20) Alignment

Behind-the-scenes building Vambrace AI, a company on a mission to figure out its mission. Please pardon the stream-of-consciousness style. Subscribe to follow along or visit the site here:

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Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, Energy, I explored the importance of pursuing opportunities and working with people that: (i) respond well to my energy, and (ii) give me energy, within the context of structuring my day-to-day. As I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve become much more comfortable saying no to things and really understanding what I’m looking for—and why I’m looking for whatever that is—and then being uncompromising in waiting for that right thing to come along, and then pouncing when it does. Now more than ever there’s so much content-clutter in the information streams of existence, and so I aim to cultivate a more focused, mindful, and quiet existence.

Alignment

Today I’d like to discuss the importance of alignment in structuring successful engagements but then more generally in building a framework for a full and abundant professional (and personal) life.

Inspiration

The start of a new entrepreneurial endeavor permits the evaluation of pretty much every aspect of an existence. One general area I’ve never really been super into is that of life coaches and motivational speakers and stuff. My general sense is that it’s probably more useful to just live and experiment than it is to listen to people talking about other people living and experimenting. But as I enter into this new chapter I’m willing to leave some of my biases at the door.

In this specific instance, I listened to a GSB talk by Graham Weaver talking about how to construct a life-game that you can win, and it inspired me to do a similar type of reflection and introspective exploration on my own life and the company I aim to build. But let me try to put finger-to-plastic (i.e., type) on what I’m actually trying to say here.

Levels of alignment

This will probably end up being just some like jankey hierarchy type of thing that psychologists or scientists have explored in the past. But this is how I’m thinking about an alignment funnel. I’ll try to be brief here:

• Self & Values. I’ve spent a lot of the past few years diving deep into who I am, the experiences that have shaped me, and a more general idea of what matters to me, what I’m good at, what I don’t enjoy, who I want to be, etc. And I think I’ve also gone down the arduous path of why I am the way I am, in terms of upbringing, experiences, etc. I do think that part of an understanding of self is realizing that you are an active participant in the construction of self. But first I needed to almost excavate the psychological ruins of my existence before I could start building new structures.

  Within the context of this post, I think the more I understand who I am, and why I am, and what I am, the more clarity I have around the things that matter to me, the impact I aim to have, how I want to show up in the world, and the types of things that I’d like to spend my time on. So from there, that kind of is / informs my values and the behavior-set, attitudes, and principles that let me sleep peacefully at night.

• Values & Purpose. As I’ve started to define and refine and exhibit my values, and explored the boundaries of those values, I think I’ve been able to start leaning in more into my purpose on this planet and how I can operate at the intersection around, excellence, positive impact, and joy. It’s pretty much just the Ikigai thing. In my case, I’ve always been drawn to small businesses—and then I think the more general abstraction there is that I like being on David’s side for the most part (even if the Davids I work with are Goliaths to others, they have to pass my David-test). And then I think there’s other purpose-related stuff with like building fun stuff, and outcompeting others. I guess at the highest level my purpose-flow is like: explore, discover, experiment, perform, enjoy.

• Purpose & Pursuit. I actually really like that high-level, five-word purpose-flow. From there, it’s important to get tactical within the existing technology and business environment to live out that purpose through concrete pursuits. In my case right now, that means finding family-owned business partners to help them like adopt AI (and other) technologies to improve, streamline, and redefine their businesses—positioning them to better compete in an AI-first future. I know there’s a good bit of buzzword-ing there, but that’s also pretty much what I’m doing. It’s not all that confusing. And I’m trying to basically take a business-first, technology-second approach, because I’ve gone deep in the weeds with like sub-$50M revenue businesses for my entire career, and so I know how to dig deep into the cost structure and asset-flows and stuff to help propose new ideas for improvements. And I enjoy doing all of that. Like there is probably a perfectly fit platonic ideal of any given company—and I want to use AI to find that ideal with people who also want to find it.

• Pursuit & People. Like I just said, I want to pursue things with people that also want to pursue those things, and where the collective participation of the joint-pursuit substantially increases the probability of success. I think it’s important to note that I don’t really care too much about the worldview that has brought them to a shared interest in the pursuit, so long as I deem it to be like formed with integrity or whatever. But I just want to find people who are driven and impressive and entrepreneurial and competitive and aligned with me and who are funny and fun and joyful and then like let’s go from there. I just don’t buy the idea that working hard and doing difficult things has to be super severe and negative and joyless. Like there’s just this fallacy I think that to work really hard and do really amazing things you have to sacrifice fun or something. I just fundamentally don’t believe that. We can work hard and experience adversity and focus-up when we need to. But we can still be a joyful zebra with serious stripes in everything that we do.

• People & Impact. From there, assuming you work really hard with people you respect and are able to achieve some level of success, I think it’s important to understand what the impact of that success would look like—and that it’s a future-version of the world that energizes and excites you. I generally do believe that we should pursue optimal efficiency within business, and I’m super into emerging technologies, and I emotionally resonate with smaller family-owned businesses—and so all of this means that if I can work with like 5 of these companies to really really improve things, then that would be amazing; and that’s a future I’d like to be part of birthing.

• Impact & Actualization of Self. And so then I think the most beautiful part of all of this, probably, is the cyclical and self-reinforcing nature of it all. Where the more I find and execute against aligned opportunities with people I enjoy, then hopefully the better equipped I am to understand who I am, continue to sharpen my purpose, perform better in my purpose-driven pursuits, and better support the people I do it with, and elevate the impact that I have.

Kind of pedantic, but I think overall a pretty solid framework for how I’m thinking about the alignment-funnel right now, and why it’s really important to pursue aligned opportunities—especially since I am fortunate to have the freedom to pursue those aligned opportunities. And I really do believe that doing things that excite your soul with people who bring you joy, means the work is better, the focus is better, the outcomes are better, and then life is better.

Types of alignment

And then I think that alignment is multidimensional, and that the best engagements and the most satisfying work achieves alignment across all dimensions below.

• Social (i.e., Culture). I used to think that culture was a myth, but increasingly I subscribe to the belief that really it’s the most important thing. Nothing is worth doing if it’s with people whose company I don’t enjoy or that I don’t want to see succeed. Because then any seeds of success blossom into grapes of wrath—eventually—and that’s a vitriolic vino that I do not want to sample. So as I think about the customers I work with and the people that I might hire, I do think that social alignment is one of the most important things here. And, importantly, this doesn’t mean like a socially homogenous organization or anything like that, but it means working with people that I enjoy, who enjoy me, and who I can really imagine building a years-long relationship with.

• Values. Beyond social alignment, I do think it’s important to align on more general and/or fundamental values. I think this alignment is more specifically around work ethic, business morals, treatment of others, etc., and not like political values or anything like that (within reason I guess). And then even just like do you embrace difficulty, do you not seek comfort, do you understand accountability, etc. These are all much harder to suss out over zoom and on a 45-minute call, but I think you can still kind of discern the general vibe pretty early on. But, so, you want your work with others to be a constructive expression of self and a constructive expression of your joint-whole—otherwise, again, what’s the point?

• Goal. And then more tactically, what is the objective of the entanglement? What does massive success look like? What makes the both of us super super super happy? And this isn’t even from an economic perspective (yet) or from a teleological perspective at all, really. I also think timeline plays an interesting role here, because really it’s sort of immediate-, intermediate-, and long-term goal alignment.

  For example (this is a theoretical customer), (i) right now I want to implement an automated system for customer engagement from the time they visit our site to the time they make a purchase; then (ii) in the intermediate-term, I’d like to drive efficiency improvements and increase revenue by implementing AI throughout the entire ops stack; and finally (iii) in the long-term I’d like to be the biggest [x] in the state. I guess really what I’m trying to say is that I consider myself to be pretty ambitious, like I’d really like to build a meaningful company and have substantial impact—and I want to work with people who are similarly driven and willing to roll their sleeves up to be dominant.

• Economic. Finally, there must be economic alignment. My general worldview is that, if there is sufficient alignment on all of the above, then the economic alignment will sort of take care of itself—so long as I am being thoughtful about appropriately structuring the relationship. I’m still in the early stages here of optimal economic structure, but I think that will come with time as I grow more confident in being able to even deliver on what I say I can do. And then I think I’ll pursue as many performance-based arrangements where the onus is on me to go above and beyond expectations, and hopefully share in the upside as a result of that.

I’d also like to note here that, these are all different types of alignment, and I think you can do a similar analysis from the “levels of alignment” above to each of these alignment categories. Like for economic alignment, I think I’ve spent a lifetime figuring out what my relationship is with money and economic—and it’s always evolving—but that relationship was/is borne out of self, values, purpose, pursuit, people, impact, etc. Like I wouldn’t be doing things that weren’t, in my opinion, sufficiently economically ripe. And that same idea extends to social alignment and stuff.

Maybe this is all pretty obvious or pedantic or robotic, but it’s sort of a fun framework for me as I think about bringing on a small number of high-quality clients that I’d like to form multi-year and really deep partnerships with as their preferred digital transformation / modernization partner. Like a core guiding belief is that effective adoption of AI (and automation in general) technologies now can position you to dominate everyone else in your competitive arena. And I want to find people who are in for that pursuit, and want to do it the right away, and who I can have fun with as we do it.

Some concluding thoughts

I guess, maybe, this all sounds so perfect in theory and also so simple and straightforward. So, a few things: (1) I think it’s much harder to actually stick to these aligned opportunities because I’d guess that mostly unaligned opportunities present themselves, and they can be pretty compelling (economically, socially, etc.), and so staying true to your values and self even when there are compelling opportunities is really really difficult. We are super vain and mimetically-driven creatures, so it’s only human; and (2) I do think that the pursuit of aligned opportunities is a little bit of a privilege, which I do acknowledge—but it’s also much harder to live out than it seems—so I think it’s a privilege worth pursuing.

Looking Forward

I’m starting to build some business development momentum, and so I’m thinking more critically about the types of opportunities that I want to pursue, and I think I’m just trying to be very intentional about how I show up in the world and stuff—to help me live as aligned a life as possible. Much easier said than done.

Perhaps I’ll get more tactical on like outreach strategy or engagement strategy or something, I’m not sure. But that feels like enough for this post.

Have a wonderful week full of aligned opportunities and joy!

Sincerely,

Luke