Nathanael Yellis

For years, I've consulted on go-to-market optimization. The ingredients of these projects are often pretty similar: business process mapping, identifying automation potential, and finagling precision from more-or-less integrated parts of a technology stack. This similarity of ingredients has not been predictive of results: some of these projects work really well, others founder, in states of barely launched, never coming close to completion. Whether the projects succeed is often a completely separation question from whether the business result gets achieved. Seeing an excellent system launch and then diminishing results is the worst outcome. It happens, by I get mystified as to why.

This email has been a little too much like This American Life recently: a theme chosen and stories brought to you on that theme. This week, we're going back to the original style—things that were a delight to read.

For the first ten years of the millennium, it seemed like once or twice a year some new piece of tech came out and immediately found a central role in the universe. You could almost immediately spot what would trend: the move from search results in a series of animated folders to a simple, endless list gave the world “Google” as a verb. Want to post and watch videos online? Youtube. Want to run a simple website? Wordpress. People were dying to get into Facebook, going so far as to spoof .edu email addresses to get around their early “college-only” rule. There were a ton of first-mover advantages and thus fortunes were made.

I came across this line in the Wlal Street Journal's review section about a month ago. It's from Sam Sacks, their fiction critic:

The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization.

Having read just about my fair share of novels, I think he's right. The more experimental the form has gotten, the less novels are being read. Even the best ones tend to be thinly veiled auto-fiction or else routine fan service, where the book is about books and book people being heroes against the unwashed, non-reading masses. As much as I enjoy Kingsley and Martin Amis, their brilliant novels helped ensure the marginalization of all the rest.

Happy New Year!

Each year, I purchase a Moleskine day planner. While sometimes I use it for, you know, planning, mostly I write about things that have already happened. This catalog of events and their immediate impressions on me can make for interesting reading at the end of the year. Just what made that mid-March ski run from the summit "ludicrously good"? Nathanael of 9 months ago didn't say. The better reading is about the books, articles, and even the early thoughts for some of these essays: when I put a little effort into it, the journal is rewarding.

It’s almost Christmas; time for some stories.

In an demonstration video of HubSpot's in-CRM AI, called, like most AI things in software, copilot, the voiceover reminded us to always verify what the AI produced. Whether you are asking it to summarize a CRM record, write an introductory email, or answer a 'how does this work' question, the trainer wanted to make sure the viewers verified what their copilot produces. The message seemed to be the old Reagan line, "trust, but verify," although it didn't leave me feeling too trusting.

About a month ago, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching cable news. This isn't my normal mode: usually, I'm in bed by 10, and I never watch the television pundits. But that night, I couldn't look away. Heading into it, almost all of the people on the tv thought something else was going to happen. Then, as each new bit of data came in, you could see their faces initially register surprise, you could almost hear their internal dialogs figuring out how to smartly adjust, and then you got to see, in real time, how they managed to make their comment as if they'd known or understood all along what would happen. Some did this very well: you might call them the born liars; others struggled, much to my entertainment, they appeared more like real people. Cable news is usually boring because no one moves away from their practiced commentary. Election nights are one of the few times where they have to improvise to absorb unfolding reality and react to it in real time. I couldn't look away.