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.

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Hard to execute strategies

A strategy should be challenging to execute if you want significant victories and differentiation.

If you choose an easy path or a straightforward strategy, how long do you think it will take the competition to catch up and replicate it?

So, it's crucial to ask ourselves: what's our capacity for taking risks and making investments that genuinely separate us from the rest?

This has been our approach since the start of Alan. There are a few key themes that perfectly reflect this right now.

• Our investment in the verticalization of care—be it mental health, back pain or health at work—is challenging for competitors to replicate in an integrated application. 

• Our investment in artificial intelligence is equally ambitious, as it involves a massive overhaul of processes, and we did it ahead of time. That's precisely what we're doing with some new products to come, and we're creating substantial competitive advantages.

• It’s the gamble we took with public servants, even though we were very uncertain we'd win. And look where we are today.

• It's also the bet we made on international markets, and we continue to pursue it!

The unique arc that ties all this together is our forward-looking vision, an ambitious outlook, and the awareness that today's decisions will profoundly impact our business in the next two or three years.

This obsession with the long term will continue to set us apart, and it's one of the things I love most about Alan. We've taken a series of bold risks that continue to pay off, and when they don't, we learn so much that it maximizes our chances of success in the next gamble.

And that’s the incredible part of building this together.

Some good articles I have read this week

Building companies & culture

👉 An Interview with dLocal Founder Sebastián Kanovich and CEO Pedro Arnt (Stratechery)

• My classic “it’s hard, otherwise someone else would be doing it”

• “Great companies are the ones that are able to avoid the trade-offs that not-great companies come up against“, meaning growing fast and building the foundations at the same time!

👉 Unspoken Expectation (Farnam Street)

• On the importance of writing: “we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.”

• Why you should read books and not only summaries (even if my summaries go in-depth):

  • A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. 

  • The time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us.

👉 Lulu Cheng Meservey on X: founders going direct in communication (X)

• I think I should do it more and more!

  • Speed matters ➡️ what kind of news should we react to? How do we set ourselves up?

  • People want to hear from people, not corporations

  • A great post can rival the distribution of a leading newspaper

Healthcare

👉 The Rise of Mental Health Chatbots (AI Secret)

👉 The new era of consumer engagement: Insights from Rock Health’s ninth annual Consumer Adoption Survey (Rock Health)

• Good article on the trends for virtual care and what it means for us

  • 76% of people used virtual care in the US

  • Reasons: chose virtual options over in-person care for greater convenience (39%), shorter wait times (30%), and the ability to see a specific provider who couldn’t otherwise be seen in person (17%).

  • Mental health tops the list of care specialty visits conducted virtually and many consumers now consider it more “typical” to see a mental health provider virtually than in person.

👉 Medical AIs with human faces are on their way (The Economist)

• People seem to find it easier to disclose their sexual history to a chatbot than to a nurse

AI

👉 Tyler Angert on X: prototypes (X)

• An example on how we should build prototypes 10x faster

👉 GitHub AI can now auto-fix code bugs. (AI Secret)

• Likely some buzz on the capabilities of it, but I’m wondering if we spent time trying this new feature for security? 

👉 Matt Shumer on X: Introducing `claude-investor` (X)

• Interesting patterns for market analysis

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