Content

The world is way less complex

Read a book this month - Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Where others see the story of a shoe company founder, I saw a time machine into the vastly different world of the 60s and 70s. For that time, Phil Knight had an incredibly adventurous life, but compared to today, it's quite typical (with some extra hurdles).

I came to realize that things were way more complex and difficult back then. Travelling, because communication and being open-minded was way more difficult. Doing business - because there was no support for founders (such as venture capital), and doing business overseas came with its own set of challenges (such as worrying if someone would still be mad after the war). And finally - the simplest things: Ordering shipments, paying a large bill, communicating across the country - things that only take a click today.
 

Shower Thought: Are we good enough for AI?

I might turn this into a fully fledged blog post at some point, but I ran a survey last month, asking how confident people are in their AI algorithms.

I was secretly hoping for a result like this, but only 27% of people said that they are "quite confident" or "very confident" in their algorithms. What about the other 73%? Now - I don't want to scare my non-AI friend - you don't have to worry about killer robots anytime soon, but there are certain biases in algorithms that we, as engineers, should be able to detect and control.

Projects

An education platform for remote companies

It always bothers me a little when I see new launches of remote working tools that promise to make it all work out somehow. Doing business as a remote company is complex, and I don't think any tool will solve it anytime soon (they help, but don't solve it).

What needs to change is the mindset of founders and managers. I recently ran a covering survey amongst remote workers and founders, and got in touch with a lot of them. Made some new connections along the way, and learned a lot. I'm just now starting to put together a new resource at nohq.co, where I'm starting to write about this.

Objective: Sales

My projects are growing, and this is nice, but I realized I always get the biggest benefit when I'm reaching out to people directly. For the rest of this year, I want to concentrate on learning and doing sales. This needs some restructuring in some projects–I'm going to create a B2B platform on top of MentorCruise, and will further push the Intravert Marketplace. I'm creating a full, white-glove service for NoHQ and am working on a business safeguarding/accessibility API. Exciting times.

Personal

KPIs & Refocus

I always have the urge to start new things and not really see the existing things through. While working on yet another product™, I realized I need to focus on what I already have, and grow, sell, finish or kill it, also for the sake of making some space for other hobbies, balancing things with work and get some relax time.

I'm setting End-of-Year KPIs for all my products later today and creating a plan on how to get there. I'm not ruling out that one project or two might see its end soon (at least under my governance, I hope to pass things on).

Moving Soon

Only three more days until I'm receiving the keys for a nice, little apartment in the city of Zurich. Next week will be hectic, with multiple trips to the city (about 100km away), staying in an empty apartment a few times to receive deliveries, and putting up a ton of IKEA furniture.