The Algorithm, Applied to Breakfast
April 24
I woke up at 4am and am writing this at 6am. Jetlag.
There’s a passage in Marcus Aurelius I keep coming back to on mornings like this — the one where he catches himself not wanting to get out of bed and reminds himself he wasn’t made to stay warm under blankets. He was made to do the work of a human being. Today the jetlag did the arguing for me.
Went for a walk with my earphones on. I’ve been listening to The Algorithm by Jon McNeill — former president of Tesla, former COO of Lyft, now on boards at places like GM and Lululemon.
The TL;DR: question every assumption. Just because something has always been done doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it. Sounds obvious, but lived through the book’s examples it feels refreshing. One that stuck: McNeill going to Shanghai to negotiate the first 100% Tesla-owned factory, when JVs had been the norm.
Simplify and optimize is something I need to sit down and do with the Scroll App. Is every step absolutely necessary? How should I be thinking about the whole customer journey?
Accelerate cycle time is another good one. When it takes us 2.5 weeks to get a lawyer’s opinion out to the other side, and the counterparty takes 2 days, we are operating in vastly different worlds.
Do things slowly and manually before automating. Write every step on a sticky note. Then question whether it needs to be there at all.
Another story: McNeill noticed cyber insurance was running around $7M across the companies where he sits on boards. He figured this was too blunt — cyber risk has distinct fragments that could be priced separately — so he started something to break it apart.
I’m halfway through the book. I’ve already been walking for two hours with weights on. To put some of the rules into practice, I went into the kitchen, manually sliced an apple, added Greek yogurt, mixed in some seeds and acai powder, and dropped in a few pieces of 100% dark chocolate.
Not entirely sure how to automate this production process. Maybe I’ll buy an air fryer so the apple can come out hot and I can add some cinnamon.