The Suit, The Artist & The Engineer

For the longest time, you needed those three roles to really market and create something to customers. Three roles meant three sets of people. Occasionally the roles could converge but not generally to the same effect. So the artist can also be the engineer or the artist can also be the suit, but not the engineer, yadda yadda...

I think AI is, for the first time, leading us to the point where one person can actually perform all three roles. So now you can have an idea, you can build the idea, and you can sell and market the idea, all as a single high agency person. I think that's a really powerful concept because what it does is it starts to vertically integrate the different skills and roles necessary to carve out niches and define success for whatever it is you're trying to do in a business sense.

This doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be easy. Removal of friction runs both ways. So if it's easier for these three roles to be defined by one person, then that means more people are able to perform these three roles, which means more output. I don't think that's the right barometer or metric for viewing this shift. I think it's far better to think in terms of leverage on your existing time and energy and skills. How much can you leverage yourself? 5x? 15x? 50x? We all have the same 24 hours in a day after all.

So the way that I think about AI is a little more akin to the super soldier serum given to Captain America: it's going to exacerbate and highlight what's already there first and foremost. I don't think this is going to teach you something entirely new per se, but I think it'll enable and enhance something that's already there.

So if you've already got a little bit of idea, but no way to build it or not really an understanding of how to build it, I think AI is going to allow you to circumvent and shortcut that. Or maybe you've got some way to market something, some way to be an engineer, but you're kind of short on ideas and you need something to work with. A sort of pile of clay to start molding and shaping. I think AI is going to help you kind of generate those ideas without increasing your cost significantly.

So when I think about the impact AI is going to have, broadly speaking, I think it's really going to benefit this group the most. The people that can be the artist, the engineer, and the suit and go from ideation to construction to sales in an iterative fashion. I think that's really going to be a benefit to people. Having a viewpoint through AI that this is kind of how to bring ideas to fruition and how to bring ideas to market is going to help narrow your problem space.

Because now, instead of having too many ideas and no way to build any of them, I think people are going to have too many ideas and no way to filter on them. Deciding on a filtering mechanism based on what you think you can ideate on, build, and then sell, market, and sell, I think is going to be the right kind of viewpoint on how to approach the next several years of your career.

Business Update

SPT (Standard Parts Toolkit) - quiet few months. Really hasn't been a huge focus for me outside of customer service and iterative improvements. I'm getting set to really narrow the focus of the product towards manufacturers (vs. retailers) and so the next 1-2 months will be a revamp of all of the positioning & marketing.

FeedGeni - Similar to the above: pretty steady state and minor to flat growth. I migrated the underlying hosting infrastructure to clean up a few things and make some quality of life improvements, but nothing sizable.

No Fixed Plans - Here's where I'm spending a ton of timing thinking about what the next 3-5 years for the overall company looks like. I'm weighing a mixture of:

• Double down, grow existing assets in a more AI native way (first defining AI native of course)
• Make a strategic acquisition in the services space to shore up some additional opportunities.
• Do nothing, exit the existing portfolio and take the next 6-9 months to go all in on something large, AI related.

Watching / Listening

Swimming Paul, Nas & DJ Premier and Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter

Reading

This is not a T-Shirt by Bobby Hundreds

Reamde by Neal Stephenson (slowly...it's 1000+ pages)

And now that you know you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. - John Steinbeck

Have a great start to the summer this holiday weekend, be safe and have fun.

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