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Welcome to the April edition of the Insider. Do you know someone who would enjoy the Insider? Forward this email to them, and they can subscribe here.

Doing Things That Don't Scale

Scaling something often comes with abandoning the things that don’t scale: the obsession over the product, the extra-mile efforts to delight customers, the human touch of the people themselves. That precious and unique essence that consumers crave can go missing when the attention turns to optimizing for efficiency and growth.

Today, we yearn for the things that don't scale. When we're surrounded by the infinite scale of the web everyday, we crave the unscalable and the intimate. Many of the best parts of the internet happen in small group chats, not in mass-scale social media platforms.

When we're hit with corporate messages or AI-generated content, we crave the content that is undeniably human. The New York Times homepage has started to humanize its journalists by having them share, in TikTok-style, the story behind their journalism.

When so much of life happens online, we crave the physical and the tactile. Independent bookstores are booming; the number of independent bookstores has grown more than 50% since 2009, and many of them have meeting space where authors can do book readings and interact face-to-face with fans.

This is the rise of the authenticity economy, where human connection becomes the ultimate premium. It recognizes, as artists do, that in a world of infinite replication, the irreplaceable becomes invaluable. Here are a few lessons for builders:

  1. Do things that don’t scale. Carve out space to focus on delighting your customers in deliberately unscalable and inefficient ways.
  2. Go direct to your audience and humanize your brand. Cut the corporate filtering and be uncommonly honest. Use “I” statements. Humans trust humans.
  3. Build in public. Like a restaurant with an open kitchen visible to guests, bring people into your craft. It builds trust through transparency.
  4. Be skeptical of “best” practice. In his book The Power of Moments, Chip Heath cautions, “Beware of the soul-sucking force of ‘reasonableness.’” Conventional wisdom and industry best practices will homogenize, not differentiate.

The Power of Editors

Every week, a new edition of The New Yorker slides through our mail chute, and every week, I make my way through it. In February, an edition with the article, The Editorial Battles That Made The New Yorker, arrived at our home.

Behind every article in The New Yorker, there was an unseen battle between writers and editors, privately dueling to create a masterpiece. The late New Yorker editor John Bennet described the role of editors like this:

  • “‘Readers are like cows—they just want to keep chewing what you feed them,’ Bennet used to say. But writers are like sheep, woolly and steadfast and bleating. And the best editor, high in the hills, is like a shepherd, warding off the wolves, moving the flock to better pasture, rescuing lost lambs.”
  • “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

For centuries, editors have wielded underestimated power in society. In his book Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that we give the creators of culture—the authors, musicians, philosophers, artists—too much credit. Creators are an important part of the puzzle, but it is the editors who shape culture. They are the ones who decide what gets published and what falls away into obscurity. Harari uses the example of Catholic Bishops who gathered in Carthage in the 3rd-5th centuries to decide what books should be included in the Bible.

We have always been downstream of editors. The difference is that today, those editors are more likely to be algorithms than people. The black-box algorithms that drive our feeds on platforms like TikTok and X determine what gets amplified and what gets buried. Our algorithms don’t as much reflect our culture, they shape it—telling us what to like and buy and be.

Perhaps the lesson here is to become more aware of editors' invisible power in shaping our worldview, and then to make more conscious choices about what we let influence us.

On Longevity

Spend enough time online, and you’ll come across Bryan Johnson, the longevity-obsessed man spending $2 million every year to live forever.

We’re in the midst of a modern-day obsession with the tactics, supplements, and morning routines that will extend our lives. But this fixation leads us down a path of endless optimizations: sleep tracking, supplements, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, red light therapy, implantable trackers. 

The fringes of the longevity craze are animated by the mistaken belief that we are in control. Research says that our lifespan is (partially) predetermined by our genes. Larger socioeconomic factors like our income, our physical environment, and our access to healthcare also play a role. Buying into the idea that the 1% optimizations will somehow compound into a longer life not only gives us too much credit over the control we wish we had, but it also amounts to a distraction from the important work of actually living a rich, vibrant life.

I’m no longevity maximalist, but I’ve noticed something similar in myself: the tendency to combine deferred gratification with a love of constant optimization. Jeremy Giffon describes it as the way so many of us are “sharpening their sword for the battle that's never going to come.”

It is far easier to obsess over how we buy ourselves more time than it is to seriously consider how we spend the fixed time we have. It’s far easier to sharpen our swords for a battle that will never come than to make choices rooted in the devastating but invigorating truth of our own mortality. It is a daring act to release ourselves from the pressure of constant progress and instead choose to drop anchors in this very fleeting life.

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What I Am Reading

  • Few institutions have been as prolific and clear-eyed about AI's moral and human dimensions as the Vatican. In honor of the late Pope, I’m sharing the Vatican’s recent Antiqua Et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.
  • I loved this short essay on how not all hours are created equal. Your dreams demand your best hours. Working Theorys.
  • The share of solo-founder startups has almost doubled in the last few years. The critical dividing line in our economy is no longer education or specialization but instead agency itself. Gian Segato’s blog.
  • This article makes the case for more suburban sprawl to address our nation’s housing crisis. I struggled to reconcile the argument with my aversion to suburbia, especially with the accompanying photography. The New York Times.
  • Workers have yet to recover from the isolating effects of the pandemic. The result is a “soft skills” crisis. Harpers.

Something Personal

I recently sold my home in Denver. Lisa and I live elsewhere in the city now, and for the last few years, the house has been a long-term rental.

So much life happened in that house. There were Airbnb guests who became lifelong friends, late-night conversations with roommates, romantic dates and full-house parties, patio hangouts under string lights and vegetable gardens in full bloom. Every day for months during COVID, I worked from the same chair at one end of the dining room table (a chair I never sat in again), trying to figure out how to lead a company and make payroll.

You would think that on my last visit to the house before I sold it, I would have taken all that in. Paused for a moment. Walked through each room. Reminisced. But I did not. I was in too much of a hurry that day, and I was annoyed at the house by then. It had become a liability in my mind, a bottomless hole of money and time over the months I spent preparing for it to be sold. I was ready to be done with it and distracted by a full schedule. I rushed out of the house that day. It took me a week to realize that was my last time inside.

Sometimes, we get to choose how we close a chapter or end an era. Sometimes, we consecrate that moment with a grand celebration, a final hurrah, a worthy sendoff. But other times, we don’t get to choose. Or we just weren’t paying attention. Sometimes, the chapter will close without a sound, the door will shut quietly, and it won’t be until later that we realize, it was already the last time.

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From home,

Banks

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