Edition 12

Flexport's drama; from remote work back to the office; and, no, your car isn't spying on you

Welcome to the twelfth weekly edition of Nowism. This one is a bit shorter than normal as I have not been sleeping well. Hope it is still good. I bet you prefer it this way.

This Week 

Flexport’s drama

A lot has been written about the drama over the CEO role at Flexport and I find that aspect very boring and rather bitchy. You can read good pieces here, here and here.

What I do find interesting is that it raises these questions.

1)      Why have so many companies failed to predict that the pandemic would end?

The pandemic was never going to change the world, but it was going to pull through some demand (toilet paper rolls, printers, potted plants), push back some (hotel stays, suitcases, suits, irons), before reversing back to the mean.
This was always easy to see coming.

We could expect a handful of preexisting longer-term trends to remain at elevated levels (remote work, Telehealth, perhaps online learning), but not many. I’ve always been shocked that smart companies with smart people like Flexport somehow assumed global shipping prices would stay elevated, while capacity increased, when this defies any logic.  The power of hope over thought and the need for a compelling narrative to sustain investment

2)      Can a big company CEO ever really take over a startup?

Startups are amazing at being startups: they take risk, they build fast, they play in grey areas of the law, they pivot, and they often do stupid things which is how they get better (or die- remember the study of Unicorns is largely still the study of survivorship bias, not the market).

Big companies are so damn good at being big. They are reliable and are well orchestrated; they are practiced, robust, and repetitive; they dominate and exist on bulk; they manage stakeholders, steer clear of the law, and are in absolutely no way like startups. 

The track record of startups successfully handing over the reins to storied CEOs is inconclusive:  Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber has steadied the ship  and Sandeep Mathrani at WeWork has faced greater challenges, but the truth is, rather like large companies recruiting CEOs of startups, people just don’t tend to bridge this huge cultural divide.

3)      How much about the shift to eCommerce is really about logistics?
eCom is such a weird loose term. If I order a takeaway over the phone, it’s not eCommerce, but if I do it via the internet, it is. Yet little has changed.
If I buy Groceries online but collect in person, is this eCommerce?
The entire world of business seems to think eCommerce is really about where I decide what to buy, where I make payment, where I commit. But for most companies and most consumer journeys this is the least most interesting thing.

The part of “eCom” which is by far the most important, is about the logistics of getting stuff to you. This is where the unit economics either kill you, or make you rich. Amazon to me has always been a disastrous retailer, but an incredible Logistics company. eCommmerce for me is really the art of procuring, holding and getting things to people at scale profitably, and not the art of website design. That’s why Flexport was interesting.

Ground Down

Predictably, the very first companies to proudly declare they are moving to remote work, are all slowly reneging on that promise. In August, the social network Grindr announced a return-to-office mandate, giving its staff two weeks to pledge to work from one of their 5 US offices TWO DAYS a week starting from October or lose their jobs come August 31.  Quite shockingly, 46 percent of the staff rejected this mandate and have been let go.

 This does all ask the question these days, what is fair? Is it fair for your employer to demand you work from somewhere ever? How long for? How far away? Who has the power? If you signed a contract in 2019 saying you’d work from an office five days a week, is it possible to feel happy it’s now only two days? The hard thing about these things is nobody really seems to know what’s reasonable any more. Employment was once been a way to keep alive. No teenager cleaning chimneys or climbing down mines 200 years ago would moan about how well the company aligned with their purpose; few mill workers revolted to my knowledge because of a lack of structured training.  By 2018, jobs had become something more than survival, they became identity. We were expected to “like” our jobs, to feel we did something to make us “proud”, we were expected to hang out with colleagues, wish them a happy birthday, and to think of them like friends and of bosses a bit like parents who could be nice to us if we were sad.  And now we’re totally lost. Should we love what we do or just love the life that a salary allows us to do? Should bosses tell us what to do or persuade and inspire us to work? Should CEOs inspire us to the office or demand we do what we agreed to do?

No, your car isn’t spying on you.

I get really annoyed by pieces like this that claim cars want to know about your sex life and your weight and also listen to you. 

When a privacy policy from Nissan states: “It reserves the right to share and sell “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes” to data brokers, law enforcement, and other third parties,” it doesn’t mean Nissan is about to sell your most deviant secrets to the market.

It means a 24-year-old legal intern was tired and copied terms and conditions from a double-glazing firm’s website, which was written by a 27-year-old lawyer working out his notice period, who copied it from some website somewhere, because nobody ever cared about this stuff and nobody ever checked it. Never confuse conniving vicious intentions with languorous legal work and the way the entire world is constructed by recycling what’s done before.

WeWork ish

It’s slowly dawning on investors that maybe WeWork wasn’t a tech company at all, but a real estate company with some iPads on meeting room doors.  Remember the question with technology and business is always how something changes the unit economics of the business - not how does this look good in a photo.

Little Ones

• "Accepting that people who have lived different lives than you want different things and will see the world differently. What looks like debates are often just people with different lived experiences talking over each other" is a wonderful line from this piece.
  
  In a world where people seem more divided than ever, and seem to actively enjoy sneering at those who “vote the wrong way” or “are too stupid to read the real news”, I spend most of my time thinking that pretty much everyone on the planet wants the same things, but has different real world experiences and a different opinion on how to get there. Generally speaking everyone is doing their best and scared.
  

• “It’s just so mind-bogglingly efficient and cheap” to transport goods around the world” In a slightly depressing piece on how modern furniture got so bad.  As someone who buys once extremely expensive furniture used and then sells it for profit when I move, I endorse the move to quality furniture. 
  

• The dumbest thing I’ve heard in the last year was that the next Unicorn would be set up by two people and ChatGPT, this piece shows that I may be right. We all know the next Unicorn will be one person and 10,000 people on Upwork, using Slack.
  

• Ultra-fast delivery companies’ valuation are crashing as it’s ultra slowly dawning on people that it’s not a very good idea for a business. We’ve invested far more money into hastily getting Spicy Cheetos to your house at 3 am than we ever did putting humanity on the moon. We should at the very least be putting Pringles on the moon (same day) by now.
  

• Bitcoin’s price shifted 2.1% to …….nobody cares any more, Crypto trading volume drops to lowest since 2019, which, considering it’s all make-believe money based on plausible narratives and arbitrary data points, is progress.

Me Me Me

• As you read this, I’m interviewing “Mr. Global” aka Billionaire Dragon Peter Jones in Riyadh which should be fun, I’ll try to get a copy of the audio if it’s good and share it here.

• Consulting always goes from feast to famine and I’m at a nice feast stage, so I am also promoting my free “paid speaker finding” service InterestingSpeakers.com so I can match people who can pay for great speakers with great speakers.
  
  No fee taken from either side, but I do occasionally suggest myself when I think I’m good for it.

• Still on the look out for great guests for my Podcast “My Wildest Prediction” for Euronews, so let me know if you know of anyone quite well known and super interesting.