Are these sorts of general advice on how to do X even valuable today when you can put the details of your start-up into AI and get a more customized and moderately more thoughtful actions based on what your start-up does, who your customers are, etc?
Who's still going through these kinds of docs?
I know micro.so (I'm not affiliated with them) have documented how to build agentic B2B sales AI that you can download (if you give them your email address).
https://www.micro.so/guides/sales
I have a friend who was working in this space in 2019.
Their customers were hiring something like 10k jobs worldwide annually, which means 500k+ applications to go through.
AI was used for the first filter to get a person through to later rounds.
It makes sense at that scale, and not for "hiring" but just to make decisions as to who gets to the next round.
The alternative is that you end up having to hire so many people to go through the applicants and then those people get bored of asking the same initial questions again and again.
I remember hearing an anecdote, back in the days of paper resumes, that hiring managers would take the huge stack of resumes they got, divide them in half and throw half in the bin. That half would be considered unlucky, and you don't want to hire unlucky people.
But seriously, with the number of job applicants, for certain positions, what are the alternatives to getting AI to help?
If you have 10k jobs and 500k applications, that's 50 applications per job. Spending a few minutes on each application would mean a few hours for the initial screening for each job, but if that job is filled, you'll get a person who'll stay there for a few years. How is that not worth it? Why would you need to automate it? If you're interviewing for people to do some quick task and leave, sure, but companies want long-term hires.
I probably should have worded that better. 500k applicants for 10k positions. The jobs aren't different. Think Amazon Warehouse job where there are 650k workers. High turnover, and an HR department is running those interviews, not the manager.
So even if each screener is running 15 minute interviews, they're asking the same questions 20 times a day. Every day. The mental task and repetitiveness just isn't something a person is going to be good at. An AI can do this more effectively and pass on the top candidates.
Realistically there's a point where you haven't interviewed enough people and another when you've interviewed so many you're wasting time.
Do you need the global optimum candidate, or do you need a very good candidate? If you need the global best then you're probably better off headhunting than posting a job listing.
Google decided to build a new chat app every two years instead of keeping the good bits of the original chat app they had and evolving it. It was endlessly frustrating to me when I was at Google. Google's security team ended up banning Slack access after several teams started expensing it.
It doesn't seem like building something that works well would be that hard; we've had nearly 40 years to learn from IRC, AIM, and others. Why can't I run my own chat client that does what I want? Oh, because you gotta lock people in. Sucks.
It is impossible to believe the self-own on Google's messaging platforms. At one point, it seemed that all of my acquaintances used Google Talk. Then years of shutting down perfectly working applications, sometimes without any real user porting. There were even identically named products existing at the same time.
However, I am sure a few Googlers got some tasty promotions out of the mess, so it was all worth poisoning the well.
If you are on Google Workspace, just use chat.google.com: it's not bad. All it takes is just a benevolent dictator (or more realistically a bean counter) at work saying they don't want the company to pay for Slack in addition to Google Workspace.
> San Diego does have a bunch of health tech, but it pales in comparison to Boston.
I don't have firm data on this, but colloquially among medical people, San Diego is seen to have more biotech startups than any other metro, including Boston/SF.
Boston has more research, of course, though SD is competitive there as well.
We can disagree about numbers etc, but 'pales' doesn't reflect reality.
I have worked in tech in many different cities and when I worked for a startup in San Diego, we were surrounded by health tech companies of all sizes. I've never worked in Boston, but I would say San Diego is definitely a health tech hub.
Exactly! If this post had been written 20 years ago it would have started with
Internet, handheld computers, electric cars...The problem is the same dudes.
Putting beanie babies in with Quantum Computing and Nuclear Power completely ignores the potential life changing elements of some technologies, even if they don't work.
Oh, and smart glasses he put in there, so he'll be eating his words in 2 years.
You may remember this video featuring Facebook with a ridiculously high $15B valuation, Skype, YouTube and other failures: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
There is a huge difference between claiming that there is an investment bubble in an industry and some companies are overvalued and that the technology is a failure. Someone might well think that Tesla is very overvalued, but that EVs are successful. If someone thinks there is a house price bubble that does not mean that they think houses are a failed technology.
This ignores the profitability of business class for the airlines, and makes the assumption that more seats on a plane means all of those seats will be sold.
As a Canadian, we don't think of travelling to the US as "international travel". It's more like going to a friends house.
I remember flying Alaska Airlines out of SFO and when I went to check-in at the International Terminal, the gate agent said "Canada isn't International" and looked at me like I was the dumbest human on the planet.
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