great more demand than supply. But the lack of supply has meant that it's too expensive to build/fix stuff. If you're in the US look around. It looks like we literally stopped building in the 1950s. Every renovation/building project is multi-year. Why? The lack of plentiful skilled trades people is one of the reasons the US building and infrastructure are deteriorating.
Fossil Fuels. I read 70% of it is wasted in extraction, processing, transportation and inefficient use. This despite ~100 years of working on the problem.
A couple of years ago, some smart kids created fractal. Every week (or maybe 2) you got matched with another exec. It was super high quality and I got a lot of value from it. I met someone I hired, someone who eventually hired me and another I still trade texts with. My impression was others felt strongly about it as well. But they abandoned the project as there was no viable monetization model. That and Founders are a terrible demographic to build for. 99% don't stay founders for long.
I wonder if the callousness is a consequence of generational experiences. Hundreds of years ago, Europe was once like the US. It had hype manias (tulips). But perhaps they had enough of them where they stopped believing. The US is much younger and we're now in just our 3-4 meta hype cycle. Though in the last 10 years they seemingly have accelerated in tech (SaaS, SoLoMo, Crypto, AI). I wonder if over time that hype will wane. I do agree with DHH here that VC is the gas that keeps the engine going.
The local public elementary school blocked all chat programs on student chromebooks. The 3rd graders figured out that they could chat with another in a shared google doc. They had thousands of pages of chat before the teacher finally put an end to it. The teacher only found out because a kid shared that it was getting unruly during class. I share this because most kids have an ipad and are digital communication natives. This landline concept is like puting a lid back on a can of worms.
I've managed thousands of people. In my experience people didn't feel guilt about taking PTO, they felt FOMO because they didn't feel secure in their position or at the company. They felt something would come up or someone would undermine them while they were away that would affect their employment.
A digital strike by all employees for a week to get a collective bargaining agreement in place to show companies just how far AI has to go as a replacement would be powerful.
For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively created the middle class. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
I've gone down this rabbit hole with customers as a PM still working in the space. Here is what I've learned. The past decade of devices (hololens, realwear, google glass, vuzix, etc) were some combination of way too heavy, expensive, fragile, short battery life, no wifi connectivity, too much UI long to get to point of value and/or simply not useful. That and most customers had a content problem. The AR/VR use in the field typically came down to looking something up in a manual or calling someone. Both easily and perhaps more effectively done on a smartphone. There was an instance where I asked techs why they weren't using the headset for showing what they were seeing in realtime and they said, it's easier to facetime (hard to argue that). The cool AR 3-D demos or overlays rarely worked in the field on real equip or didn't actually convey anything useful (everyone knows the basics of how the machine works). There are training VR use cases (like learning to operate a crane), but once again it's a nice to have supplement and not a replacement. Recent advances with LLMs (specifically voice) + Meta type "glasses form factor" have created intrigue again with innovation centers at large companies. The use case we're currently working on is inspections or filling out forms with audio/videos.
I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.
The apocalypse will presumably come when communication + coordination meetings are no longer necessary. People are really inefficient at this. We have to all get on a synchronous meeting and wait 20 minutes to share our 90 second update. We can debate the utility of these meetings, but that's how it's done and nothing has replaced them. Agents/AI will just get the info they need from the source, no updates needed. In my experience 60%+ of a corporate job would go away if I could just ask an all knowing bot where we were on something and get an instant response vs waiting for someone to respond to a slack or not wanting to bother them knowing we were meeting tomorrow morning for updates. All the people who dedicate themselves to making meetings work won't be necessary. I'm kinda excited for this future.
I just got a courtesy notice from the roll-out of these speeding cameras in San Francisco. This after getting 0 speeding tickets in SF for the last 15 years. It's admittedly had a chilling effect on my driving. It's hard for me to drive < 30MPH when there is no traffic. I have to deliberately focus on going that slow. I feel more compelled to take an uber.
Ultimately (and sadly) yes. While I never habitually or intentionally attended meetings to just look busy, I did work on something I knew had a long shot of creating value for the business. I worked on 0-1 products that if the company was more disciplined would not (or should not) have attempted. I left both on my own accord seeing the writing on the wall.
True! I golfed with the president of the division on a Friday (during work) and we got to the root of this. Companies would rather burn money on headcount (counted as R&D) than show profits and pay the govt taxes. When you have 70%+ margin on your software, you have money to burn. Dividends back to shareholders was not rewarded during ZIRP. On VP's being respected. I found at the companies I worked at VPs and their directs were like Nobles in a feudal kingdom constantly quibbling/battling for territory. There were alliances with others and full on takeouts at points. One VP described it as Game of Thrones. Not sure how this all changes when your kingdom is a bunch of AI agents that presumably anyone can operate.
Imagine a soldier operating an andruil drone with a heads up display powered by Meta getting intel on a target that includes their instagram with family pics and then being ordered to fire
I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.
CEO's typically make decisions when there isn't enough data to support the obvious direction. In this way, they are anti-pattern finders that rely on gut or some anecdotal experience. They are most often wrong, but when they are right and it's a success they are considered genius. I'm not sure an AI can make a non-obvious decision based on feeling.
I did a bunch of solo-traveling in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a magic time. No smartphones. Internet was still niche. You take a train. Find a hostel. Meet some folks. Party together. Check out some sites then go on to the next city.
Back then the only pictures I saw of Prague were in a travel guide. Navigating a city meant looking at maps and asking people. Smoking cigarettes was a great way to meet people. Today that discovery is sort of dead.
I noticed young people don't go out as much as I did early in my life. In my small sample size of questioning this they reasons were: It's too expensive to drink at a bar, a good night costs $200. Dating happens exclusively through apps so what's the point.
So much of my going out was motivated by discovery of the unknown. You can see everything there is to see on your phone in seconds, including people experiencing it in an endless feed. I'm not old man ranting, it's just different then when there was no info.
RTO full time just isn't possible for my family and I suspect I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with productivity. It's just the economics of childcare don't work. We live in SF both work tech jobs. We make above median income relative to rest of the country. Our 2 kids (< 10 years old) are in public schools. Kids need to be dropped off at 9.30 and picked up at 3.30 and 2.30 on weds.
The bare minimum for pickup/drop off help is ~ $2500 a month.
I read this annually, typically in a day, usually when I'm feeling lost. For me it distills the human experience into a simply story that helps me find meaning for where I am in my own journey.
I like the AI notetakers. I'm not worried about being taken out of context because if I am, there is a recording of the whole thing I can point to. As far as etiquette, yah it was awkward at first, but so was doing video calls