"In response, Lord Watts added that young people “are not stupid”, explaining that if they assume they will “earn low incomes and there’s no future”, then youths will likely lower their aspirations as a result."
There's probably a lot more interesting info hiding behind that statement. If housing is massively unaffordable (as it in the UK), social mobility is rather low, why go out there and destroy yourself in low wage jobs?
Not saying there's no spoiled youth waiting for their lottery ticket that will never come, but there's a rational aspect to it as well.
You're on the right track in channeling this negative energy into productive work on the company.
There are a few things to keep in mind, some of them you've already argued yourself. One, Engage is a common word, so that's on you, and two, more importantly, in today's SEO/ASO/other algorithmic wars, if you truly are the leader in this space, people will copy as much of your name/branding as possible to steal your customers' attention.
You are absolutely not in a unique position in this regard, if you want evidence, look at this top 50 generative AI mobile apps ranking: https://isarta.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/image-6-1.... Count the amount of Chat + "something" names, and the amount of practically identical logos as ChatGPT in addition. That's the game these days, if you are successful, you will be copied relentlessly.
And the copycats might not even be copycats in the sense you're thinking. Automated customer engagement, LinkedIn or otherwise, is probably among the top 3 ideas that came to mind to anyone working in the sales/CRM space as soon as LLMs became convincingly human in conversation. So it's just thousands of people realizing the same opportunity at roughly the same time, going out to build it, maybe checking if there's a significant player in the space already, learning from their mistakes, copying the parts that made sense, and firing on all cylinders to become the leader in the space.
Yes, someone with more money might even beat you to the #1 spot, and the people who you think are your competitors right now might not even be relevant in a year, when various CRM companies build this functionality into their systems as a feature. In an even worse scenario, companies like Persana might be acquired with way worse numbers than you have, because of the network, the budget, the lower risk due to being ex-LinkedIn, etc.
None of this is particularly "fair" in the school playground sense of the word, but rarely anything is in business. If you have a true competitive advantage in terms of product, you have better odds than most, but maybe someone is going to beat you on distribution, pricing, marketing, targeting, to the point that product will barely matter.
It's on you to figure out what you want to focus on, and what outcome you will be happy with. If you have the metrics, you can probably fundraise easily. You might not want to, because you want to bootstrap, but then stop wasting energy on thinking about competitors who are doing it differently. Whatever choices you make, make them, and focus on your own path.
There is a tremendous share of medicine specialties facing shortages, and fear of AI is not a relevant trend causing it. Even the link explaining shortages in the above article is pretty clear on that.
I do agree with the article's author's other premise, radiology was one of those fields that a lot of people (me included) have been expecting to be largely automated, or at least the easy parts, as the author mentions, and that the timelines are moving slower than expected. After all, pigeons perform similarly well to radiologists: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4651348/ (not really, but it is basically obligatory to post this article in any radiology themed discussion if you have radiology friends).
Knowing medicine, even when the tech does become "good enough", it will take another decade or two before it becomes the main way of doing things.
Waymo was providing 10,000 weekly autonomous rides in August 2023, 50,000 in June 2024, and 100,000 in August 2024.
Not everything has this trajectory, and it took 10 years more than expected. But it's coming.
Not saying AI will be the same, but underestimating the impact of having certain outputs 100x cheaper, even if many times crappier seems like a losing bet, considering how the world has gone so far.
Maybe this will be helpful to the author (partially already mentioned):
- Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business.
- You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment, there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses, premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process)
- Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge users or other parties for the value they get out of your product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue.
I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need to, because you already know what happens if you don't.
And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space, you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed, wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!
Perhaps a simpler analogy, you see a new bag/flavour of chips in the store, "super crunchy" "delicious", you buy it, go home, tastes horrible, barely crunchy, do you get to take it back and get your money back?
Do you get your money back if you go to the store and buy some new food/fruit/snack you don't like the taste of?
No, you throw it away, and probably won't buy it again. If you don't like NYT, don't buy from them.
If NYT is like an avocado for you, sometimes ripe and delicious, sometimes unripe, sometimes rotten, you get to decide how often you're gonna buy avocados, or if you'll develop your own methods of avocado testing before buying to increase your odds. In no case do you get to take the avocado skin back to the store asking for a refund.
Very much agreed on a lot of the points there, and on that note, how new frameworks market to developers is probably a great lesson in that. Pieter Levels (of nomadlist.com and similar fame) recently talked about it on a podcast, how he basically sticks to PHP and jQuery, and how often he sees developers jumping on a new framework, not realizing it's likely a marketing tactic that's pulling them in.
The part that feels most like the advice above: "And same thing what happens with nutrition and fitness or something, same thing happens in developing. They pay this influencer to promote this stuff, use it, make stuff with it, make demo products with it, and then a lot of people are like, “Wow, use this.” And I started noticing this, because when I would ship my stuff, people would ask me, “What are you using?” I would say, “Just PHP, jQuery. Why does it matter?”
And people would start attacking me like, “Why are you not using this new technology, this new framework, this new thing?”
What an evolution for the tech industry. From being the underdogs trying to change the world for the better, to becoming top dogs with all the same egoism and "money and power above all" that Big Oil and similar industries have been known for for decades.
From that perspective, Trump loves money, loves deregulation, and will open the door for whatever dystopian play if it provides enough benefits to him, so it only makes sense for him to be more favoured.
All that will come from this will be more evidence to how power corrupts everyone, and a lot of money made.
Having bought a Toyota hybrid for the first time about 2 years ago, the value proposition was overwhelmingly in their favor. Cost the same or less as equivalent gas cars in their class, with about 30% to 50% less gas usage, meaning ongoing costs are way lower too.
It was of course way cheaper than any reasonable electric car 2 years ago too, still probably is, and charging infrastructure was terrible where I live back then, still mostly is (but getting better).
I think the years and years of PR around their top tier reliability helps a lot too. I guess the biggest gripe is the looks of their cars, they're basically boring, kind of ugly and utilitarian. But all of the above together kind of nails a segment of car buyers which is "I don't want to give a shit about my car, I need it to work well, not burn the planet too much, not cost a lot, and get me where I need to go", which is probably a pretty large segment.
Have to add a different perspective here (the management one), just to try to give a potential explanation. I did pretty much the same thing to my team, though with a lot more background as to why. We were severely rocked by a Google search ranking update, and basically lost 70% of traffic overnight. We had no idea why, none of our metrics over the past years changed, but it all went to shit. In the days after, we set out a plan to try to recover this ranking, even though we had no idea what we need to do. Page speed was one of those metrics we set out to improve, and even though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional. As with other SEO stuff, there was no guarantee this will help, but we needed to try, along with a few other things. After we fixed it (along with a few other things), there was very small growth initially, and it took another 9 months for our SEO to fully recover, but we did fully recover. Was it Page speed? Who knows, but 30 million website visits were earned back one way or another.
I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).
A lot of the changes just don't make any sense? Some of the features removed:
- Using your voice to send an email, video or audio message. You can still make calls and send text messages
- Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.
- Asking to take certain actions by voice, such as send a payment, make a reservation, or post to social media. You can still ask Assistant to open your installed apps.
- Asking to meditate with Calm. You can still ask for meditation options with media providers such as YouTube.
All of these seem to fall under the umbrella of "features that actually make the assistant an assistant"/connecting the assistant to other apps, which I imagine is exactly the opposite of where the Assistant trend is going, especially with LLMs. Just speaking to a device about which action you want to take and not needing to think which app you need to open and navigate feels like the UX of the future, whatever this is seems like the opposite.
For those who will click directly into the comments:
The US GOVERNMENT (not the US as a whole) spent more on health care ($1.8 trillion) to provide non-universal healthcare than 6 European countries with a combined population similar to the US did ($1.2 trillion) to provide universal healthcare.
The article's premise being, it costs the government significantly more per person, and 50% more in total to run a non-universal healthcare system serving a subset of the population, than it does a universal healthcare system which covers everyone.
As a whole, the US spent $4.5 trillion (private+public).
