54) Hair on Fire

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:

(typos are to make sure you’re paying attention)

Introductory Remarks

Dear Vambracers —

In last week’s post, AI Hate, we explored why there is so much pessimism and negativity around AI in the broader popular conversation. I do think that a lot of the criticism is fair and warranted. But I remain optimistic that we’ll be able to overcome and/or compensate for most negative externalities; and the possible upside associated with things like accelerated drug discovery are just too potentially impactful to overlook. Moving on!

Hair on Fire

Leading accelerator Y Combinator talks about this concept of finding a “hair on fire” problem within organizations, and then solving it. The analogy they use is that you have to find a hair on fire problem, and then give that organization a brick with which they can use to put out the fire—the brick is the MVP. The point there being that you need to find fires that are so intense—problems that are so bad—that the organization is willing to use a brick to get rid of them.

The purpose of this post is to say that now, having been on this founder journey for about 10 months or so, I can say definitively that I know what it feels like to have your hair on fire, and I’d give anything right now for a brick. And, although painful, I do think that that knowledge alone is worth the pain of the journey.

Because in the past, when I’d talk about how hard entrepreneurship was, I’d just imagine some amorphous sort of generalized difficulty or whatever. But now having lived it for a few months, I can confidently say that I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about or just how far off I was from how hard things actually can be.

Maybe at some point in the future I’ll speculate on the root of this pain or theorize more generally on why high-functioning organizations have hair-on-fire problems. But for now, I’m content to acknowledge that I now know what it really means to have your hair on fire, and how much I’d give for a brick.

Looking Forward

Short and sweet today. I’m in Chicago for the week to work with some friends, which also relates to my brick-searching initiatives, and I’m excited to get a feel for being in an office and being shoulder-to-shoulder with someone on this pursuit—even if only for a week.

I hope you have a wonderful week!

Sincerely,

Luke