MEK Studios

How can you be a good leader in a bad market?

2024-10-24T09:33:45-07:00

In hard times, I think leaders need to: * Have rigour to decision making – constrained resources mean decisions are harder to reverse and more costly to get wrong. * Be willing to make hard decisions and stand behind them – it’s inevitable that you have to make (more) hard decisions in a tough market. * Be intensely focused on delivering value – in hard times leadership is measured less by vision and more what is actually accomplished. * Build systems of accountability – and use them, when layoffs are more likely, it’s all the more critical that the team you have is structured to be successful. * Understand constraints (of resourcing, time, or money) and how to operate within them – this feeds into decision making, and also the need to say no. Find cheaper and more sustainable ways to motivate and align people – when you can’t promote people or pay them more, what else can you offer them?

The Objects of Our Life

2024-08-06T08:11:11-07:00

Steve’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen. If you like Steve Jobs, you’ll enjoy this talk. Terrific and — as usual — invigorating.

Coast-to-coast in a solar-powered car

2024-07-26T13:43:03-07:00

A solar powered “motorcycle” — three wheels — vehicle made by a young team in Michigan completed the Cannonball Run from New York’s Red Ball Garage to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach in 13 days, 15 hours, and 19 minutes.

Love the idea of a solar car. Builds on what Aptera Motors here in San Diego has been trying to do.

When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind.

2024-07-22T11:23:42-07:00

After being asked to summarize a 50 page paper. A colleague took a stab at the summary by running it through ChatGPT. What Gerben found was interesting:

ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two. To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying. To shorten text, not so much. To truly summarise, you need to be able to detect that from 40 sentences, 35 are leading up to the 36th, 4 follow it with some additional remarks, but it is that 36th that is essential for the summary and that without that 36th, the content is lost.

He concludes that LLM’s are influenced by how it was trained (it’s parameters) and the context you’ve given the LLM via the chat interface.

If the subject is well-represented by the parameters (there has been lots of it in the training material), the parameters dominate the summary more and the actual text you want to summarise influences the summary less. Hence: LLM Chatbots are pretty bad in making specific summaries of a subject that is widespread;… If the context is relatively small, it has little influence and the result is dominated by the parameters, so not by the text you are trying to summarise; If the context is large enough and the subject is not well-represented by the parameters (there hasn’t been much about it in the training material), the text you want to summarise dominates the result. But the mechanism you will see is ‘text shortening‘, not true summarising.

Expensing Software Development Costs vs Capitalizing Them

2024-07-08T07:24:38-07:00

An interesting note on C3.ai — they are expensing their software development costs instead of capitalizing them. From my basic understanding, typical accounting practices involve capitalizing software development expenses — spreading them as amortized costs over the software’s useful life — C3.ai is expensing these costs immediately on their financial statement as Selling, General & Administrative (SG&A) and Research & Development (R&D) expenses. This front-loading of expenses impacts their current profitability but is expected to enhance future financial performance by eliminating ongoing amortization costs. Consequently, once development costs are complete, C3.ai’s profit and loss and cash flow should show significant improvement. This strategic move offers insight into the company’s financial planning: they are willing to take an immediate hit to profitability for potential long-term gains.

Great Developers Steal Ideas, Not Products

2024-03-02T13:30:40-08:00

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

2023 Annual Shareholder Letter

2024-02-27T16:34:58-08:00

Interesting, in-depth look at Buffer’s business provided by the CEO — looks like something he’s been doing for a while. Count Buffer a company I’m going to start following.

Dear Buffer shareholders and community,

2023 was a turnaround year for Buffer by a variety of measures. This is something the team has worked tirelessly towards, and it is wonderful to see the positive shifts take place in our metrics and the culture and energy around the company.

We’ve spent the past few years clarifying our strategy and the principles by which we operate, and being diligent in our execution in alignment with that path.

I’d love to walk you through our results for 2023 and share insights into how we’re approaching building a long-term business.

Words to use in your Resignation

2024-01-22T13:18:24-08:00

KPBS today carried a story about Port of San Diego president, CEO Joe Stuyvesant, resigning. They included some or all of his statement. I really like the way he closed his resignation statement:

It is with gratitude to the Board of Port Commissioners that I close the chapter on my leadership at the Port of San Diego. Without the dedicated staff of professional public servants, there is no port. I look back to my service at the port with a sense of pride in what we accomplished under the leadership of the Board of Port Commissioners and the entire port team. While I will miss being part of the port team, new opportunities have recently presented themselves, and I am excited to pursue them.

Tim Cook and Retirement

2024-01-14T08:12:24-08:00

I’ve enjoyed watching Tim Cook lead Apple over the past nearly 13 years. Something he seems to have thought a lot about during his tenure is succession planning for his role as CEO. That thread continues as Apple’s Board of Directors notes that they have updated the CEO’s retirement vesting policy. “The time‐based RSUs awarded to Mr. Cook in 2023 provide for pro‐rata instead of full vesting in the event of retirement during the term of the award and only if retirement occurs on or after the first anniversary of the grant date. The People and Compensation Committee intends to maintain this same structure for future years.”

Tim, thank you for your continued leadership at Apple. When the times comes to say goodbye and welcome a new CEO, I want to thank you for all the thought you’ve put into succession planning at Apple for not only your role, but across the leadership team.

Succession Planning Quotes in the News

In October 2017 with BuzzFeed News, Tim said: “I see my role as CEO to prepare as many people as I can to be CEO, and that’s what I’m doing. And then the board makes a decision at that point in time.”

In 2018 at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, Bloomberg News reported that Tim Cook addressed succession planning “saying that eventually ‘passing the baton’ properly is one of his most important roles.

Most recently, in November 2023 with Dua Lipa’s At Your Service podcast, Tim reflected on his time at Apple: “I love it, I can’t envision my life without being there, so I’ll be there for a while.” Then, asked if there was a succession plan at Apple, he continued:

“We’re a company that believes in working on succession plans, so we have very detailed succession plans. Because something unpredictable can always happen. I could step off the wrong curb tomorrow. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, I pray that it doesn’t.”

Dua Lipa: “Are you able to say who is in line for succession?”

“I can’t say that, but I would say that my job is to prepare several people for the ability to succeed, and I really want the person to come from within Apple, the next CEO. So that’s my role: That there’s several for the board to pick from.”

Interesting

2023-10-09T08:54:51-07:00

Like many young naïve nerds, when I first heard of the idea of “strong opinions held weakly,” I thought it was a pretty good idea…

The real competitor to strong opinions held weakly is, of course, strong opinions held strongly. We’ve all met those people. They are supremely confident and inspiring, until they inspire everyone to jump off a cliff with them.

Strong opinions held weakly, on the other hand, is really an invitation to debate. If you disagree with me, why not try to convince me otherwise? Let the best idea win.

After some decades of experience with this approach, however, I eventually learned that the problem with this framing is the word “debate.” Everyone has a mental model, but not everyone wants to debate it. And if you’re really good at debating — the thing they teach you to be, in debate club or whatever — then you learn how to “win” debates without uncovering actual truth.

Some days it feels like most of the Internet today is people “debating” their weakly-held strong beliefs and pulling out every rhetorical trick they can find, in order to “win” some kind of low-stakes war of opinion where there was no right answer in the first place.

Anyway, I don’t recommend it, it’s kind of a waste of time. The people who want to hang out with you at the debate club are the people who already, secretly, have the same mental models as you in all the ways that matter.

What’s really useful, and way harder, is to find the people who are not interested in debating you at all, and figure out why.

Technology Assessment Rubric

2023-10-04T09:00:23-07:00

I’ve written and open sourced a rubric for assessing new technologies as part of your organization. It’s written for use in non-technical organizations in particular, but it might be useful everywhere. The idea is to pose questions that are worth asking when you’re selecting a vendor, or choosing an API or software library to incorporate into your own product.

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge

2023-08-31T13:50:37-07:00

A fun read digging into an infrastructure project — in this case, a pedestrian bridge in Bloomfield,, Minneapolis — and asking “why is this here?”.

Justin O’Beirne also does some interesting work comparing Google and Apple maps products with commentary on how maps tell the story of the place.

Fernando Tatis Jr.

2023-07-04T11:16:45-07:00

I asked Tatis recently why he plays the way he does — valuing defense so much, stealing bases, rounding first on most singles as if he fully intends to go to second, using his finely tuned instincts in so many situations — when he could still be thought of as an excellent player and still make millions based solely on his power.

“I feel like that wouldn’t be fair to my dad and the people that would have wasted their time with me, training me, teaching me this game, giving me these things that helped me,” he said. “And to God that gave me the talent. It wouldn’t be fair to everybody to not be doing everything that I’m capable of.”

My most exciting product launch

2023-01-10T09:32:16-08:00

I was recently part of a tech layoff — my previous employer, Houzz, laid off 98 employees in mid-December. The most recent hires were let go (LIFO). As I’m applying to new position, I received this prompt today from Patagonia: “Tell me about the most exciting product launch of your career. What was your role? Describe the experience step by step.”

My response: The most exciting product launch of my career was the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which launched from French Guiana on December 25, 2022. I started as an intern in Systems Engineering, Mass Properties, on JWST in the summer of 2009. I was hired full time after graduating the following winter and became the lead Mass Properties engineer. I was responsible for maintaining a database of the mass of the spacecraft and its center of gravity as well as an inventory of the mass of each component part (to achieve orbit, a rocket can only lift so much mass). From there, I worked on the Alignments and Sunshield teams and the program for four years. We worked our way through challenges (too much mass in certain components, manufacturing tolerances that were too loose, and a deployments system that was high risk) as well as many successes (successful critical design reviews, prototype tests, and trade studies). I left Northrop Grumman to pursue a career in technology — I’ve loved building websites since I built my first in 2004, running for student government at UC San Diego. My father, also a Northrop Grumman, JWST team member, was in the launch control room supporting the deployments team when the rocket launched. He stayed in on Baltimore, Maryland until all the deployments were complete. So far in my career, my small contributions to that program will make the biggest differenece in human history.