The modern trap
The word modern has become the cure-all solution, promising to solve not just our immediate problems, but somehow prevent future ones entirely.
Category: Business
All CategoriesA cynical read on Anthropic’s book settlement
$1.5B. Damn. Who can afford to pay that? A very cynical read.
No, you don’t want to hire “the best engineers"
Just say those words to any room full of recruiters, and everyone will give a wry chuckle and roll their eyes. We've all heard it a million times.
Seeing like a software company
Thinking in terms of legibility and illegibility explains so many of the things that are confusing about large software companies.
The melancholy of history rhyming
The “AI” Bubble feels more like the all-encompassing wasteland that was the 2007 bubble in Iceland than anything else.
The broken promises of Substack
Substack promised independence, but has evolved into another platform playing the same game as everyone else.
21 ways people are using AI at work
It still makes plenty of mistakes, but it has become part of the job for many.
The OKR parallel universe syndrome
Don’t communicate new priorities by adding a slide to your all hands presentation.
Why most enterprise adoptions of AI fail
5 principles to help decision makers.
On being haunted by my corporate software past
The kind of software that generates heaps of money but nobody involved is happy with: not the people writing it and not the people using it.
Let’s stop pretending that managers care about productivity
Businesses only care about control over labour and stock prices, and ignore anything resembling modern management theory or related fields.
The specialization of app gen platforms
The world of AI app generation isn’t winner-take-all. There’s space for multiple breakout companies, each carving out its own niche.
Directory of boring websites
Discover simple online business ideas that succeed without hype or venture capital.
The hype is the product
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.
The three layers of ROI for AI agents
If you’re building or buying for enterprise, there’s really only one question that matters.
Can LLMs do accounting?
An experiment exploring whether frontier models can close the books for a real SaaS company.
The politics of pilot teams
The pilot team is how we demonstrate to the broader product and technology organization what good really looks like.
The HALO effect
A new breed of deal structure has emerged in AI: an alternative to acquisitions and hiring that shares traits of both yet isn’t quite either.