sean.horgan.net

Notes on Alex Komoroske's bit & bobs

Sean Horgan

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Alex describes himself as an external processor and prolific note taker. He creates evocative metaphors by talking to lots of people across different subgraphs of a network — a diversity of the people.

Thoughts on life philosophy

Do things that give you energy and makes you proud. * Negative opportunity cost

From Tim Urban: happiness = reality - expectations

Software is alchemy - so much potential. Wants to use AI to escape the box of monolithic apps curated by aggregators.

Bits and bobs

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komoroske.com/bits-and-bobs⁠

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komoroske-updates - Google Groups⁠

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Platforms

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komoroske.com/gardening-platforms⁠

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LLMs

Truly a disruptive technology. See’s LLMs as magical duct tape that connects human and plain-old computers. We are in the late stage of the

LLMs write it easy to write shitty software but can make it expensive to serve it. Advertising can’t cover the inference costs.

Changes the basis of competitive landscape as it has lowered the barrier. Writing and running software is no longer a differentiator on its own.

LLMs as a squishy computer - electric bike for the mind.

PM skills

Community gardening stage — not factory farming. We need curiosity & play, e.g. WebSim:

https://websim.ai/⁠

We know how to execute Vertical SaaS - it’s probably not the approach to leverage AI.

Seeing a reduction in the cost to produce information. Taste & perspective that is compelling — much more important than generically following others. How distinct is what you think from an LLM?

Organizations

Kayfabe (kay-fay-bay) is a term used in professional wrestling to describe the idea that wrestling events, stories, and characters are genuine, even though they are actually staged. In larger organizations, there is often something everybody knows is fake, yet everyone acts like is real - that’s organizational kayfabe.

The ability to embrace non-conforming evidence is critical. Some ways to do that are:

Build a cognitively diverse team

Make it easy for people to tell you bad news

The slime mold -

https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/⁠

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Apple - very important to maintain the illusion of perfect coherence

AWS - picked the opposite approach - a swarm of services

References

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Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change⁠

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https://www.davidkhurst.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/From-Life-Cycle-to-Ecocycle-1994.pdf⁠

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Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems⁠

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CHAORDIC AGE ORGANIZATIONS - Dee W Hock⁠

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Aishwarya Khanduja⁠

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Nerd Clubs / Strategy Salon

Many of the strategies at google led to situations where the sum of the parts was less than the whole because one approach under-minded another.

Pairwise executive reviews in complex open-ended problems led to expensive pageantry that obscures more than it clarified.

Collaborative debate - “Yes And”. Interesting: surprising and potentially valuable

Bottom-up and emergent

Playbook

Communities are all about momentum. Space too small, time too short.

Never dies — a community with 1 person talking is already dead, you just don’t know it.

Needs a gardener

Once a week / send FOMO notes, e.g. “thanks for the amazing conversation”

Adjacent Possible

Slice the world into a coherent system. You can arc to wildly different options through a series of small steps. Great way to reduce risk while keeping. Avoid jumping too far head.

Get coherence with a north star / 3 year vision. Doesn’t require a miracle - everyone can’t see . Everyone would high-five at the end.

Look at your options to see which has the steepest gradient — avoid the random walking or designing castles in the sky. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in efficiency that

Illusion of precision — comfort blanket masking the uncertainties of the business.

Books

Origin of Wealth -

Thinking in systems

Favorite recent product: WebSim

Nerd Clubs / Strategy Salon

Adjacent Possible

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