Timing is of the essence

💡JC's Newsletter #127

Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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💡Must-read

👉 Marc Andreessen: The 6 secrets of great timing (Apple Podcasts)

Timing and first principles:

• Timing is the major form of entrepreneurial risk.

• It's all about the market's readiness for what you've created.

• The big risk in my experience is literally you build the thing, and then it just doesn't take because the market's just not ready. And the reason I'm so confident in that point of view is because I have so much experience with basically things that were tried kind of once, and then five years later again, and then five years later again, and five years later again, and then they work.

• There's actually very little benefit in even being aware of the history. And in fact, being aware of history might actually be a negative, because basically the world does change. The conditions on the ground do change. The markets actually do become ready for new things at a certain point. The technology really does reach the point where something is really going to work.

➡️ Really important mindset about “it is not because it failed in the past, that it will not succeed in the future”.

• There's always this question in my mind of whether you even want negative lessons from the past, because they might just mislead you in a negative way, where the right thing to do might just be to ignore all that and just try to do the new thing clean. And then a fair amount of time, it just works.

➡️ Think from first principles and not experience. 

Being 3 years ahead of the market:

• If you wait until your idea is hot, you've waited too late.

• You’re not trying to get in at the peak of a trend. You’re trying to be one to three years early, so you can have time to build toward it. So when the moment arrives, you already have momentum, while everyone else scrambles to get up to speed.

​​➡️ Taking risk is about being ahead of the market, not when it becomes “hot”.

Being contrarian:

• You have to basically say, "Okay, all the experts say” or “the entire press course says,” or “all of the university researchers say” or, by the way, “all the VCs say, ‘Idea X is a bad idea,’" and you have to be able to basically shed the social kind of conformity aspects that are kind of so innate to how, how we behave, and you have to be able to kind of look at it objectively as best you can and say, "Well, no, actually, you know, this one could actually be one of these good ideas.

➡️ We should look at the ideas where all the experts say the same thing, and take a contrarian view.

Think about the future, be pro new ideas:

• A big factor in getting your timing right is projecting the state of play at present into the future, and what that means for you, your competitors and your industry.

• I'm enthusiastically pro new ideas, pro new technologies. And I have routinely found that I have underestimated way too many of the things that turn out to be really big.

➡️ It is something I’m trying to constantly push at Alan.

On the importance of cultivating an open mind:

• And this is why it's important to proactively cultivate an open mind every time you embark on a new project – and at regular points within a project.

• The thing with openness is it actually falls over time, over your lifespan.

• You just get less open, which maps to what people experience, which is people as they get older, generally, they won't listen to new music. They won't buy new consumer products.

• You need to fight hard in the other direction. One is because you need to offset the fact that you're probably getting less open over time just naturally.

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🏯 Other great articles on timing & speed

👉 Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (The Jsomers Blog)

• The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

• The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

• The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.

• That doesn’t mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. That’s because the task will come to cost less in your mind; it’ll have a lower activation energy. So you’ll do it more. And as you do it more (as long as you’re doing it deliberately), you’ll get better. Eventually you’ll be both fast and good.

➡️ I agree very strongly with this. Going very fast, and iterating makes a huge difference and compounds. 

• I’ve noticed that if I respond to people’s emails quickly, they send me more emails. The sender learns to expect a response, and that expectation spurs them to write. That is, speed itself draws emails out of them, because the projected cost of the exchange in their mind is low. They know they’ll get something for their effort. It’ll happen so fast they can already taste it.

➡️ I have experienced the same. How do we make sure we quickly answer customers? Candidates? 

• It’s now well known on the web that slow server response times drive users away. A slow website feels broken. It frustrates the goer’s desire. Probably it deprives them of some dopaminergic reward.

➡️ It is a big part of our quality, and I think foundation should work on keep accelerating our apps. 

• In workplaces, faster employees get assigned more work.

• What’s true of individual people turns out also to be true of whole organizations. If customers find out that you take two months to frame photos, they’ll go to another frame shop. If contributors discover that you’re slow to merge pull requests, they’ll stop contributing. Unresponsive systems are sad. They’re like buildings grown over with moss. 

👉 FTX overview (The Generalist)

• FTX is geared for speed. Everything the firm does seems to be toward this end. Rather than hiring tenured Big Tech engineers, used to the sanity and balance of working at an established corporation, FTX favors young, hungry, Wall Street types. In addition to being willing to work extremely hard, these individuals have the benefit of context. This was something SBF stressed in our conversation: FTX strongly prefers hiring people that actually understand the product and genuinely know trading. The result is a culture more similar to an East Coast quant fund than a Valley startup.

• With just 82 employees, the company is able to operate one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges

• FTX relies on just a handful of engineers: six

• A platform that moves hundreds of billions in volume every month is built and maintained by a crew the size of an ice-hockey first team.

➡️ Interesting on the scale with a small team. How they attract people who have high potential and let them ramp up.

• We want to be in the position where we never lose a customer. If we lose a customer we fucked up. And I want to figure out what or why they chose a platform other than ours. And what we can do to be better.

➡️ I like this approach.

👉 Notion operating values (Notion)

• The Greek concept of "eudaemonia," seeking fulfillment from hard work and constant learning.

➡️ I love this concept.

• Optimize globally. Teams are not territories. When we face tradeoffs, we choose what's best for Notion's mission as a whole — not what's good for one person or one team.

➡️ I like it as well. 

• Build a habit of urgency. In a world of unpredictable outcomes, what we can control is executing with speed in mind. As a company, we always ask ourselves: how can we move faster?

➡️ Very close to our bias to action. 

• Always start with our users. We constantly ask ourselves: “Is this actually useful for people? Is this what our customers say they want, or what they actually want?" Behind the metrics, it's humans who use our tools.

➡️ Connected to member-obsession. I liked the “Behind the metrics, it's humans who use our tools.)

• Debate to make progress, not to win. 

• When people are afraid to give direct feedback, ideas aren't explored, trust isn't built, respect isn't earned, and we don't learn as fast. 

➡️ What can we take away from it?

• Being kind is not the same as being nice. Superficial praise or diluting opinions is not helpful. Being kind is about taking responsibility for our impact on the people around us, and being mindful about how our interactions and presence can affect others and their growth.

➡️ Very agreed with this one.

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🗞 In the news

👉 Where Are Hit Podcasts?, Spotify and Podcast Aggregation, Protesting Rogan (Stratechery)

• While the overall audience for podcasting expands, the audience for individual new shows is shrinking across the board.

• Text spreads more easily and is consumed more quickly, which makes it better suited to acquiring an audience; podcasts, meanwhile, are harder to grow but have a more loyal and attentive audience, making them better for monetization.

🏥 Healthcare

👉 The Future of Health & Wellness (Medium)

• New-age mental health companies such as Real, Coa, Pace, Bloom, Noom Mood and others are also beginning to offer modern psychology services and pathway-focused content through self-pay monthly subscriptions.

• Today, nearly 1 in 4 US adults report using some form of wearable device or activity tracker (approximately twice that of 2015), and 82 percent report willingness to share wearable data with their providers.

• Vitality Group and Well Dot are two such businesses poised to pioneer this model, and I believe AI-driven health coaching apps that incorporate data from wearables to recommend actionable lifestyle changes such as Ommyx, Holly Health, and BestOfU will continue to expand their service offerings to do the same. (P.S. The latter three health coaching apps are currently raising pre-seed/seed rounds as of Dec 2021).

👉 HTN Weekly Health Tech Reads 1/16 (Health Tech Nerds)

• Transcarent raised $200 million at a $1.6 billion. Even in this frothy market pretty wild to see the valuation growth of Transcarent over the last year

  • Transcarent fits squarely in the trend of employers looking for trusted partners to navigate and manage health spending for employees.

➡️ What we do!

• It's hard not to see Transcarent continuing to win there given the momentum it has. 

• As Transcarent gains traction with employers, it is presumably deepening ties with those employers’ insurers/TPA’s, who see an opportunity to provide navigation to other populations (i.e. MA or individual).

• But given the opportunity in the employer market and the fact that Transcarent is still only a year old, it feels early to talk publicly about expansion into MA. Link.

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