Tippets by Taps - Issue #122
This week I celebrated my birthday (yay!), as well as explored why the nuclear family was a mistake, shopping under the influence, how AI businesses are different from traditional software, and more. Enjoy!
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
If there is one piece to read this week, it is this one from David Brooks on the nuclear family. As I’ve talked about before, parenting can often be a panic inducing challenge. The cost of child care is crazy, and the nature of families and ‘socially acceptable’ is constantly changing. The nuclear family had a brief golden age in the post-war decades, thanks to a buoyant US economy and the subordination of women. But extended families are more robust, especially in hard times; they are a better model for most of America now.
We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.
The idea that two people should be enough to do the job of raising a child, a task that used to fall to between 4-10 in a household, is an unrealistic expectation. As young parents in a manicured world of social media where everyone else seems to be 'doing it’, while often our biggest accomplishment is if our son eats a full meal without most of it ending upon the floor, my wife and I sometimes wonder what we’re doing wrong. It takes time to internalize that there is no 'right way’ to raise a child, only what works for your family in that moment in time. Learning from one’s own parents or siblings, having others to absorb the shocks of life, certainly seems to be where the pendulum needs to swing.
Shopping under the influence
NRF, retail’s big show, this past January was all about experience, with alcohol becoming a larger part of the experience. As I wrote last month:
Nordstrom is offering alcohol while you shop, with Co-President Erik Nordstrom saying to the crowd at NRF, “I don’t know why it took us so long to put drinking and shoes together, but it’s a great combination.” A great combination presumably because the drunker you get, the longer you’ll stay and more you’ll spend.
This piece goes deeper into the phenomenon, a good look and how retailers are trying to take advantage of their physical retail space.
Across the country, shopping centers, malls and major chains like Nordstrom, Crate & Barrel, Whole Foods and Giant are increasingly allowing — even encouraging — customers to imbibe while they browse. It’s the latest attempt by stores to offer shoppers an experience they can’t get online, like in-store climbing walls and designer trunk shows but with a much bigger reach: Retailers say customers tend to stay longer and spend more freely when they’re drinking.
But public health experts find the trend troubling, even out of touch, given the rise of “sober curious” culture and hashtag-friendly challenges such as Dry January. In fact, alcohol consumption is on the decline worldwide, down 1.6 percent in 2018, according to the International Wines and Spirits Record.
The New Business of AI (and How It's Different From Traditional Software)
AI/ML is now core to many companies’ product offerings (mine included). However, it’s easy to incorrectly classify the development of AI technology with that of traditional software. This piece by Martin Casado, partner at Andresseen Horowitz, does a good job of explaining the differences between AI businesses and traditional software businesses (particularly the margins), and how “at times, they can even look more like traditional services companies.”
AI-First Companies
Zetta Ventures’ perspective on why AI-first companies will win, and win big.
The big tech companies of today can’t win in this era because they’re not AI-first companies. Incumbents are focused on adding features, reducing cost and locking in customers. Incumbents started in an era where customers were afraid of putting their data in the cloud. Without the data, you can’t build predictive models and without predictions you can’t automate anything. Competing with the AI-first companies would require the big tech companies to go back and negotiate their customer contracts, change the way they build products to collect more data and hire whole new teams of machine learning engineers.
The Work You Do, the Person You Are
A wonderful piece by the late, great Toni Morrison on work and life.
The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike…
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
Quote I’m thinking about:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Theodore Roosevelt