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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Radical transparency has been a key tenet of our culture since the beginning of Alan.

It made sense at the time as it allowed information to flow, and we could roughly all comprehend everything that was happening.

Quickly, there was more information than what’s humanly possible to absorb.

Some companies resort to a push solution: they editorialize the information shared with the team. You only get to know what was decided as useful for you.

We decided on a radically different solution, the pull one: you get access to all information, and you’re the one to decide on what’s important to you.

That gives every single Alaner more power to get updated and understand the great picture, so they can do their best work and grow faster cross-functionally. This is partially why we are doing things like the weekly Pulse.

On the other hand, that requires discipline: you need to be able to filter your channels of information. You can’t be always on.

Then there was too much information to even look up. Search engines are limited. It may be hard to find what you can’t easily express.

That’s where AI comes in. Thanks to our writing culture and our radical transparency, a tool like Dust becomes very powerful: you can ask just about anything that happened at Alan and get an answer.

Information is power. And thanks to our culture and to AI, we are all more powerful, and we need to preserve that by making sure we document everything we can!

Some articles I have read this week

👉Health: are we definitely going to run out of doctors? (Le Figaro)

• The average age of doctors has also slightly decreased from 51.1 years to 50.3 years.

• the proportion of doctors aged 60 and over has also increased significantly, from 23% in

 2012 to over 30% today. Furthermore, doctors aged 65 and over now account for 16.4% of the profession, a significant increase from 6.3% in 2012.

• In the Lot department, all ophthalmologists and 12 out of the 16 cardiologists are over the age of 65.

👉 Inflection AI co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, author of The Coming Wave, on tomorrow’s interactive artificial intelligence

• “It isn't just going to be this one shot, ask a question, get an answer, it's going to be strings of correct answers in high precision, high quality environments over time.”

👉 AI Agenda: Be Like Microsoft: How OpenAI Customers Bend the Rules to Save Money (The Information)

• Using GPT4 to fine-tune then a smaller model

👉 An Interview with Eric Seufert About Streaming Advertising, Generative AI, and Marketing Automation (Stratcherry)

• It seems that Meta managed to crack advertising again on their platform thanks to AI

👉 Adding a Paid Tier to The Split + Launching a Podcast (The Split)

• Interesting trend on influencers that are less and less trusted (I guess it is starting to be a saturated channel). Worth digging deep in the numbers.

• How all systems can be gamed and why picking up the right metrics is important

• How consistency is very important to see tractions, and how long it takes!

👉 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.

👉 Mental well-being by Zak Williams (Prepare Your Mind) 

• “spread awareness around how mental hygiene can decisively support people through a prevention orientation.”

• I like this idea of finding leaders in communities, training them, supporting one-on-one crisis recognition, and letting them be our ambassadors with our tooling.

  • Could we find employees in every company and support them?

👉 Inside OpenAI: How does ChatGPT Ship So Quickly? (The Pragmatic Engineer)

• Know when to give a nascent group its own code repository. 

• How to create the atmosphere of an early-stage startup iterating towards product-market fit (PMF.) 

• Research being integrated into product teams has been critical.

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