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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.

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Small teams can achieve great things

Recently, in some internal exchanges, I read and heard about questions such as: “how can we innovate or be competitive on various topics, like Doctor AI and many others, even though we have a very small team and others are much larger?”

I think it's a classic misconception to think that large teams are necessary to solve complex problems. Mistral managed to release amazing models with under 20 people. At Expliseat, my first company, we released the world's lightest aircraft seat with fewer than 20 people, while competitors were several hundred.

I can list dozens and dozens of examples where very small teams have done extraordinary things. In fact, it's not a question of the number of people, but of having the right people on the right problems. 

It's the same in research. Often, it's the very small laboratories that make huge innovations.  We see that tiny teams can solve big problems. Once we know this, it actually gives a lot of hope.

It's not about counting the number of people we have on a subject. It's about making sure we have extremely brilliant people who are very eager to innovate on a topic that involves risks, that fails quickly, etc.

Having larger teams often just means spending more time coordinating and collaborating than building. The smaller the team, the more each can advance fast.

Then, once we scale up, there are often more maintenance costs, more management costs, etc., which cause teams to grow very quickly.

As a result, let's not limit ourselves to the number of "we've only allocated three people to a problem" to decide whether the problem is important or not for the company. The question is who we have allocated and how much we believe in it. 

Some good articles I have read this week

Healthcare

👉Mosie Baby received FDA clearance for at-home intravaginal insemination (Bloomberg)

• For $129 you can do at-home intravaginal insemination

• It seems like a big step change in technology. I would be curious to understand the market for France.

👉 Metabolic Meltdown: The Hidden Health Crisis (Part 1 and 2) (The Health 3.0 Newsletter)

• Good definition of Metabolism health: “Metabolism is the biological process by which we take in nutrients and break them down into fuel, for use in the body.”

• When someone is metabolically unhealthy, a significant portion of the calories they consume are stored in areas where they are not needed. 

• The body’s inability to process excess glucose leads to a continuum of metabolic disorders, from insulin resistance to type 2 diabetes. 

• The perspective on advanced screening and tests is interesting (see in the thread), and we might want to explore more over time. 

•  The Mediterranean diet was the most effective for controlling blood glucose.

• A 2- minute walk after a meal really mitigates extreme blood glucose responses. 

👉 Health OS Revolution: Powering Preventative Care with Data (The Health 3.0 Newsletter)

• I think we should dig deeper and build more knowledge about advanced preventative blood tests, whole-body MRI scans, Continuous Glucose Monitors

Building companies & product

👉 Alexandre Yazdi about Voodoo Story (X)

• How can we get faster at innovation? I love how they pushed each team to release one game a week. 

• How at one point we might create the mini-app platform and attract developers. 

👉 Scott Belsky on attention spans (X)

• Learn to be actively patient

  • “The problem in big companies with short attention-spans is that those zeros make people question the actions incessantly until they see the results. defending (or distracting) the period of “relentless action before results” is half the battle.”

👉 Joyspan, Emotional AI Bumpers, Persona Designers, & More Wild Concepts Bound to Become Commonplace Plus Where High-Tech Entertainment Brings Us (Implications)

• I love the notion of Joyspan as shared in a previous thread!

• The importance of authenticity in our product experiences. Everybody craves some degree of distinctiveness. We can embrace imperfections and signals of authenticity and incorporate them into digital experiences.

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