The big difference is we can now see relevant use cases that aren’t some abstract polymath function none of us really understands. The principal argument of blockchain was that it enabled trust, but most of us already trusted the tools we use every day. The barrier to trust we place on our tools isn’t that high that we need to due diligence everything we use. If we did, no startup would ever pass the sniff test and get any amount of traction.

What changes now though with these new AI tools that have recently hit the market is that we can now ingest sentiment from the user in so many non-traditional formats. We’re no longer restricted to purely keyboard or mouse or tap interfaces. We can have someone share an image of what they are thinking about or what they want, we can have them talk to the software to describe what they want. These multi-modal commands make it all the more dynamic and flexible and change the game in how we think about software development. Gone are the days when you’re explicitly limited to whatever data a human or a robot can feed you.

The emerging era of the AI copilot.

In what may be the most exciting and rapid paced arms race in the tech world, everyone and their mother seems to be racing to add a copilot function to their apps. Whether its Github, or Microsoft (who owns github), or Google, or Adobe, or any number of other well known software companies adding a copilot function, the trend is clear: people are going to expect in-app help.

So how does this affect how you design and develop your products?

First let’s categorize how we can expect to see this generation of AI tools working with your product. There are going to be the helpers that give people better tutorials, answer questions, and show people how to use the tools better. (These will end up being trained off of extensive and more readable documentation and knowledge bases). This can end up being a cost savings from a tech support side over the long run. Watch this space for an emerging crop of human and hybrid powered solutions to this in the form of next generation zen desk type tools or intercom.

Robot assistants made by AI

The other big bucket we’re going to see is generative tools that take varying inputs from a user or different input types (asking the user questions vs expecting them to learn your UX) and then helping them accomplish the end goal of whatever your product does. Whether its filling in a spreadsheet, drawing a poster, or explaining what the contents of a document are. None of the off the shelf generative libraries really solve for this entirely, and you’re seeing a rush of people adding image generators and text expanders into their tools, but that’s not really going to make a huge leap like the solutions that do things like “take my meeting notes and generate a project template and notify the key people” type of prompts. These prompts most likely will be both typed and spoken.

So how do you as a product manager/founder adapt?

Lean into these tools, they already exist, ignoring them would be like doubling down on horse and buggy accessories when the automobile is already here. The next few years will give you enough cover to come up with novel interfaces as moats, or force you to get creative on defensibility.

Exciting times.

Note the featured image was generated with AI.

Some of the past predictions can be found here.

This year I am going to bucket them into 3 main categories.

Humanity / Business / Technology

Humanity

1. We continue our love/hate relationship with science. Much of the hate aspect is driven by fear/poor science education, some driven by identity/culture politics. I don’t see us escaping this cycle in 2023 or any time soon. Sadly this is going to have a negative impact on innovation as we make things like stem cells harder to study, and defund potential ways to eradicate viruses like covid-19 as the political will is no longer there, and it shifts into endemic status.
2. 2023 Is going to be wild for international politics. War in Ukraine isn’t ending soon (I hope I’m wrong on this), Ukraine is growing in its role as a pawn between Russia and the West.
3. We keep wasting time and attention on D-list celebrities fighting with other D-list celebrities. (This continues to be a big source of social media traffic. See Tate/Musk/others)
4. We normalize covid as a regular thing. Shift has gone from “stop the world, are they going to make it” to “did they get boosted/vaxxed? they did, ok great see them next week” and “oh they didn’t get boosted, f-ing sucks they are in for a bad ride/understood the risks (or didn’t but we stopped sympathizing).”

Business

1. Every business is a digital business in 2023. Whether you like it or not, that ship has sailed. If you aren’t tracking your data and synthesizing it in some way, you’re dead and just don’t know it yet. Landscaper? need marketing data. Bakery? need inventory forecasting + marketing data. Dentist? Need all kinds of software.
2. AI starts to edge its way into enterprise first. At the most basic levels the most repetitive tasks start getting automated. Tools start to emerge in no-code format to let people train their very own models.
3. AI tools for every day business make a big leap. Tools like zapier and make evolve a bit to understand the data they are moving around more.
4. Pre-made reporting options emerge for everyday business tools. Don’t make me figure out SQL queries for my salesforce or square data. Let me buy one-time use templates for my business needs. Someone might end up making the equivalent to themeforest for these reports.

Technology

1. Startups start integrating AI into all their products. We’re already seeing companies like Notion do it. Expect to see it in a ton of products trying to add an “aha” moment to their product experience. Most of these will rely on openAI’s APIs as they are the most readily available and affordable.
2. Cloud providers will rush to compete with OpenAI. AWS/Azure/GoogleCloud/Oracle will all pump out more AI libraries and spend time on promoting them.
3. Someone will release a creative suite built on top of Adobe tools using stable diffusion and other LLMs that gets bought by Adobe 6 months later. This will be the first mid-size exit in the space.
4. Lots of innovations that come out this year will look like gimmicks. Until they don’t. Eventually you’ll come to expect generative AI features in all your day to day apps. It will become table stakes by 2024.
5. We’re entering a new era of personalization.
6. UX will become ever more adaptive and intelligent. This is going to make interfaces have to improve faster than other parts of apps.
7. Natural language interfaces will emerge. Tell the SaaS tool you want it to do something, or connect to something and it will know.
8. Better knowledgebase tools become needed.

I wrote most of this in early January 2023, but as I hit publish in mid-february, much of this already feels outdated. I suspect that feeling will be pervasive as things rapidly accelerate this year.

What do you think will be the biggest changes in 2023?

One thing I have a hunch that will change in the wake of Coronavirus is how we choose to live. I’m talking where we live, in what places, what types of homes we buy, and what types of homes we build. With the possibility of quarantine happening again, it is likely going to influence a lot of home buyers, especially white-collar ones on what factors do they prioritize in the purchase of a home.

We’re going to see more people opting for homes with multiple offices/dens, separate kids playrooms, larger pantries (possibly built-in freezers or second refrigerators), and more emphasis on yards and other at-home entertainment options. 

We’re going to see people opting to live in the exurbs rather than in city centers. The wealthiest 5% will opt to own multiple homes, with one being located outside of the city limits, but within say a 90-minute drive of an airport or major city. This will give people the opportunity to camp out/self-quarantine in more comfortable environments and enjoy the outdoors and not fear getting sick in their crowded New York or Miami apartment buildings. 

New construction of homes (hope you’re listening @Lennar) is going to change too. In higher-end homes we might not see a movie theater room, but rather the living room is upgraded to make it comfortable enough, and the movie theater is converted to a second office. We’ll see sound insulation being seen as a premium in people’s offices. Mesh wifi support will be built into people’s homes. Better consideration for lighting in home-offices for video-conferencing will be factored in. 

Home offices will be treated as de facto offices. Many businesses will now include in your signing bonus or onboarding package funds to outfit your home office the same way your work office/desk is setup. Everyone will get multiple screens and noise-canceling headphones at home if they have them at work already.

The key trends here

• Work from home is not going away
• People will reconsider dense urban centers if they don’t love them
• Without commutes, suburbs and exurbs seem more appealing again
• People’s homes will be retrofitted to be their primary workplaces

What are the opportunities here:

• Home office design consulting services
• Remodeling/redesign services for existing homes
• In-home wifi + AV service (setup better video conferencing support at homes)
• Focus on at-distance/in-home experience for your startups
• Building activities for people to give their kids to keep them busy
• Remote education/entertainment options
• Think of the TV as a communication device (think Facebook Portal TV)
• Neighborhood scale co-working spaces for those who need to work near home/can’t work from home, but not in the big corporate office.

How long will this trend last is hard to tell? However, it has planted the seeds in many bosses that maybe, just maybe, we don’t need everyone in the office all the time. One thing that’s for certain is that the coronaconomy is going to change everything.

Image by Lorenzo Cafaro from Pixabay

Durante los últimos tres años, me he centrado principalmente en la educación. Pasé mucho tiempo en SimCase, la startup que cofundé y que se creó para ayudar a mejorar la calidad de la educación empresarial; asumí un puesto en la Universidad de Miami para dirigir su Centro de Emprendimiento y también he sido mentor de varias startups. Me alejé de SimCase en diciembre de 2019 después de 4 años, ya que era hora de volver al modo de emprendedor. 

Nos encontramos en un nuevo y extraño estado del mundo en este momento, un enemigo invisible se está extendiendo rápidamente por todo el planeta, la economía es inestable, por decirlo suavemente, y a pesar de que la sociedad tiene más herramientas para estar conectada que nunca, nos estamos volviendo cada vez más aislados. Este blog comenzó para mí como una forma de digerir lo que estaba sucediendo en el mundo de los negocios y la tecnología, y para compartir mis aprendizajes con quien quisiera leerlo. Con tanta inestabilidad, parece un buen momento para reiniciar este sitio y espero que pueda brindarnos algo de claridad a todos.

Lo que verás aquí es una mezcla de consejos prácticos para empresas, comentarios sobre las tendencias que veo venir (es probable que mis predicciones anuales vuelvan, pero en un formato más extenso), trucos de vida que disfruto, alguna receta de cocina ocasional y actualizaciones sobre el progreso de varios proyectos en los que estoy trabajando. Para recibir una notificación cuando publique algo nuevo, suscríbete al boletín de la derecha. Haré todo lo posible para enviarte un resumen semanal de nuevas publicaciones, enlaces interesantes y artículos que creo que deberías leer.

Espero sinceramente que todos tomen las medidas adecuadas para mantenerse a salvo durante esta pandemia de coronavirus. 

Imagen de Gerd Altmann en Pixabay

A number of organizations around the world are working on indexing all of the big world changing problems affecting the human race. These problems range from conflict to water access, to sustainable agriculture, to mitigating pollution, and so forth. The issue with these grand challenges is that an individual might often feel helpless or useless when it comes to tackling them because of their sheer grandeur.

If you read any number of cliched articles by some middle aged business reporter about millennials and how they are in the workplace (eye roll), they all talk about how millennials only want to work on something where they can have an impact or a cause. The challenge with wanting to have an impact is that often times we see these overwhelmingly large challenges and don’t know where to start. Society hasn’t really taught the average person under 40 how to even begin to tackle such large problems. So let’s start by breaking down these grand problems and looking at them from a local level.

There was a fascinating podcast from the Ted Radio Hour the other day about how cities are the new center for innovation and impact. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to impact a million people, you had to go to an entire state, sometimes a country to find a million people. Now in some urban areas, you can find a million people in 1 square mile (see: Mumbai, Manila, Lagos, etc). Let’s take the approach that we need to identify what our grand challenges are for our local communities first; because if we can solve our local communities, that impact will compound regionally.

Given my affiliation with Miami, I thought we could start by looking at what the biggest challenges are for our community here. This way we can start by looking at the potential solutions and not wait around for someone else to solve them. So in no particular order, here are my initial Miami Challenges.

Where are these challenges?

– Traffic
– Education
– Economic Opportunities
– Housing
– Pollution
– Energy
– Crime
– Government

I’m sure I’m missing a bunch, so feel free to add them into the comments.

The first step I believe in tackling each problem is to start thinking about the Whys. Toyota famously pioneered a concept called the 5 Why technique. It forces you to work back on a problem and reverse engineer it until you reach the original root cause. Eventually, we would get to the root cause which would let us work back towards the solution.

What I’m proposing is we start inventorying all these problems and also applying some group design thinking on them to figure out what is the starting point for solving them. We need to rethink the way our community solves its problems if we want to turn Miami (or any of our cities) into world class places to live.

So we decided to turn the $500 question into a challenge.

This is open to any new miami startup or entrepreneur who has an idea they want to explore, but is just at the idea phase. So here is what we’re offering

• $500 loan at an industry standard interest rate, repayable in 12 months. (from each of us, so $1k total, but we could split amongst 2 ideas)
• 10 Hours per month for 3 months in advice from each of us
• Promotion through Tim’s podcast, and my blog/social media.

Tim and I both have MBAs (his from Wharton, mine from Kellogg), and a combined 20+ years of business experience, so we should be able to help you with lots of facets of your business. However, we aren’t building these companies for you, we’re just here for guidance, so don’t expect us to get our hands dirty on these ideas, these are YOUR ideas. We aren’t taking any ownership, merely offering a loan to get started. This loan we expect you to repay via earnings from the business.

[ecko_button color=”orange” size=”small” url=”https://goo.gl/forms/ct630g0wIx6RjCM63″]Apply for the challenge here[/ecko_button]

How we choose someone is really a matter of who we think can benefit from our guidance more than anything. We promise your idea is not going to be published. However if 2 or more of you submit similar ideas, we will likely introduce you to each other, as that can probably benefit you more than competing.

Don’t forget to check out Tim’s podcast

Some of the topics that seem to be on my mind the most lately are the following:

• Inclusion (political, societal, and economic)
• Economics (both macro and micro)
• Politics (what is going on with our country lately??)
• Strategy (business, marketing, operations, and more)
• Value (how it relates to business)
• Performance (individual performance on a physical and mental level)
• Systems & frameworks (adding more structure to my life)
• Food & Wine (experimentation and understanding the science of cooking better)
• Books & learning (I’ve been consuming so many books lately, I feel the need to share what my takeaways are)

Lots of these things will be as much about me sharing my views as they will be asking questions so I can learn more.

Why I thought I wanted to get an MBA.

My original thesis was that I wanted to build a network of people with more experience than me, sharpen my business skills, and get another credential. I can say I truly enjoyed myself while managing to learn a lot along the way. I had fully intended to write articles about how the MBA experience applies to startup life, I just ended up being too busy. I did write up a bit of my experience halfway through for the Kellogg student blog, which you can read here .

What I learned from my MBA

Throughout the two years of the program, we took classes on everything from accounting, to finance, to leadership, to operations, to negotiations, and more. Despite some classes being completely foreign to me, and some areas where I was already very familiar with, I did learn something in every class.

I learned about the right way and wrong way to manage balance sheets and other accounting concepts.

I learned about how and why brands market to us the way they do (hint: we’re all super gullible).

I learned about how the economy works, and what statistics really matter when discussing the world economy.

Oh yeah, and I learned about statistics. Wonderfully entertaining statistics /sarcasm

I learned about operational efficiencies, and bottlenecks, and throughput (on of my favorite topics).

I experienced Asia, TWICE! First getting to know Hong Kong and how Asian consumers behave and how deals get done in China, and later diving into India’s rich and amazing culture. (Tons of upcoming posts on India and China)

I learned about negotiating. Specifically concepts like BATNA and ZOPA (which helped me save thousands of dollars on 2 car purchases – instant ROI ;-) ).

What I really learned though, was it was all about people. Making relationships, building teams, working together, and making things happen. Good businesses are about their people first. If you can figure out the people component of a business, the rest falls together. Building, leading, and managing teams the right way are the only way you’ll succeed in business.

What am I going to do next?

I keep getting asked that question over and over. Long term, hopefully I can leverage the knowledge and network Kellogg gave me to do hugely impactful stuff. In the short term I plan on focusing more on my startup SimCase, which is trying to disrupt the higher ed marketplace, and Infinimedia, which has been building logistics solutions for over 10 years now. For now I’m happy to have made such great friends, a new family even, and to have learned so much from so many great people.

I’m happy to answer any and all questions you might have about the EMBA program at Kellogg in the comments.

Apple hits the market with what is arguably nothing truly revolutionary (its not, Garmin has watches with similar functionality, so has Motorola or Samsung), but Apple has already proven they can sell these like no one else. Apple made an interesting move when it started marketing the watch a few months ago, it focused on how the watch made your life better. It was marketed purely as a lifestyle gadget, not some revolutionary life altering thing. This allows Apple to not have to compete on purely functionality (which could be a terrible arms race they’ve managed to ignore in the Android space).

The real genius of Apple’s strategy with the Watch is the pricing though. By telling the market that this is a luxury good, priced from $349 and going all the way up to $17,000, Apple is saying they’re nothing like the Android watches that all hover around $200-300. Apple has planted their flag in the high end of the market, they are the Mercedes of smart watches. By anchoring their price in a completely different bracket they effectively changed the conversation surrounding their product. No one will compare a $10k Apple Watch to a $249 Samsung gear watch, as they won’t even be considered in the same conversation. This now effectively lets Apple make incredibly high margins on what could have otherwise been a commodity product.

We’ve already seen this works, the product hasn’t even shipped to the masses yet, but it has already reportedly sold 2.5Million units, more than all the android smart watches COMBINED in the last year. Apple changed the story altogether. Brilliant move Tim Cook, brilliant move.

When I started doing web development work ten years ago, I did my cursory google searches and found a few articles highlighting how to figure out what to charge. Opinions varied from hourly to fixed rate billing to blended fees to how to come up with each one. ALL of the price suggestions had one common factor, they were rooted in cost. This is where the root of the problem lies. According to Professor Vohra, whose book I recommend grabbing if you’ve got a chance, cost based pricing means you’re leaving a ton of money on the table. We need to shift your mindset to value based pricing.

Let’s start with the methodology you’re likely to be taught from all the basic tutorials on pricing. They say start with a target revenue in mind. Let’s say $50,000 USD is what you want to make per year. There are realistically a maximum of 2,000 billable hours per year (50 weeks * 40 hours per week), as you want to allocate at least 2 weeks of time off. So remember your new cost is $50,000 (your desired income), so to work backwards from there that means you have to bill $25/hr to achieve that, assuming 100% fill rate of your time. Realistically you’re not going to be able to fill over 80% of your time as billable (that’s what everyone says at least). So that means you’re now down to 1600 billable hours per year. Now your rate is up to $31.25/hr just to keep your $50k gross income target.

So far this math is super easy, it gets you to a target, and assumes so few variables its incredible. Sadly life isn’t that simple, because you’re going to have to spend money to get to $50k, and you’re also going to have to pay taxes and other expenses on that 50k (another entire can of worms).

So many of these examples assume you throw a shingle out there on the side of your home-office and the clients will roll in. They also assume a constant flow of customers, these customers are free to acquire, and new projects keep rolling in. In reality, none of these models work well, and definitely shouldn’t be used as defacto guides for establishing your pricing. After you factor your tax burden, office expense (even if its home office), equipment, marketing, and any other expenses, that $50k you theoretically grossed is withered down super fast. Of that magical $31.25 (I say magical, because your first year out, you’re unlikely to bill even half your time), you’re probably going to be left with less than half after expenses and such. So imagine you’ve taken home $15/hr for a year’s work, this leaves you in the low-20s earnings wise, without factoring in living expenses.

Now that you’ve understood the fallacy of these simplified cost based models, let me hammer it in a bit further. Suppose your new client comes in, you’ve spent a bunch of money on marketing to get them, and they hire you to build out an e-commerce site for a few grand. If you’re doing it based on cost, you’ll bill them for a couple weeks time, maybe a month, and then never hear from them after; so you made $5k on the high side based on your rate. You just delivered to THEM more VALUE than you received in monetary VALUE compensation. Now there is an inequality in the value exchange going on. You exchanged years of your training and education for a temporary exchange of value that will likely drive more value long term to them than to you. So when you go to price your project, you need to think about how much VALUE are you giving them, and what will they derive from it. Treat something like an e-commerce site the same way a company would invest in building a physical store. What value are they going to derive from building that location vs your ecommerce store?

Do you really think it costs $20k MORE to build a BMW 5 series car vs a BMW 3 series? No, the price difference in cost is likely a couple grand in extra metal and plastic. The 5 series presents a different VALUE proposition to the customer though.

Now you’re thinking, but Brian, I just read 800 of your amazing words, and you didn’t give me an easy answer!?! What gives? Well in the end it IS useful to understand your baseline costs, but once you establish that, you should disconnect that figure from your pricing. If you base your price solely on cost, and create your value propositions purely on time/costs, then you’re forever destined to compete on cost.

So here is my advice: figure out your value proposition, learn what your competition is charging, study how they are positioning themselves, and then make yourself unique. How do you price a unicorn anyway? It’s definitely not priced the same way as a horse but with an extra cost for the horn right?