July 2023

ai secret value, future of jobs, decipad is open

Jul 21, 2023

What I love about my email schedule is that I’m never “too much”. Writing twice per years is perfect cadence to relive through multiple trends (ai, threads, raises, economy shifts) and reflect back on them. I hope you will find it valuable, I will wait here for your likes and comments below.

Decipad — making sense of numbers.

I really believe, that the state of the static text in modern web is very outdated. Every number should have a context: dependencies from other numbers, historical data or forecast into the future. Static numbers (“5” ← like this one) is very flat and uninformative — just a pixelated representation of a symbol, that will be explained by text before or after it and I really think it shouldn’t be like this.

Decipad is on ProductHunt today and it opens it’s beta doors to everyone.

No more waitlists: decipad.com

I love the industry of “dynamic documents”. There are so many attempts to make it right, the amount of dead startups is growing at the same pace, as new appear. And I think Decipad is oriented to success with unique approach to units management, smart references, and •• •••••••••• ••••• — an amazing feature that is coming soon!

I was helping Decipad with their design function. In some sense you can consider this post “Sponsored” 😅

Real value of AI

“Generating emails, messages, texts and essays” — this is what half of the Silicon Valley startups did in the last couple of months. And I think it is quite shallow. This is human nature — people always add things to fix things, and rarely remove something. It was studied multiple times and AI is a great proof of that.

I think we have enough text. We have enough stories. What we lack is clarity and action-taking on them. Product Managers who write documentation in companies are getting caught in perception that amount of documents written equals value created. This thinking is very limiting and many-many-many talented people get into this trap.

But how can we use AI to embrace more clarity in action?

My take: we should stop generating and start collapsing data.

By “collapsing”, I mean merging multiple documents, knowledge bases, facts and people, without losing the phrasing and context. Summarisation works quite bad, because many times it’s losing very thin threads of context that were engraved into the sentences and how they were written.

I was sharing this concern multiple times with people: browsing knowledge is becoming harder and harder. And we don’t have great solutions yet. We’re stuck with two:

File-management — files, folders, tags. Think of Notion sidebar.
Search — ⌘ + K patterns, smart searches, etc. Think of Raycast.

They both hold a limitation — it’s almost impossible to "get confronted with data, that you don’t exactly know how to describe or how it looks. I think one of the porential solutions can be spatial systems, where our body “feels” where some knowledge is situated.

People can find stuff around their homes even with the eyes closed. In computers we sometimes can’t find things with the eyes open.

Anyways, I’m preparing more research into this, and started sharing a little bit:

Future of Jobs

I did a small research for one startup recently and I think we’re on the verge of “social contract revolution” in job sector. There are so many reasons for it, and ironically AI is NOT one of them!

Disclaimer: I have to say it’s related to tech sector and knowledge workers mainly, because I’m in the middle of it and I have little knowledge about other sectors. I was hiring and was hired dozens fo time, so will vouch for “both sides”.

Everyone are unhappy about productivity. Managers are unhappy about employees productivity. Employees are not happy about manager’s contribution. Executives are unhappy about everyone else. Managers are unhappy about executives decisions. It’s much more rare to find a person who is satisfied about their team, than it was, say 5 years ago.
The social contract of full-time doesn’t work anymore. People leave most of the time in 1-2 years of working. Employees can leave anytime. Company can also layoff anytime. Both parties are pretending to like everything, until they give a notice. Full-time work have this dilusion of “infinite employment”, which is never true, but everyone pretends it is. I’m not even saying about people juggling multiple jobs and projects.
Building changes. One person, with the right mindset, can build a million dollar business. This is still rare, requires strong character and amazing skillset, but it’s not impossible. Our tools have changed, we have a lot of APIs and tailwinds to make it happen. But the companies’ economy is still operating like a factory, which leads to…
Compensation is very assymetrical. It’s unclear to me, how the money are flowing right now and for what exactly. What is a job? Is it being responsive? Or is it being productive? Or are you getting paid to not work on other’s projects? The answer was very clear 10 years ago, but it’s almost impossible to generalise at the moment. Everyone have side-hustles… which makes them more experiences… but also distracted. Should that person be compensated higher or lower? Is a job really 8 hours per week or 2 smart decisions per month? It feels like the whole industry is exporing themselves like hungry teenagers — building subscription agency models, working on 3 jobs at once etc. Because apparently there’s no healthy way to hire talented people for their full time, unless you bring them to a founding team.
Job descriptions (as well as roles) suck. 5 years ago I was unsatisfied, that jobs were very poorly described and I suggested more interactive job descriptions, where:
1. people could see the problems they would need to solve
2. people could peek into the future schedule they would have
3. people could see their compensation trajectory
4. people could see their team structure
Screenshot 2018
It probably requires rebuilding whole recruiting effort inside of the companies to be this open, but it also feels like the change is needed. Hiring regular IC takes multiple agencies, months worth of effort and many cultural misses.
I’m experimenting with one “interactive job description” right now.
If you’re a builder, reply and maybe we could build something for $220B market!