Bill’s Amigo
You know from my drinking beer with Grok earlier this week that I have started fooling around with AI. Guess what? It’s entertaining and helpful. I know I’m late to the party here, but give me grace. While I’ve said that one’s overarching purpose in life and work is to make one’s self obsolete, maybe part of me doesn’t want that to be so.
But I’ll tell you that the reason these AI tools have been so entertaining and helpful is that they’re fast. And who among us doesn’t get a dopamine hit from instant gratification?
For example, our founder and CEO Brent told me that he was eating dinner out with his lovely wife and they found themselves admiring the restaurant’s steak knives. When he asked the waiter where he might purchase some, he was told it was impossible. That’s because they’d been handcrafted by an artisanal blacksmith in rural Mexico. But Brent took a picture, fed it to ChatGPT, and it (I won’t make the pronouns joke again) found the knives for him. Now Brent knows what he’s getting people for Christmas. (Maybe. Not a spoiler. I don’t know that he’s actually decided yet.)
Not long after Brent and I were contemplating hiring someone for a kind of strange position with a diverse set of responsibilities in an obscure geography. We wanted to know what we might need to pay this person. Perplexed, Brent asked his AI and I asked mine. While we got slightly different answers, both were well-reasoned and significantly narrowed the range of possibilities. Now we could not only plan better, but if we end up making an offer to someone, we can feel confident we are neither insulting them nor doing something too over the top.
Finally, after he read about my friend and mentor Bill Mann nearly carjacking an elderly Chilean gentleman, my friend and former colleague and now podcaster and venture capitalist Joe Magyer spent some time with Grok refining what Bill’s amigo’s face might have looked like just before he bellowed “Oh no!” And you can hang that result in the Louvre:
What these tasks have in common is that, without AI, they would have been incredibly time-consuming to perform and probably not worth the effort. But even though the manual labor may not have been worth the outcomes, the outcomes were still positive. To wit, Brent has a thoughtful Christmas gift idea, Permanent Equity knows what it might pay a new employee, and Joe made a keepsake for Bill and me that will make us (and maybe you) laugh and remember every time we see it.
A popular way to do prioritization is to put jobs to be done in quadrants based on the difficulty of and value in solving (and I have advocated for this methodology in the past). In other words, do the easy things that will deliver big wins first because they’re big easy wins. But a consequence of this view is that hard things that aren’t expected to move the needle much never get done.
On the one hand, that makes sense. That’s ruthless prioritization. But given how fast AI works, we might get as much or more done without needing to be so ruthless. And then those things we thought wouldn’t move the needle much might turn out to be more meaningful than we ever anticipated. After all, without AI, Joe never would have made that picture of Bill’s amigo. But it’s awesome that Joe did that.
Have a great weekend.
– Tim
