Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me!

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This week, I’m sharing something that was written by Sebastien in our team, that I found very thoughtful and that I edited to give more clarity on our culture.

Every week, senior Alaners are invited to contribute to the “Top Transversal Topics”. It is a shared notion page with the following categories:

• Summary of action items & ownership

  • New action items

  • Last week action items

• Update on top problems

  • New this week

  • In progress

  • Closed this week

• What’s top of mind this week & transversal?

• Small Yes/No Ideas, Topics

Alan operates on a principle of radical transparency, which means everyone has access to these discussions. 

However, sometimes the content can be a bit confusing or unsettling. It happens that some Alaners feel weird when we go deep and publicly on some soft signals, such as do we need to put more controls on our flexible leave policy? or challenging the performance of a part of the company.

In many companies, such conversations usually happen behind the scenes, known only to the top-level executives. These discussions are crucial as they pick up on early issues or trends that could impact the company in significant ways. It is one of the safety-nets for the company’s culture, strategy and organization.

At Alan, we’ve kept these discussions true to our culture: transparent. This transparency is not free, it can be jarring when you read them. Yet, asking senior Alaners to sugar-coat what they share in this forum would go against our unwavering transparency as it would likely push these conversations to less public forums, or would prevent some entirely.

Having the founders and the most senior Alaners (over)reacting to weak signals about how we embody our culture is a healthy sign: editing the company is not a second order priority, it’s top of mind. Of course, it’s easy to mis- or over-interpret these reactions, especially without context.

So rather than polishing or hiding these discussions, we believe we can learn to read them for what they are: weak and raw signals completely open to discussion, all shared with the intent to continue building the best version of Alan.

Some articles I have read this week

👉 Brain Food: Proven Benefits (Farnam Street)

• On the risk of intervention, especially for the most Senior Alaners (me included), when we are tempted to intervene, let’s make sure it has an order of magnitude impact. 

  • "A simple rule for the decision-maker is that intervention needs to prove its benefits and those benefits need to be orders of magnitude higher than the natural (that is non-interventionist) path. 

👉 Des Traynor (Intercom) - Real Talk About AI and Software (Join Colossus)

• A bit more about Fin (I shared in the past already). 

• He says we could target a 50% drop in support volume. 

• Explore how they put limits in place so we answer only the questions we want. 

• “Even in a lot of cases, all our help docs are out of date and we didn't realize it, but our customer support team were saving our ass”. ➡️ Scaling our documentation will be really important

• I love their idea of snippet product and continuous training

👉 Strava (Contrary Research)

• ~20% of people working out daily ➡️ the number seems very high. 

• I like that “Athletes can give “Kudos” to each other and leave comments on other people’s activities.” 

• I really believe in Groups & communities.

• Good overview of the competing apps in terms of running. 

• Strava is compatible with 400+ devices!! The work for integrating all those must be expensive. 

👉 Milestones: What to be ready for (Matt Mochary)

• “At >500 employees, your reviews on Glassdoor will suddenly start to go down”. Very interesting that it is a common pattern.

  • Keep building connections with everyone!

• I think we have been pretty good at not needing to bring in Senior Execs into the company and grooming internal talents.

👉Startup Valuations Are Bouncing Back (The Split)

• Interesting data points  on valuations:  Q2 median valuations were flat or up across every funding round

👉 14 Charts on the US Consumer (The Split)

• Every interesting stat (I don’t know how it applies in Europe): Americans would rather be 25% healthier than make 25% more money.

• “Gen Z and Millennial’s say its 3x more important that they admire and trust the founder of a brand than baby boomers.” Radical transparency will be paramount more and more. 

• Consumers are drinking less alcohol for physical health and mental health. It is likely a topic we would like to tackle at some point. 

• Births resulting from Assisted Reproductive Tech (ART) are growing 6% annually. IVF is now 9% of live births in Denmark.

👉 Thomas Edison, tinkerer (Works in Progress)

• It is like for us in healthcare. I don’t think we need to invent new procedures/methodologies, but be the one building the systems so everyone can access them. 

• Sometimes, brute-force a problem by experimenting a lot

• Build & confront reality. 

• Link innovation with business models

• The importance of timing, perseverance. 

• The importance of vertical integration as we are doing it. 

• Focus on outcomes.

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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!