How many people do you have to convince in a city to get the difference between 20k car break-ins and 5k break-ins? I think it’s probably something like 10-20. Plus politicians/cops/etc but they have much less direct control of the metric than the decisionmakers do.
Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining. And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.
Like I think we've seen internally at Meta um cases where if you can develop the right agentic loop and you have the right eval or the right metric for the agents to optimize, you can have a swarm of agents accomplish more than like a team of 100 engineers in, you know, uh very very handily actually, very very easily.
a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.
you got to be really conscious of the consequence and not get too deterministic about a single metric or a single variable and know what's important and what's on top.
projects are flooded with junk contributions at the moment to the point that people are trying to convince GitHub to disable pull requests, which is something GitHub have never done.
What probably the single most important proxy metric that you can have it in a company today is token burn. Because what token burn says is your engineers are trying to do stuff or your non-engineers.
They actually had the budget and bought the stupid thing. Then they went through onboarding and invested their time etc etc. That is a crazy gauntlet that almost no one gets through.
Being right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.
But the most important metric, and we carefully measure it is, like, how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI, right? It's tough measure, and we rigorously try to measure it, and our estimates are that number is now at 10%, right?
What he found is that the companies that struggled to grow almost always had less than 40% very disappointed. Whereas the companies that grew the fastest almost always had more than 40% very disappointed. And this question, this metric is way more predictive of success than something for example like net promoter score.
So, taking also any benchmark that is derived from competition and saying this is where we should be is also so dangerous because it might not even be applicable depending on how you define the metric.
And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.
One email will never do anything. If you're going to go into email, please think about it as a series, about communication, about how it interacts with product communication.
Empirical data drawn from many different regions clearly shows that, on a metropolitan scale, rents tend to rise when vacancy rates are low and stabilize when vacancy rates are high.
If you think about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. In almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did, and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates. Almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be.
I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then. It means you go examine the data because it's usually not that the data is being miscollected, it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.
If you ever needed convinced of the importance of why starting with a small experiment is really important this is the book to convince. With interesting stories from Pixar and amongst others, it makes a compelling case.
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