Generick Ideas #1- The Innovator's Dilemmas

Hello hello hello, welcome to the first official iteration of Generick ideas, where I share tech news, ideas, frameworks, and themes that i'm following or pondering each week.

I'm so excited to share my thoughts with you guys.

My content might be a bit scattered as I figure out where my interests meet yours, but i'll strive to make these letters these either practically useful, intellectually engaging, or both.

Here's what's up today :

• I'll introduce my weekly news section The Innovator's Dilemmas which will include a small snapshot of some of the tech stories i'm following each week.

• I'll also share a product/book/company/purchase that has been adding value to my life, maybe it'll add value to yours too.

• Mentor Monday where I pull quotes from Tim Ferris's book Tribe of Mentors and discuss how i've been thinking about the idea in my own life.

Introducing The Innovator's Dilemmas

The Innovator's Dilemma--first introduced in Clayton Christensen's book of the same name (1997)--is when disruptive technologies force large companies to choose between innovating in the long-term and serving their primary customers in the short term.

Large companies that are overly focused on their target markets can be slow to adopt new technologies, leaving room for a new generation of players to take their place as market leaders.

The decision to name my weekly news section The Innovator's Dilemmas is both a play on words and a prediction for the year ahead.

The recent breakthroughs in Generative AI, which started automating everything from emails to programming to Newsletter naming (guilty), have sparked a gold rush in tech that has indie programmers and aspiring startup founders watering at the mouth.

Over the next several months (and in the past few weeks), we'll see a Cambrian Explosion of tooling built on top of this technology that will let you search your internal documents, make spreadsheets without learning excel, and even order burritos in a single text.

While larger tech companies could be the ones to bring these tools to market, the recent rate hikes in the U.S. have created a hostile macro-environment for big players. The financial crunch is forcing large tech companies to focus on short-term profits over long-term goals, causing them to reduce or withdraw investments from anything that's not their core business--including their R&D departments and innovation incubators.

These side-bet reductions also mean that thousands of displaced tech workers are in transition and up for grabs, creating the perfect conditions for another Innovator's Dilemma. This means that we could see some new big players like Anthropic and OpenAI over the next couple of years.

All this drama has made these past few months an exciting time to be starting my first full-time job in the industry and an even better time to get in on the conversation. The Innovator's Dilemmas will be my attempt to track the news stories and challenges emerging in the industry each week.

The Case Against the Little Fish

As someone who loves a good underdog story, I want to believe that small players are just about ready to flip the entire industry on its head in the next couple of years.

As a techno-realist, though, I have to admit that the race isn't so clear-cut. Not only has Google likely been working on internal Large-Language Models capable of displaying BGI (Basically General Intelligence; thought of that one myself), but Microsoft has also been flirting up Sam Altman and the OpenAI team as they look to buy a 49% stake in the hot young startup. This means that both Google and Microsoft, which have some of the deepest distribution networks in the world, are both well-positioned to bring generative AI to everyone in the world.

If either one can deploy State-of-the-art language models into their suite of spreadsheets, writing platforms, email services, slide-show products, etc., they'll gobble up a large chunk of the use-cases for the new tech, leaving Indie Hacker Twitter in the dust, forcing them to make money by starting newsletters about how Google and Microsoft are winning the race.

I'm personally rooting for the little fish, but the Big Fish will not go gently into that goodnight (it's a reference).

A company/product/book/purchase i'm excited about

In addition to the weekly tech news cycle, i'll also highlight some thing that has added value to my life in hopes of providing value to your life (and eventually selling this section as ad-space).

This week, I started dabbling with some AI-first tools but found most of them devoid of actual value.

Here are some that I liked though:

Scribe - Automatically turns your screen recording into a step-by-step walkthrough for others to use.

Supernormal - AI that writes your meeting notes, including summaries, action items, and decisions made.

Ellie.AI - Made by one of my new Twitter friends, Ellie responds to your emails for you at the click of a button.

Mentor Monday

I'll close out Monday editions of Generick Ideas with a series called Mentor Monday, where I share short life advice, lessons, and quotes from people at least a bit further down the rode than myself and discuss how these ideas have been shaping my life.

The Mentor:

Today's quote is from one of Silicon Valley's biggest names, Naval Ravikant (would it really be a tech newsletter if I didn't spew Naval Ravikant scripture at you?).

The Advice:

I had a friend tell me this week that I have a lot of "kicks" or "phases" when I told her I was starting a newsletter. True. I have a problem with wanting to build more things than i'll ever have the time for.

I've been working on choosing a small number of big goals to smash instead of spreading myself thin across a broad range of activities. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks for reading my first official issue of Generick Ideas.

I had a lot of fun putting this together and look forward to testing out different formats, content, and ideas in the future.

If you have any feedback, comments, or suggestions, my DMs are open, would love to hear about what's working and what's not.

Know someone who'd like this? Help me spread the word!

https://generick-ideas.beehiiv.com/

See you soon!