NYTimes: “Imagine applying for a job. You know you’re a strong candidate with a standout résumé. But you don’t even get a call back. You might not know it, but an artificial intelligence algorithm used to screen applicants has decided that you are too risky. Maybe it inferred you wouldn’t fit the company culture or you’re likely to behave in some way later on that might cause friction (such as joining a union or starting a family). Its reasoning is impossible to see and even harder to challenge. It doesn’t matter that you practice safe digital privacy: keeping most personal details to yourself, avoiding sharing opinions online and prohibiting apps and websites from tracking you. Based on the scant details it has of you, the A.I. predicts how you’ll behave at work, based on patterns it has learned from countless other people like you. This is increasingly life under A.I.”
SaaStr: “If your new Chief Revenue Officer doesn’t meet with any customers their first week, you made a bad hire. Full stop. The same goes for your Head of Product and Head of Customer Success. They’ll never be hands-on enough, deep enough, to win. You’ll want to ignore these flags. Don’t. You’ll lose a year and so much momentum.”
WSJ: “In recent years, Lego has cultivated a devoted base of adult fans, who might not have been able to afford the pricey Danish kits as kids but now come armed with fervor and disposable income. That creates a new problem, since the biggest Lego sets have thousands of pieces and quickly eat up available display space. Some builders have devoted certain rooms wholly to Lego. Others decorate mantelpieces, bookshelves and walls with their plastic builds, often to spouses’ chagrin.”
Alex Danco: “The more jobs and opportunities created by the productivity boom, the more wages increase in other industries, who at the end of the day all have to compete in the same labor market. If you can make $30 an hour as a digital freelance marketer (a job that did not exist a generation ago), then you won’t accept less than that from working in food service. And if you can make $150 an hour installing HVAC for data centers, you’re not going to accept less from doing home AC service. This is a funny juxtaposition. Each of these phenomena have a name: there’s Jevon’s Paradox, which means, “We’ll spend more on what gets more productive”, and there’s the Baumol Effect, which means, “We’ll spend more on what doesn’t get more productive.” And both of them are top of mind right now, as we watch in awe at what is happening with AI Capex spend.”
