Going Stackless

I’ve been lacking in inspiration lately so I started looking for it elsewhere, maybe more than usual… here are some recent listens/watches that I’ve enjoyed and some insights I’ve gleaned.

Karen Hao has been studying OpenAI and recently published a book - Empire of AI — Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI

• AI as a technology is really cool and powerful and potentially good for humans

• How it’s being built and sold by the mega-companies is very much NOT

• AI is being built and sold as a human replacement instead of a way to help humans flourish… why are they doing this? Power, greed, control… some powerful forces at play here

• These data centers are very bad for their local people, economies, power grids, etc…

Real example: I live on 5 acres in the middle of nowhere - the closest town is like 200 people. The neighbor came over to bush-hog our field with his brother - turns out he’s an electrician and his brother is a project manager for a data center building company. They built one recently (I think in Chicago), but the power grid couldn’t handle it, so they couldn’t even test it. …Interesting

If you listen or read any of Ed Zitron’s stuff, he tells stories of AI data centers all over the place not being built, powered, etc.

I’m starting to turn the corner on AI where I think it’s good in many use cases, but maybe how it’s being brought to market at scale is worse than sketchy. More on this below. (moral panic is normal with new technology… yes, even bicycles)

If you start listening around 59:47, there’s a super powerful exchange between Adam and Masa of SoftBank, where Adam is raising $300 million and Masa offers $4 billion.

Ultimately, Adam accepts and signs the deal, but he says it’s a pivotable change in the foundation of the company from purpose/mission to revenue and that’s when things start to fall apart. This 15 minutes or so is REALLY powerful… Definitely recommend a listen to this part.

At 1:11:15, Marc talks about how new technology always comes with moral panic - “Whatever this new technology is or this new form of media — it’s going to ruin everything. It’s going to ruin society.”

Sound familiar? Maybe AI?

I think this was actually really encouraging for me. AI has all kinds of pros and cons like any new technology… but this moral panic is normal - it happens every time, then he tells the story of the moral panic around bicycles, and all kinds of other things that have all… worked out.

Ok, moving on from the podcasts, I saw an ad for Reevo.ai and checked out the website:

https://reevo.ai/blog/future-revenue-stackless
⬆️ This is actually really good, and really interesting as it seems to describe the advisortech ecosystem perfectly as well.

• Stringing together a bunch of tools

• Legacy tools with siloed data

• To “One Browser Tab” or Stackless:

James Cantwell said CRM needed an upgrade and called it the Relationship Operating System - here’s another possible name of Revenue Operating System… but if we think back to Adam Neumann and Rick Rubin’s podcast… maybe “Relationship” is a bit more kosher. :)

That’s all, folks.

Joe