🦾 Systems Are NOW Everything
but you have to do it
Better Human: Helping you build a personal moat for the AI age.
Fellow human,
Yes, companies are going to shrink. Most.
Some will grow faster than ever.
Overall, jobs are going to compress.
The key for smaller companies, or you if you plan to do anything yourself, is to engineer all the systems, skills, workflow, agents, all of it.
Your 80/20 is spending as much time as possible on your systems. Tweaking workflows. Automating what you can so humans can spend most of their time on high-value activities.
It’s always been like this.
Most companies do 1 thing well, and that single thing is often responsible for MOST of their success.
This is true for humans, too. Most of us are good at one thing, maybe 2. And that is what moves us forward.
Yet we end up spending some of our time on the 80% that doesn’t matter as much.
It’s almost always, from what I have seen, due to the fact that the 20% feels easy for us. So we discredit it. We get caught up in doing other things.
Every extra workflow, SOP, or flow chart you build (and the resulting training/enforcement time needed) gives you 10x to 100x leverage moving into the future.
But this isn't always fun. This isn’t sexy. It's often very labor-intensive and requires a lot of thought, pruning, testing, and iterating.
The thing is, in this AI age, it’s more necessary than ever because we now tend to get caught up in doing/building too much. So it’s easier than ever to ignore those foundations.
They go on neglected while we are out chasing shiny objects.
This is why I forced myself into a hiring process even though I knew I needed ot build a lot of this.
And guess what, I've had major breakthroughs because the pressure of having a bunch of people sitting around was too strong a force to ignore.
📰 Links
Sanders and AOC just introduced a bill to pause all AI data centers
Elizabeth Warren wants to know who's actually paying for AI's electricity bill
A blistering take on what activists really win when they block AI infrastructure
A Texas county just hit pause on AI data center construction
Look at this AI-generated Monet and try to say what makes it inferior
Anthropic just landed a $30B raise at a $900B valuation
Anthropic's new research previews what AI leadership looks like in 2028
How Anthropic's CFO walked revenue from $250M to $30B in two years
Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital just dropped $100M into Shopify
OpenAI is teaming up with Plaid to bring tailored financial advice to everyone
Peter Thiel's bank is offering Venezuela an unlikely banking lifeline
Crypto just hit a historic Senate milestone — what builders actually need to know
Companies are hitting a new AI problem: way too many agents
An xAI cofounder is talking to investors about a $1B raise for a new AI startup
Figma's Q1 prepared remarks reveal where the design tools market is heading
Why oil prices stayed flat even with the Hormuz closure
Bill Ackman on why short-term traders keep creating buying opportunities
Patek Philippe's president on running a watchmaker in a downturn
A mystery bidder just paid $9M to have lunch with Warren Buffett
📊 Stats
Survey says: a nuclear plant in your backyard is now more popular than an AI data center. Source: Forbes
For seven straight years, America has picked the exact same top baby names. Culture might be drifting slower than we think. Source: Sherwood News
Netflix is taking KPop Demon Hunters on a real-world concert tour. Animated IP is becoming live entertainment. Source: Sherwood News
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👋 I’m Colin. Father, founder, and Investor. X, IG, Support the newsletter