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A programmer and a software engineer aren’t the same.
I’ve known many people who made a living writing code, but they were always a cog in a larger process they never understood.
Frontier models can do that job today. 1000x better.
Software engineers can write code, but they always understood code was a means to an end.
Software engineering is alive and well.
Wanna heads up before a migraine? Pretty 😎
The worst part of a migraine isn't only the pain. It's everything you have to deal with while you're in it. Calling the doctor, fighting insurance, chasing a refill.
@PraneetaPujari worked on Apple Watch for six years and lives with migraines herself.
Now she's built UniqueHuman, an agent called Niq that reads your sleep, your wearables and the weather, and warns you before a migraine hits.
When it hits anyway, Niq sends your doctor the report, finds a med your insurance actually covers, and gets it to your door.
The launch film is handmade stop motion. Worth the two minutes.
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If an agent could take one chore off your plate when you're sick, which would you hand it first?
What this means for your team: product walks into ambiguity with confidence and hands engineering prototypes instead of guesses.
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Contrarian Thinking.
Over and over the contrarians are the ones who change the world. But it is a muscle that needs constant exercise. The masses have the market share and most people hate change.
"I would never share my house with others." AirBnb was born.
"I would never use a digital camera," I heard at Eastman Kodak's booth years ago. Today I shoot all my photos on iPhone.
"I love to drive." Today I often take a Waymo.
"Babies use mice and GUIs." I heard that one in college from a Unix programmer. Now we are headed into a world where we don't use mice and GUIs, thanks to voice systems and brain computer interface companies.
"Art can't be done with AI." Now when you are the Sphere in Las Vegas you are watching a movie dramatically improved with AI.
"Our customers love buttons," engineers at Mercedes Benz said, while pointing out to me that touching screens is more dangerous while driving than touching buttons.
"Cooking with microwaves isn't as good as using an open flame," many chefs have told me. Yet when you arrive home late and need to make something for the kids do you listen to the chefs?
"I'll never use a phone without a physical keyboard," many told me. Yet here we are.
"I'll never use an autofocus camera," many pro photographers told me. Now it is weird if you see a pro manually focusing.
So, how can you build your contrarian muscle?
Go back to the core problem that humans are trying to solve and rethink it without bias.
On Friday @broodsugar told the audience at @TheHumanoidHub's event that a Chinese retailer asked themselves "what if humans actually suck at running a retailer." They automated every decision. AI manages every store. Makes every decision of where to put products, and how many to stock, that kind of thing. Sales went up 258%. And this was a well established retailer with billions in sales every year.
Other ways I was able to get ahead of everyone when I wrote my eight books (I wrote a book about social media before Twitter started).
1. Learn about bleeding edge tech and ask yourself "what if this got adopted?"
2. Hang around with others who have demonstrated contrarian thinking.
3. Dream about what the world would look like if your new thing actually worked for everyone. Would the world improve or get worse?
4. Learn some secrets that very few others know. I once talked at Google's first advertiser's conference and they sat me at a VIP table with Kraft food execs. They told me why they advertise and told me how much they spend to acquire a new customer. $34. So when Instagram was bought by Mark Zuckerberg I knew it was an amazing purchase, since Instagram's users were growing exponentially every few weeks. I gave a speech to billionaires that morning who thought it was the stupidest purchase they ever had heard of. It had no sales. No profits. 14 employees. No assets. That is consensus thinking. Which they got into because that's how businesses were (and still are) measured.
5. Study the problems that people actually are having and then find new ways to solve those problems with fresh eyes. Heck, you can see this in action by visiting @reservoirfarms, that has 20 new companies building farming robots. Every entrepreneur I talked with there spent years walking in farms with farmers, understanding their problems, before they started building robots. I have met many entrepreneurs who worked in weird jobs to learn the industry they are going after. Have you worked on a manufacturing line? In a dentist's office? Or, done landscaping? "First principles" applies to every human endeavor.
6. Learn from Eric Reis. When he was building one of his first companies he spent months building software that he thought people would want. When he launched it no one visited his home page. He learned to test his weird ideas first before he built another thing.
7. Hang out with people who are different. Years ago I got to hang out with Steve Mann. I shot this photo in 2014, and he had already worn a device on his face for 20 years, even had a screw implanted in his skull so that he could more easily wear a wearable computer. He was weird, let's be honest. Never met someone like him before. But ask yourself "what if he is right, and everyone else is wrong?" There are armies who will tell you they never will wear smart glasses, even today. Can you resist armies who will give you every reason why they never will do the new weird thing?
8. Hang out with the young. I remember being in Hyde Jr. High's first computer club in Cupertino back in 1977. Only five people in it. There were armies of older people (and even many other kids) who would tell me they never would use one and had no need for it. I hung out with @photomatt in San Francisco 20 years ago when he was only 17, and hearing his dreams of how people and companies would publish in the future radically changed my life for the past 20 years. Same for interviewing @VitalikButerin when he was about that age. Laid out an entirely new economics system based on smart contracts. Mullenweg had just started his company and saw a new way for humans to communicate. Today, what, 80% of the Web is running on his software, Wordpress. As much as I hate it, it is rare that people my age (I'm now almost 62) comes up with such a radical shift. It does happen, but far more likely that a 17 year old is gonna build a dramatically important company than I am. Why? They are not burdened by "the way things are done."
9. Ask yourself "is there a better way to do this?" Steve Jobs told his original iPhone team not to hire anyone who worked on a phone at any other company. He didn't want to hear why something wouldn't work, he wanted fresh thinking and new ideas. Back to getting rid of buttons.
10. Question your own assumptions. They might be completely wrong. Mine often are. And be OK with that. I once said that I would wear a Google Glass the rest of my life. That was wrong, obviously. Sometimes I talk myself into points of view that don't turn out to be right. At least short term. (I still am looking for a pair that will make that a right statement).
11. Build and test with humans who won't blow smoke up your ass (not your friends and family).
12. Read a lot of books. Anyone who writes a book has thought a LOT about what they are presenting. They often see cracks in consensus thinking. Yeah, often they are science fiction authors, but often not. (I have to take that advice more myself, dropped off my reading). Especially true regarding people who write about new ideas and how to put them into use in business (same here on X, which is why if I find a contrarian thinker I put them on my lists).
13. Remember "experts" are people who got good at building for the masses. But they often have deep blind spots on where the future will be and they often will give you bad advice.
14. Ask yourself "what if everyone had an autonomous car, a VR headset, a robot, a brain computer interface?" What would be needed that doesn't exist in such a world?
15. Question your world view. I once was highly religious, went to church three times on Sunday. Thought I was right back then too. And religion is still the dominant world view most people have, but it isn't the only one. Ask most people about autonomous cars and you'll hear religion come back "I'll never let the government look at me while I drive." That's a belief system that person is locked into.
16. Ask yourself "how could I change even the worst hater?" One "secret" I learned over and over in my career is people change, and even give up religious belief systems, when presented with something new. Henry Ford used to say "if I asked people what they wanted, they answered 'a better horse.'" They couldn't dream of a contraption that would drive them around. Even last night I talked with a Stanford Fellow who gave me the same answer about autonomous cars. He used to run California Microwave, is a very smart guy, but used to have a race car and is stuck in the world view of "I love to drive."
I could go for quite a while longer, but wanted to open it up to you.
How do you put contrarian thinking into use in your own life/business or in the things you are building? Are you starting a contarian company? One that, if successful, will force everyone to change?
This post due to Brendan Footy, @BrendanFoody cofounder of Mercor, who shared this post this morning: xitter.cf/BrendanFoody/status/21…
Yay we can dream bigger 🚀
Alexandr Wang on what matters in an age of abundant intelligence:
“The scarce resource isn’t going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it’s going to be vision and ambition.”
“Do you have a clear view of what you want the world to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you wanna put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop?”
“AI will make that easier... But the flip side of that is then all of a sudden you can dream bigger.”