Elsewhere
I post short things on LinkedIn most days, and this is where they live afterward.
A platform can change its mind about your writing, so the copy that matters to me is the one sitting on my own site. Every post here has its own address and a link back to the original.
Longer pieces go up at shiftMode.
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McDonald's can feed my kids in five minutes for ten dollars.
Yet I still spent thirty dollars and two hours cooking instead.
Nobody would call that irrational once we're at the dinner table. We understand that the point was never just getting food into them. Putting our hands to the meal and the process itself offers as much as the nutrition.
I recently built an eight-foot tall bookshelf with my youngest which you can buy at Ikea for a fifth of the price we spent on materials. My oldest spent three days grinding out a rusted truck floor nobody would ever see. Slower, costlier, and completely worth it, and we all knew why.
Then Monday I opened my laptop and started handing things to AI on the exact opposite logic. It's faster, so why would I ever do that myself again.
Maybe that's right for some of it. But we're making that trade on everything, all at once, faster than we've ever made it, and at times we're not deciding at all. We're defaulting and the only number we're looking at is the efficiency one.
The same number that says buy the shelf and skip the truck.
I use these tools every day, so this isn't a don't-use-them post. I'm saying we should at least know when we're choosing the drive-thru, and make sure it's not becoming the only way we know how to eat.
What are you building right now that's slower than it needs to be and worth it anyway?
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What are you choosing to NOT give to your AI?
The answer to that question tells me more about your business than what you're building with AI. I'm more interested in that than in what you're powering with it.
Every company is, or will be soon, issuing the "use AI reflexively" mandate to their people. I get it, that's required. But that makes the other decision urgent too, and it's worth making today: which parts have you decided AI will not handle?
And I mean decided, not the parts you haven't built your AI harness for yet, or haven't learned how, or just don't like. Those are just backlog items. I mean the parts you've explicitly chosen to keep in the hands of your humans because you believe keeping them human is how you out-compete everyone else.
This came up twice this week. Once over lunch with Mike Kirkup at our pop-up coworking day, and again last night at our Founders' Club event.
We already recognize AI slop where AI became ubiquitous first, in posts and comments on social media. It's a gut feel, you can just sense it. If we all blindly hand over every part of our operations, what makes us think businesses will be any different? Within a few years we'll interact with a company and quickly declare, eww, that company is AI slop.
That's not anti-AI. It's that we're still human, and we want to feel that when we deal with a business.
Brands weaken themselves by copying their competition, all in the name of keeping up, and AI accelerates that drift toward sameness.
We're fast foodifying every business, willingly.
True differentiation tomorrow will come from which parts you decide to keep human, and those parts will look like negatives at first, because they're slower and more expensive and harder to scale than whatever your competitors just automated. Strong brands are built on negatives they refuse to apologize for, so hold on to yours and trumpet them.
So, which parts of your business are you keeping human, on purpose?
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You can hand AI the work. You can't hand it the judgment. Knowing the difference is today's work.
That's where the conversation went at yesterday's pop-up coworking day, when we broke at lunch to talk with our guest, Mike Kirkup, about building companies. Everyone building right now is deciding what to hand over and what to keep, and most of us are making that call by feel.
He also shared some great experiences from his years in and around startup land, stories you only hear from someone who was in the room.
Thanks to Mike for the time and to Royal City Brewing for hosting us.
The next pop-up coworking day is August 12, same room. Link in the comments if you want a spot.
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Sixteen years of Startupfest and I've learned the fest doesn't stay inside the venue. Montreal absorbs it, entirely!
In the Old Port I found an iron door stamped NEW BRIGHT IDEA. Somebody's breakthrough, cast in metal, bolted to a wall, a century of rust on it. Every bright idea ends up somewhere like this...since the idea was never the hard part.
One evening I wandered into circus festival. Literally every act was risk, creation, and putting yourself in front of people before you're sure.
And on a walk up Mont Royal I ended up behind a young man telling his friend what he wanted from his working life....to build companies, fail at some, learn, and be surrounded by people who support that pattern. At the top I said hello and told him about the fest and about Founders' Club.
He was describing a room. Those exist when someone builds them.
As always, thanks for hosting me and putting on the show Philippe Telio, Alistair Croll, Rebecca Croll, Katherine Johnsen, Pamela Perrotti, Keon Smith and Adam(someday he'll share his contact deets with me).