Sarah Drinkwater

The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

In America, our culture has become anticipation.

At some point, there was a switch, in which we became an edging culture. One rooted in “pre-”.

With AI, I suspect we’ll be able to play with the compression of anticipation with software objects well. Teasing an idea on Twitter, seeing it’s response, putting that prompt in AI to generate just enough code for the resemblance of the thing → and that reaching consumer hands much faster.

Perhaps anticipation culture is the wedded partner of instant-gratification culture. It’s the only thing that allows us to microdose the gratification of the object before we actually have it. Constantly watching trailers, or runway shows, sneak peaks, etc

I find this all lines up incredibly well to VC culture. The discussion is 90% weighted on the raise

The anticipation is lost as its material reality fails to hold any long term attention. Even if it was the exact promise. We simply love the build up. The image of the thing.

The “pre-”, other than consuming behind the scenes content of an artist’s process, is all mental. As I participate as a dancer in the audience, I can only (if I care to) construct fiction of the worked anticipation of the overall performance. But 90%+ of the audience only cares about the anticipation of the next drop or track. The loop is built in.

To bring it all the way back to the tweet that launched this post. Anticipation is exhausting. It is built around uncertainty, and the quelling of said uncertainty by the fragments of the objects chosen to be presented.

As AI democratise software creation, a world with a billion developers will not lack for builders as much as it will lack for artisans.