Friday Wrap-Up: A Guru of Simplification and the AI Slowdown Debate

Hi everyone, and welcome back to our Friday wrap up. I'm Stilm Mortiskar. I'm Nikola Tangin. And this week I'm in Singapore. And you, Nikola, you are in? I'm in New York. So a bit of a time zone difference here. This week's episode featured John McNeil. Who is he, Nikolay? Well, he is one of the gurus when it comes to simplification of processes. He worked with Tesla, with Lululemon and so on and I think the book he wrote called Algorithm is so powerful and basically what he talks about is that you have to question absolutely everything that you do, you have to delete unnecessary steps, you have to simplify everything, accelerate the speed and then automate at the end. It's so important for so many companies including us in the fund. Yeah, it's really fascinating, I have it in front of me, it has a very red cover, and the first thing that you addressed is you should question every requirement. But why is that so important in business? Because we just take so many things for granted and there are so many stupid rules from prior times that we have just never questioned, you know, people just take it forgiven. There are so few people who just really try to push the barriers and get rid of unnecessary rules, which are there for no reason, so really, really important starting point. And I think it also alludes back to what we talked about earlier about the younger and older companies, right? Where the youngers maybe don't have all this legacy and all these things. Second rule is delete every step. You don't necessarily want delete all the steps, but you certainly want to delete everything which is superfluous and unnecessary. Ideally, want to delete so many steps that you delete one too many, and then you have it to actually add it back. And that's something that also, you know, Elon Musk talks about in his book, the importance of doing that, that's what they've done in SpaceX, that's how they work in many different ways. Yeah, exactly. Because the rule is actually delete every step that is unnecessary. If you apply that to the fund, what type of step can be deleted and what can't? Well, that's what we are going through now. Of course, there are many steps that we have to have for compliance reasons, are necessary for the governance structure and so on. But there are also things in terms of reporting frequency, how often you revalue assets such as real estate and so on, which we are questioning and which we are changing, which is basically simplifying what we do. Now one of the things which is interesting is that when you get new people joining your firm, they oftentimes question things that you do. But within a month, they just take the rules for granted and then don't question them anymore. So important when new people join your firm …