ai company on boxcars

I want to use this week’s email to announce this AI Native company and I want to talk about how I’m thinking about it. Essentially the email will be something along the lines of for the last few weeks I’ve been showing you how I’ve been working on using AI to write and the journey has been a question of what is AI good at, what are the tools and capabilities that enable us to harness AI, how is AI itself improving, all that kind of stuff. The reason I found this really important is because I think back to the lesson from Henry Ford and the electrification of American manufacturing. And so maybe there’s a cool story that says Henry Ford was trying to build a cheaper car because he knew if he could drop the cost of constructing the car then his market would grow. And he was not able to do this, electricity had just come out, but he stepped on to the slaughterhouse in Chicago when he was there for a visit and there he noticed something very normal in a slaughterhouse, but something profound in his head. He saw that the carcasses of the animals were hanging on these trolleys and the trolleys would move to people who would do the cutting. And that’s how the whole thing was organized. And all of a sudden it hit him that this is what was missing in his factory. But you see, at that time, factories had a central power source of a steam-powered base system and all of the machinery had to be connected to the central steam system, which meant how your factory flow was organized was limited. In an industry like the slaughterhouse where the mechanical power isn’t that high, the workers could go grab the carcasses and just move them on these trolley systems to the next person. Whereas in a manufacturing system like Henry Ford’s factory, that wasn’t possible because of the machineries, but electricity allowed him to change that. He could realign the factory floor around what made sense for maximum output and employee efficiency.

I feel like this is where we are with AI. There are some very basic things that AI is able to do, but if we can understand how to relay out the workflow to enable this new partner into our workflows, then I think things can multiply or improve. But that’s going to take some time because the engine keeps getting swapped out and the tooling keeps getting better. So we’re still at the very early stage of how AI is going to show up and have an impact on all of these things. So last week I focused on writing. I basically talked about the systems I use, the prompts I use, and the lessons I’ve learned from trying to bring AI into the workflow of writing so that I can use AI to write. Now this is a difference from just asking AI to write for me, which is what those school essays and things are, but that’s not what this is about. So we’re actually producing a work product that makes sense and then using AI along the way. But there’s also another workflow I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year and that is in how to build an AI native company. So one way of thinking about it is to say if you take a software company and you said you’re going to rebuild it from scratch with just AI tooling, how would you do it? And just like the writing process, I’ve learned a lot from this. And one of the things I’m starting now is a writing project that explains how this works. So in the coming weeks I’ll talk more about it and share more about all of the pieces.

But this idea of working how to set up the process is what made Ford possible to make an inexpensive car, capture the auto industry and spark a new manufacturing process. This is also how two brothers from California innovated on turning service in their restaurant around. They invented the SpeedE system. Shown in this video clip. They became McDonalds. The clip is from “The Founder” (movie)

, but here are some basic orienting principles. The first thing is what is a company? Well, a company or organization basically transforms resources into a product that is then sold to a customer and generates value for the company. So explain how, you know, it’s about human resources. So back when I first joined my company coming out of college, the company figured out that if they could hire young cheap developers and train them up into good software engineers and they could build software product that could then generate revenue for the company and for this to raise money for investors and went and did it. So all along the way for a software company the most expensive resources are the developers. And so offshoring, outsourcing, better tooling, all of those are super important for the software company to continue to expand and innovate and add more products to its market. So we now have a new entrant in this resource game and that is the AI programmer. And the question becomes how do you use this to build a company?