I have notes, so many.

I have raw notes. I have useless notes. I have notes about notes.

I have too many notes. And there is no time.

But there is time!

The years go fast, the hours go slow.

There is time.

We've got snackbars, AI, books, Den Helder, more AI, essays, and a stroll in the evening.

Snackbar Maandag
When walking my dog in the evening I regularly pass by Snackbar Maandag (Snackbar Monday).

Snackbar Maandag

I always found the name amusing. What an odd name for a snackbar. Or any restaurant really.

Until I felt like a snack on a Monday. Found my neighbourhood snackbars all closed. Searched the web and found an open one: Snackbar Maandag!

How wonderful. Idiot me. I should have been smarter. This is true SEO.

Highway Karaoke
Saves the Day and Face to Face and H2O and Madball are dominating the car playlist on a Tuesday morning drive to nowhere.

My 10 yo daughter: can we play Type O Negative next?

Sure.

LOVING YOU IS LIKE LOVING THE DEATH

❌ Bruno Mars
✅ Peter Steele

An evening stroll
I was walking my dog the other day when we ran into the pheasant

"Good morning pheasant", I said
"Good morning", the pheasant said

"Where are you going?", I said
"Taxidermist", the pheasant said

"Taxidermist", I said, "Short on cash?"
"Short on cash? Short on cash? HA!", the pheasant replied

"Skin in the game bro", the pheasant sneered, "Skin in the game. You wouldn't know."

My dog looked up.
He was nervous.

guess the novel

Den Helder

GTM, Engineering, Product and AI
I have so many ideas and notes, I decided to write some long(er) form essays on Medium (it's been 3 years!). To structure my thoughts and to get rid of bad ideas.

Preliminary topics:

• Consultancy to SaaS maturity levels. Every startup aspires to be a SaaS (as in: scale, scale, scale; exponential growth; zero marginal cost). Almost every startup gets stuck into some hybrid form of Consultancy - SaaS. Some consciously, most unconsciously. Some on purpose, most not on purpose. Most become aware but have no clue how to get to the next maturity level. I will analyse and model Consultancy - SaaS maturity phases, how companies get stuck and how to get unstuck.

• Second brain! One of the AI hypes. How to use AI as your second brain. Or your companies second brain. Well, it won't. There is no second brain because the brain doesn't work like that. It will fail for the same reason companies struggle with "knowledge bases" or "knowledge management". I will analyse and explain how "second brains" and "knowledge bases" are not persistence (files on disk, wikis, databases) but behaviour rooted in principles.

• GTM, the misunderstandings, the misaligment or the pure lack. Your company fails (read: gets stuck) because of your lack of a Go To Market strategy. I will analyse and explain why GTM is the core reason your company isn't functioning as you think it could. There are 2 basic failure modes:

1. Lack of GTM: there are a ton of company's that simply don't have a GTM.
2. Misaligned GTM: conmpanies that do have a GTM but one that is (completely) misaligned with Product and / or Engineering.

This essay boils down to: every organisation problem is a communication problem.

It will be great, it will be fun.

Let me know if you have a preference for one of the topics, suggestions or requests.

Books
What greater joy than compiling a long list for your holiday reading?

longlist

What greater pain than culling the longlist to a short and final list?

note: so, yes, that means I bring analogue, physical books on holiday, the bulk of my luggage (in weight). Because:

1. I should be able to smell the book.
2. I should be able to paper cut myself. Reading should be dangerous.

Else, it's not a book, it's not reading

The Singularity
My X timeline is dominated lately by AI. AI pilled zealots and AI skeptics and cynics. I do have my own opinion about AI based on what I read and my past experience with similar tech hype waves but I thought it would be nicer and more nuanced if I'd write about AI from my own experience. So I decided to start using and building AI and write about it. Exploit the teachers paradox.

You will find snippets in this newsletter. I am using AI to build a company where AI does the product management, GTM, CFO & accounting, engineering and still it won't feel like AI slop. Not to build a company but to learn about AI and how to use it and how n00bs would use it and experience it. And I will use AI as a builder, as an engineer, as a software developer. Not to develop software, but to learn how and if I, and other engineeers, can be more productive.

Of two things I am already convinced:

1. There is a gap, a huge gap, between the AI users and builders. See also my comments above about GTM, Product and Engineering.
2. Evals will determine your (you, your company, the sector) success in using / building AI. And evals are difficult.

As a start, I installed and played around with Hermes. The hype is silly, and the tutorials are hard to digest. But to be honest, it's fun! It really is. Apart from that, I noticed you will have a ridiculous advantage if you know and worked with Linux, CLI, vi, tmux, zsh and the likes. Every tool, every concept, every principle, every foundation boils down to simple Linux core philosophies and design principles.

:wqa!

happiness is easy

Innovation is fast, adoption is slow.

I have many people asking / telling me the reply to this newsletter doesn't work. Sorry about that. I haven't figured out how to fix that in buttondown yet. If you have questions or comments, drop me a line at arjen@thishollow.earth. I will reply.

(and of course this one is in, it's great, it's about the love for food, each chapter is named after a Taiwanese dish.)

READ IT!!