Homegrown heroes > outside hires

More often than not the difference-makers who will carry your company forward are hiding in plain sight

This week, we’re talking:

• The limitations of the outside hire and the importance of investing in homegrown heroes 🏠🦸🏻‍♀️

• Commerce Department is coming for Chinese cars for spying on us — does anybody care that American cars are spying on us too? 🇨🇳 🚘 👀

• OpenAI is shedding its non-profit pretense — it won’t change much about how they operate and that’s kind of the problem. 💰 🤝 ֎

• NYC Mayor Eric Adams indictment on corruption isn’t that surprising to anybody who has been paying attention but that doesn’t lower the stakes 🗽🧔🏽‍♂️ 🚔

• Are our morals just an evolutionary survival skill? 🙊🙈🙉

• Mark Zuckerberg is showing just how “done with politics” he is by getting on the phone with Donald Trump. 👨🏼‍🦱🚫🏛️

• Is GenAI “too much spend for too little benefit?” That’s what some Wall Street heavy weights are arguing. 💸🤑💰

• What do Big Tech and King James I have in common? A lot, apparently. 👑 🤖

• Have I mentioned that I love SF? This long read about a convicted murderers journey from state prison to working in a revered SF restaurant is ::chef’s kiss:: 🌉👨🏽‍🍳

My (very short) take:

One of my key employees, Moishe, once came to me and told me very earnestly that we needed to go out to market and find someone who was mathematically sophisticated and able to lead our engineering team, but still comfortable and convincing with customers. I told him I agreed with his profile, but that person was already with us. I gave him a hint: his name rhymed with “Shmoishe.”

Outsiders who are famous aren’t as good as they and other market-watchers think they are. Sometimes you’ll need to go outside to find one, but more often than not the difference-makers who carry your company forward are hiding in plain sight – if you’re willing to recognize them, train and elevate them, and believe in their potential. We invest in active coaching, training, and mentorship for our employees still today, and the gains always outstrip the costs and time many times over. Invest in your homegrown unknowns, and commit to their growth through thick and thin.

What I’m Reading:

Biden Fears Chinese Cars Are Spying. But Tesla and GM Are Too VIA TNR 🇨🇳🚘👀

So far there’s been little effort to regulate these matters at the federal level or provide consumer protections. Lawmakers have asked the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to take action, and California regulators initiated a probe last year into how automakers handle the data collected from internet-connected vehicles. Following an investigation into several automakers, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued General Motors last month for selling drivers’ data to insurance companies.

OpenAI Takes Its Mask Off VIA The Atlantic 💰🤝֎

In a way, all of the changes announced yesterday simply demonstrate to the public what has long been happening within the company. The nonprofit has continued to exist until now. But all of the outside investment—billions of dollars from a range of tech companies and venture-capital firms—goes directly into the for-profit, which also hires the company’s employees… Altman’s consolidation of power is nearing completion. Will this dramatically change what OpenAI is or how it operates? I don’t think so. For the first time, OpenAI’s public structure and leadership are simply honest reflections of what the company has been—in effect, the will of a single person. “Just: Sam.”

The Most Obvious Scandal in the History of New York City VIA The New Yorker 🗽🧔🏽‍♂️🚔

A colleague told me that she’d heard cheering outside her apartment in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, on Wednesday night, when the news of Adams’s pending indictment broke. Online, the memes have been flying. Adams has conditioned New Yorkers to expect so much inanity and cartoonishness that the news was greeted with a kind of glee. But, as one former senior City Hall official told me, “Anyone getting out the popcorn and I told you so’s today doesn’t understand how bad this is for the city.” She went on, “If I am a mid-level gov employee right now, why in the world would I take direction from anyone at City Hall? Feels like it’s asking to end up in a federal grand jury.”

Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? VIA The New Yorker 🙊🙈🙉

Darwin himself sensed the implications. In “The Descent of Man” (1871), he suggested that studying the “moral sense” from “the side of natural history” would throw “light on one of the highest psychical faculties of man.” It took another hundred years for scholars of evolution to appreciate the extent to which a Darwinian world view can explain morality. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, philosophers like Sharon Street, at N.Y.U., were taking note. “Before life began, nothing was valuable,” Street wrote in a now classic article. “But then life arose and began to value—not because it was recognizing anything, but because creatures who valued (certain things in particular) tended to survive.” In other words, moral tenets—such as the rightness of loyalty or the wrongness of murder—do not exist unless natural selection produces organisms that value them.

Mark Zuckerberg Is Done With Politics VIA NYTimes 👨🏼‍🦱🚫🏛️

In public, that means Mr. Zuckerberg is declining to engage with Washington except when necessary. In private, he has stopped supporting programs at his philanthropy that could be perceived as partisan, and he has tamped down employee activism at Meta… He has also spoken to former President Donald J. Trump in one-on-one telephone calls twice over the summer, these people said, a move that some have characterized as an attempt to repair a long-strained relationship between the two men.

Will A.I. Be a Bust? A Wall Street Skeptic Rings the Alarm VIA NYTimes 💸🤑💰

Three months ago, he jolted markets with a research paper that challenged whether businesses would see a sufficient return on what by some estimates could be $1 trillion in A.I. spending in the coming years. He said generative artificial intelligence, which can summarize text and write software code, made so many mistakes that it was questionable whether it would ever reliably solve complex problems… Mr. Covello predicts that the A.I. boom will lose steam when the companies that are adopting the technology cut spending after their profits dip. He doesn’t think that will set off another dot-com recession. But each day, he is reassessing his position.

The Antitrust Revolution: Liberal Democracy’s Last Stand Against Big Tech VIA Harper’s 👑🤖

Yet there is today a very real threat of a tyranny in the vein of James. It lies, however, in a different place—in the reach, knowledge, interests, and prerogatives enjoyed by the interlocking network of private corporations that control our online communications and commerce. It is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple that today enjoy the power to create and destroy, to censor and punish, to “make and unmake” who they will. It is these corporations that—even as we fear consolidation of power in the public state—have erected a private state over us. They who have disrupted almost every economic and political balance in the Republic. They who have amassed the power to shape and determine how we speak to one another and share news and information. Even how we think, dream, and perceive our place in the world.

One man's journey from state prison to a revered San Francisco restaurant VIA SFGate 🌉👨🏽‍🍳

The rising steam technique came in handy for Thomas whenever the prison went on lockdown for hours at a time. Thomas would still bake. He was hooked, after all. He would fill the hot pot he had in his cell with water and balance a flattened bowl on top of an upside-down water strainer to achieve the same steam cooking method his father used for seafood. After the dough and peanut butter mix was cooked through, he would then harden it in his mini-freezer. The rising steam technique came in handy for Thomas whenever the prison went on lockdown for hours at a time. Thomas would still bake. He was hooked, after all. He would fill the hot pot he had in his cell with water and balance a flattened bowl on top of an upside-down water strainer to achieve the same steam cooking method his father used for seafood. After the dough and peanut butter mix was cooked through, he would then harden it in his mini-freezer.

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